Thanks to another bout of pregnancy induced insomnia I ended up watching the first two installments of the After series. Why? Some kind of masochistic curiosity it seems. A friend had wanted to watch the second movie when it came out in the cinema last year but Covid hit so that never happened and I never had to watch the first one to be able to understand the second one.
Until now when apparently, I watched them both because I hate myself.
Everything from here on is a critique of the movies themselves and not the books. I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know if much like the Harry Potter series there were important details left out of the movies that would’ve made it better.
All I do know is that at least the Harry Potter movies still made sense to those who never read the books.
Right so let’s start off with the timeline.
Tessa the main protagonist attends Washington Central University, which is in America. In America, college starts in the Fall, so we’re looking at September. At the start of the movie Tessa is dating her high school sweetheart who is still in high school. Apparently, he is her best friend and they’ve known each other at least since they were 5. Their difference in age is never elaborated on except that he is a senior in high school, and she is a freshman in college.
They are dating for at least a few weeks into the semester before he comes to find that Tessa has cheated on him with Hardin, our resident antihero and bad boy with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say it took at least a month before she ran off into the night, during her boyfriend’s visit, to canoodle with the guy she kissed in a lake after having all of three interactions with him. Two of those were in the same night and then the third was a very pointed debate in class about love.
Yeah.
I’ve gone back to re-watch certain sections just to see if there was at all some kind of implied timeline and no, from what I have found there is not during this first movie. So, by the looks of it, it took all of a week (again I’m being generous) and three interactions before she went off with a guy she barely knew and thought was arrogant and then wore his t-shirt into a lake before making out with him.
That very evening they fall out again because he’s…Hardin?
Then some undisclosed period of time later her very bland boyfriend turns up with flowers at the start of her school day and asks what they’re gonna do that day. Um, excuse me sir…she has classes. The hell you doing just showing up unannounced like that? Apparently, they decide to go to a bonfire that night, there’s a jealousy induced bout of fisticuffs initiated by Hardin with some older dude which I will touch on later on and then Tessa gets a call from Hardin’s soon to be step brother at 3:28 in the morning.
Assuming that the bland boyfriend waited until Saturday morning to show up and every student in that scene was just carrying a backpack because they thought Saturday morning studying would be fun, there’s literally nothing to stop us from assuming that Tessa goes and spends the night with Hardin only two weeks after meeting him.
Also, we see that the next morning she has 7 missed calls from Noah from 5 hours before. As someone who has watched the sun come up more times than she’s particularly happy about, I can say with some certainty that 8.30 am on a Sunday does not look like it does in this scene. That’s assuming that Noah woke up the second that Tessa left and started calling her at 3.30 which I don’t think he did.
Right so, there’s a breakup, obviously. What appears to be an entire day and night passes and she goes to class. Her mum then messages her at 5:38pm, I want to say the next day because a) when are there classes on a Sunday, b) I really don’t want to think about the weird relationship going on if Tessa’s ex-boyfriend immediately went running to her mother.
Another day and night pass with her ignoring texts….and then she ends up at Hardin’s frat house with him on the roof. Not like that. His window allows him to go and sit out on the roof. She ends up telling him that while Noah is her best friend, he, Hardin, is so much more.
By this point we’re almost an hour into the movie and I still couldn’t tell you what the actual end goal of these characters are except to make me cringe so hard even the dogs stopped dealing.
There is at least another day and night before Tessa’s mum comes barging into her room to find her straddling her new resident bad boy. Queue a classic mother/daughter disagreement that only belongs in teen drama.
Then bad boy becomes the knight in shining armour, bringing her to the apartment of some professor that he’s meant to be watering the plants for while she’s in Italy for the year. Righto then son. Just go ahead and live in someone else’s home without their knowledge why don’t you.
Now by this point there is nothing to dissuade us from drawing the conclusion that they’ve only known each other for three damn weeks. They’re making heart felt declarations like, “Nothing could ever change the way I feel about you.”
Honey…you’ve known him for all of a damn month if that. You don’t know anything about this wombat.
Tessa runs into the jealous ex-whatever in the toilet and there are comments like “Haven’t seen you since the bonfire.” Which doesn’t actually give any context of time whatsoever.
Fifteen minutes until the end of the movie and we’re finally greeted with the climax. Guess what. Turns out Hardin did something that no one has done since primary school, maybe highschool if they were emotionally and mentally stunted. Made a bet that he could trick a girl into going out with him before revealing it was all a lie. Then he reveals that he actually did fall in love with her but she’s already feeling so betrayed and like she can’t trust him.
This results in Tessa going home to see her mum and by the Christmas decorations on the front door we can assume that you know…Christmas is coming.
Let’s assume that American’s put up their Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving. We’re now looking at roughly three months since Tessa started college.
9 minutes left and Tessa is back at college wrapping up the semester. Her English Lit professor says so. I looked up the American college semesters because they’re very different to what we have here in Australia. They’re roughly 15 weeks, the first being from September to mid-December. Alright, great cool, whatever.
UNTIL WE START THE NEXT MOVIE GOOD SIR/MADAM/PERSON
Yeah, that’s right. This is the part where I get really critical.
The second movie opens with Hardin in his car, somewhere off the beaten path and the words 1 MONTH LATER literally appear across the screen. If that weren’t enough of an indicator, his messages to Tessa also reveal that it’s been a month since they last saw each other, at the end of the last movie…in the middle of December.
