By: Benjamin He
The movie I’m about to talk about seriously has it all.
Some movies are based on books: Little Women, The Grinch, To Kill a Mockingbird. If those books are especially good, they might be made into an show series like Game of Thrones. If those books are just crazily good in quality and popularity, they might even be made into a movie series: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, etc. However, seldom is there an idea that gets made into a book, a movie, a television series, and a live-action musical.
But Les Misérables did exactly that.
Les Misérables (commonly [mis]pronounced “lay meezerhabluh”) was insane. In a good way, not insane like “You’re INSANE!” Anyway, I’ve watched the movie and the live-action version, and both were amazing. During this review, I’ll be going over the base of Les Misérables (the movie and the musical, plus the general storyline they share) and explain what was so insane about it.
If you couldn’t tell from the title, Les Misérables does feature some miserable characters. The story follows multiple overlapping narrative threads: that of the prisoner Jean Valjean, the prisoner guard Javert, and Cosette.
The general format of Les Misérables is that of a musical, which means a lot of the time, the characters either converse completely in song, or will burst into a musical number in a scene (See “The Confrontation”).
The songs are great as well. The lyrics in every single song are very carefully and expertly written. Also, if you take a look at them closely, you can see some incorporated humor in (See again The Confrontation).
I also thought the choreography was excellent, both in the movie and the live-action (See The Confrontation. Look, I just really like The Confrontation okay?). Whether it’s a fight scene, a prisoner being condemned to pull an entire boat with chains, or it’s a guy stealing the silver of a holy man who gave him shelter for a night, the plot gets more and more insane.
That’ll be the review on Les Misérables. It was an amazing musical, one of my personal favorites, and I really enjoyed experiencing the franchise in whatever way I could.