ok here are my thoughts on the new wuthering heights movie (as someone who really loves the book)
this is probably gonna be long and rambly and nonsense (im bad at explaining my thoughts/feelings) and full of spoilers so uh. shit below the cut ig
ok so i went into this with my expectations On The Floor. the first previews i saw were giving nothing but basic bodice ripper action and were skewed even more by charli xcx being the named music source (to someone who doesn't know more than her most popular songs, a ~1770s period piece doesnt seem like the type of thing her music belongs in you know?) and in general it just seemed Bad
then i saw a couple more that gave me a tiny bit more faith but like. i was still stressed out about Heathcliff being played by A White Guy and how that was gonna erase the racial aspects of the whole story, and that they likely weren't going to handle the second generation arc (which is yanno like. half the book and honestly the way the traumas of the first gen affect the second gen and how g2 overcome that is so much more interesting to me than all the fuck shit going on between heathcliff and cathy but ANYWAY)
that being said, i really enjoyed this movie and i found it surprisingly faithful to the first gen's arc of the book. was it very deep in its recreation? no. was it perfect? definitely not. in the first like 5 minutes i had already wanted to walk out because of changes that were made to the earnshaw family (the whole "im gonna call him heathcliff after my dead brother" made me so mad before i realized they were gonna take the route of drunk fucked up dad instead of drunk fucked up brother). either way i feel like the plot points were mostly followed well (and the ones that weren't were executed in a way that at least Made Sense in universe) up until heathcliff returns after hs disappearance and even still they managed to give the audience what they were marketed and let heathcliff and cathy fuck around together in a way that still felt like it Worked yk? idk again i don't think it was particularly deep in what it showed us and like. the most like ~themes~ we get are the whole class thing since the earnshaws are broke as hell before cathy's involvement with the lintons but i still think it's good considering the era it's come out in.
i think i mostly like the movie because a lot of it feels like a cathy pov fanfic and i find it interesting to see her where her flaws are less apparent because of that. she's often haughty and cruel with no thought in the books and it hardly shows through except for in scenes where we're paying more attention to the other characters (especially the servants. joseph's the only one that really seems to be kinda comfy with her/treats her kindly and im pretty sure thats more because shes a pretty lady and hes been surrounded only by fuckass dudes since zillah left and the heights goes deeper into decline)
on the topic of joseph i dont quite know how i feel about the drastic change they made to his character. like. his sole purpose in the movie is to be pretty and young and introduce cathy to freaky sex. thats such a huge distance from the irritable old man who yaps regularly about god and the bible and how heathcliff and cathy are demons and shit and idk i get that that kind of character isnt really palatable to today's general audience
and isabella!!! i think the way her character has changed from this sweet innocent girl in the book to like. quietly violent weird ass girl is interesting. I don't like that her relationship with heathcliff is some fucked up bdsm shit in the movie when in the book shes literally just getting abused??? like i understand that maybe its not a good idea to make her a plot point, abuse her, and then throw her away but like either way she seems to be a throwaway character in the movie and when cathy dies she just gets like. scooped away. shes so confusing because i genuinely can't tell if she does or doesn't want to be doing this whole pet spiel when nelly comes to check on her and idk the more i think about her the more im like oughhhh i dont get it
actually edgar was fucking weird too what do u mean "i painted your bedroom so it looks like your skin complete with veins and freckles" thats fucking ODD bro. actually while i think about it are the veins always visible or do they just become more visible as cathy starts to become more miserable at the grange? that would be kinda cool if thats what they did
ANYWAY last big thing i think i have to say is that im surprised i didn't hate the way this *looked* even though i hated that so many of (specifically cathy's) costumes were like. shiny and full of plastic (what the hell even was that cellophane nightmare of a dress after she marries edgar?) like. thrushcross grange was simultaneously so pretty and so disjointed and Weird and unsettling? but like. the moors were nice and i liked that wuthering heights was so rundown and dark and depressing
i lied also it was hot. as much as i hated the idea of the movie being saturated with sex i sure did enjoy the sex in the movie.
tldr theres definitely some stuff i didnt quite like didnt quite Hate but all in all i think that it was a lot more faithful to the source material than i expected and i did really enjoy it.