So, these kids should be enjoying their last few weeks off before they start their new semester right?
Wrong.
Tessa is just starting her internship with a publishing company and there are still Christmas decorations around the pillars of frat houses. Also correct me if I’m wrong but is Fall not known as the season in which LEAF FALL DOWN? I understand that Washington is the “Evergreen State” but there are some trees that don’t do the year round green thing and yet all the trees in this damn movie are green and leafy.
Moving on.
From Tessa sharing a birthday with Joseph Stalin we’re able to surmise that her birthday is the 18th of December.
You recall when I said I looked up the semesters? Yeah. Assuming that they’ve set this movie in the year it came out, 2019, the school semester did not break up until the 23rd of December…But she’s been at her internship for I really wanna say a week.
Which leads us onto my next point of contention.
Noah and Carol.
Let’s start with Noah. Not only is he the most bland of people but he’s also cringy as all hell and judgey as fuck. I don’t actually believe that Tessa and Noah as characters were ever meant to have chemistry, almost like if they were awkward around each other then it makes it okay that Tessa cheated on him with Hardin.
Hardin even told Tessa that her hurting Noah wasn’t her fault. Sorry to break it to you mate but it actually is her fault, she chose to not end the relationship before she gave in to your advances.
Carol.
Overprotective mum? Check. Level 10 judger? Check. Gas lighting personality? Check. Cuts her 18 year old daughter off because she’s started dating someone not in the approval tree? Check and check.
I am quite certain that these two characters were created purely for the sake of being hated and making Tessa’s choices look better and justifiable.
Also, did anyone else notice the weird relationship that these two had? Noah went straight to his ex-girlfriend’s mum when he found out that she was at a college party with her new friends and when they broke up. He justifies his judgement by “only doing what’s best for her”.
Sir. Too bland to even be vanilla, Sir. You aren’t doing anything except judging her choices and being a douche bag. Now off you pop and badly help her gaslighting mother cover up the fact that her dad came back.
What’s next?
I could express my shock that Sandy Cohen made an appearance as Hardin’s dad in the first movie but then had a complete facelift in the second one, as well as Landon’s mum. I don’t know what happened with the professors apartment but I’m pretty sure that they changed the layout of that from the first to the second movie as well. Last I checked that bed with in the living room with the bathtub and sure as shit they wouldn’t have been doing hand stuff with his mum sleeping on the couch no even two meters away and nothing between them.
Could I go back and watch parts of the first movie again just to double check the layout? Yes I could. Am I going to? Good God no I’m not, I already went back once to check the timeline.
Oh I know where to go from here.
How inappropriately invested some of the adults were to the goings on in their students/employees lives. That English Lit professor that I briefly mentioned, yes well in addition to clarifying that they are in fact at the end of the first semester of the year, she also gives Tessa an essay that Hardin wrote as his final assessment. She did this because she believed it was intended for really intended for Tessa and not her.
I don’t know how American college professors operate exactly but in my stint at university here in Australia I encountered a number of teachers, lecturers, professors, whatever you want to call them. The first class of every unit was started with an introductory game, something for us to get to know each other and the lecturer to put faces to the names they had in front of them.
Did anyone else catch onto the fact that in the very first lesson this professor knows the first and last name of Tessa without any prompting what so ever. I could believe her knowing Hardin’s name because he’s not a freshman, she’s probably encountered him a number of times seeing as he is an English major.
Now all of this culminates to my point that it is wholly unrealistic that a college professor would hand over one students final assessment to another student just because he’s confessing his love for her. And this isn’t the last time that an adult authority figure gets oddly familiar with their relationship.
In the second movie we find that Hardin worked at the publishing company at which Tessa gets her internship and apparently his putting a call in to the head of the company guaranteed her not only the internship but special treatment. She gets taken on a business trip for which she has no experience, on her second day there, with Dylan Sprouse masquearading as Trevor from the finance department. She then gets upgraded to a business suite because apparently her room at the hotel wasn’t ready upon their arrival and taken dress shopping by Caroline Forbes who informs her of Hardin’s glowing recommendation.
Honestly the only other thing that I find worth mentioning is Trevor’s reaction to being found half naked in Tessa’s hotel room.
And also Hardin’s reaction to seeing Trevor.
Seriously. Look at that overacting.
Look at those eyebrows.
Goddamn.
He plays angsty, over dramatic teen really well.
All in all, these two movies came off like 50 Shades of Grey set in high school. A bit more tame but missing enough details to make a majority of the movie just look and feel unrealistic. Again, I don’t know if the details that would’ve made the movies plausible are included in the books. I can’t judge the books, I doubt I will ever get around to it either. I can’t stay on top of my TBR list as it is.
Anne Todd did something that we all dreamed off when we were busy writing our fanfictions. She took her story and she turned it into novels that were picked up by a publisher. As much as I cringed watching these two movies, I’m also aware that my watching them through a streaming service has probably put money in her pocket and I’m not mad about it. She’s living the dream.
It’s one thing for books that aren’t based off of fanfiction to read like fanfiction coughMaximumRideFinalWarningonwardscough but when a fully funded and produced movie feels like fanfiction…eesh.
If you made it this far then either you feel my pain or also hate yourself. Either those or you find my rants funny even if you have no idea what they’re actually about. Whatever works for you.
I’m off to rewatch Bones for the hundredth time.
S.J Smith Books 
