From Broadway to the big screen
October 4, 2021
“Dear Evan Hansen,” a two hour long movie was released to theaters on Sept. 24, 2021. The movie introduces Evan Hansen as best friends with Conner Murphy who passed away due to suicide.
The movie takes place in Evan’s senior year of high school. Evan doesn’t really talk to other people because he has bad social anxiety and gets freaked out by talking to others. Connor first talks to Evan when he thinks Evan is laughing at him getting made fun of and screams at him. Evan is given an assignment from his therapist to write a letter to himself, but when Connor takes it and commits suicide that night with the letter still on him.
Due to Connor still having the letter he took from Evan it led Connor’s parents to believing that Connor and Evan were best friends and that was a suicide letter Connnor had wrote to Evan. Evan had tried to tell Connor’s parents that Connor wasn’t the one who wrote the letter but Cynthia and Larry thought Evan was in shock.
Anyone who knows me knows I love watching films where they talk about more sensitive topics. I think that it is a really important thing to bring things into the light, especially, more sensitive topics like suicide. So you bet when I heard about “Dear Evan Hanson” I was really excited to go see it.
I went into the movie not knowing that is was based off a musical which I think would’ve made more sense at the beginning. I thought the songs were really good and really well sang but it was extremely awkward on how they added the songs. One scene Evan was making up a story about when he was hanging out with Connor and started singing in front of Connor’s family.
The ending was extremely abrupt and very opened ended and I don’t think that was the best way to end the movie. With Evan’s now ex-girlfriend and Connor’s sister Zoe being mad at Evan for lying about being friends with Connor. The ending wasn’t specifically told when it was placed but it was after Evan’s graduation and in the time Zoe had forgiven Evan. I wish they had shown the process of how Zoe had come to terms of forgiving Evan and if Evan had tried to talk to Zoe after everything went down.
I enjoyed the movie but I did expect more going into it, especially, since I was so excited for the movie to come out. The movie overall was just okay and I really wanted to like the movie more. The ending was really abrupt and not the greatest, the songs were oddly placed and overall was just an average movie.
Even though the movie was lacking in some areas, I would still recommend it to people who like or are interested in musicals. The movie overall, has a really good theme and message to it.
