Every spring break, I tag along with my best friend and her family on their annual road trip to Florida. While she and I fulfill our low contribution to these road trips by sitting in the back seats doing nothing, we have agreed that in order to stay sane and entertained on these 18-hour car rides, we would run through our favorite movies: The After series.
After having watched all four After films, I have become attached to the characters and their story. When I saw that the filmmakers released the fifth and final film to wrap up the series, I knew I had to watch it. I had loved the earlier movies, so I figured I would without a doubt have the same feelings towards the new addition of After Everything: The Final Chapter. With my expectations for the continuation of this storyline being extremely high, I think it’s safe to say that while I was not let down, my expectations did not match the story.
After Everything is the continuation and final writing of Tessa Young’s and Hardin Scott’s troubling love story. Now, with everything that had been written to develop the character’s track record in the previous films and having left off with a breakup between the two in the movie before, After Ever Happy, I was expecting this sort of back-and-forth love between the two of them to continue in these newest 93 minutes. Little did I know that I would get the complete opposite. In fact, rather than the movie being fully centered around Tessa and Hardin as a unit, it is more a story of Hardin’s search to better himself to obtain his happy ending.
The movie starts with Tessa preparing for a wedding as a foreshadowing moment at the end of the film. While this had me confused at first, I was shocked to see that the next moment of the movie was of Hardin drinking over his laptop, struggling to write since he misses Tessa. This set the stage for the rest of the film, as it was all a growing uprising of Hardin himself with conflicting moments along the way. As we move further into the movie, Hardin encounters a puzzling moment where he realizes the only way for him and Tessa to end up together is for him to truly change. He then finds himself on a flight to Lisbon, where his journey starts and my confusion truly sets in as we are introduced to a new unfamiliar face: Natalie.
The one thing that I do not like about the storyline of this film is the way that the filmmakers implement flashbacks and memories to introduce or explain situations. When Hardin arrives in Lisbon the first thing he does is go to a dress shop where he comes face to face with Natalie. The filmmakers then throw in a flashback of a moment when Hardin made a rather familiar bet with his friends that he could end up with Natalie, and it all goes downhill from there. Although a flashback may be an easy way to get the message across, it made the scenes feel as if I was watching too much too fast, and the movie became difficult to comprehend.
As the story progresses, Hardin and Natalie reconnect getting closer and closer which ultimately leads to Hardin’s growth and change of heart. Now, while I do think that the dynamic between Hardin and Natalie was needed to further develop Hardin’s character, there were some questionable moments between the two that, as one who is rooting for Hardin and Tessa, I did not enjoy. Something about the way the writers made it feel as if Hardin was supposed to end up with Natalie was rather unsettling to me and had me questioning the purpose of the series itself.
I went into this movie sitting on a hope and a prayer that the soul tie of Tessa and Hardin would bring them back together. Despite this, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared of the ending as a good portion of the film felt like I was watching Hardin go back and forth between two girls, in a hassle to decide which one he wants to be with. I have always been a strong believer in the “right person wrong time” theory, and after watching the final scenes of Tessa and Hardin dancing together at Hardin’s brother’s wedding, it is clear now that these two are a perfect representation of that.
While I was not expecting the story to unfold the way that it did, I will say that the writers knew what they were doing. After Everything: The Final Chapter was undoubtedly the perfect ending to the troubling love story of Tessa Young and Hardin Scott.
