404. Great Expectations (1998)

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert De Niro

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Running Time: 111 mins

Great Expectations is an American film, based on Charles Dickens’ classic novel, but updated to modern day America, about a boy who grows up to be a famous artist and has everything he wants, except for the woman of his dreams, who he is never able to be together with.

Usually film adaptations of classic stories are pretty poor, but this really was an inaccurate and uninteresting version of what was originally quite a very good story.

Updating the story was the first mistake, taking it to the USA didn’t make it any more entertaining, and in the end, it seemed like quite an unintelligent synopsis of the original story.

The main problem with this film was that it completely ignored the much more intriguing notion of delving into the characters, of which their are many deep personalities, especially the contrasting emotions of Finnegan (Pip) as his success begins to mount throughout the story.

Rather than follow that more interesting line, this film really went to town with the romance. There is a certain degree of romance in the story, however it’s quite obvious that Hollywood just said to put the romance up to 11 in order to draw in the maximum crowds, and what comes out is a repetitive, dull and ultimately extremely annoying plot that bears little resemblance to the original story, and because of that, I’ll give this a 3.7.