Breanna Tillie
One of the best aspects of art is that an art appreciator can admire a beautiful piece of creation, while still disliking multiple elements of it. Art is open to interpretation. “Lonely Planet,” a new movie released Oct. 11 on Netflix, is a film that can be commended for its beautiful setting, yet the storyline, characters and message very much fall flat.
“Lonely Planet” tells of a writer’s retreat in Morocco. Attending this writer’s retreat is a successful and popular novelist named Katherine and a finance manager named Owen, who is there with his girlfriend, Lily. Katherine and Owen meet and immediately begin spending a great deal of time together, much to Lily’s understandable jealousy as Katherine is an author that Lily admires.
Owen and Lily are in a difficult spot in their relationship, and Katherine is the only thing Owen is enjoying while being in Morocco. Eventually, while Owen is drunk and in the heat of a fight with Lily, he makes a romantic pass at Katherine where she mentions the age difference between the two of them. This angers Owen and he walks away. The very next morning, it is revealed that Lily has been cheating on Owen, so he runs into Katherine’s arms and the two carry on their relationship from there.
The first bothersome aspect of this film is the storyline itself. It is advertised as being a tale of a love affair between an older woman and a younger man, yet this was hardly discussed in the film at all. The story would have been nearly identical, with the exception of two scenes, if Katherine and Owen were the same age. It was also unnecessary for Owen to have a girlfriend coming into the film. There was nothing that Katherine possessed that Lily did not. They were both successful and focused writers, and neither of them had much of a personality.
Owen’s career as finance manager also had little to do with the love story between Katherine and Owen. These elements seemed random and thrown into the mix for no particular reason, other than the movie needed to be an hour and a half long.
The way that Owen discovered Lily had been cheating was lazily done, and only existed to justify the fact that Owen had already been having an emotional affair with Katherine throughout the entire movie. Katherine and Owen also have a random and thrown in issue towards the end of the film, because this movie insisted on following the overdone structure of making the couple split up in the last twenty minutes, only to reunite at the very end. This movie could have taken this story in so many directions, yet it deliberately chose to be as cliche as possible.
With how poorly done the storyline is, it is no surprise that the characters are also majorly under developed. Katherine is a difficult character to care for. Her character has such little depth and the audience knows so little about her. She did reveal to Owen how her previous relationship ended, but her explanation of this still consisted of such little vulnerability.
Owen was certainly the worst character in the film. He was obviously quite insecure and envious of Lily’s success and refused to celebrate her accomplishments. He overreacted to any slight joke made towards him and had no ability to laugh at himself. He spends the trip primarily with Katherine, even though he is there to celebrate his girlfriend. Overall, the writers did a poor job of making this romantic lead even remotely likable.
Lily was a character that viewers probably could have rooted for, but the writers insisted on turning her into a cheater. This was silly considering Owen had been every other kind of unfaithful to Lily as well.
Overall, this film was irresponsible with its beautiful Morocco setting and badly missed the mark with the production of this film.