For me, Rent is one of those musicals where I’m pretty familiar with most of the music on the soundtrack, but have never actually sat down to watch the whole movie. I remember when it came out my sister was really into musicals, and so she always had the movie playing in our house. So I saw bits and pieces of it, and definitely heard the songs playing all the time, but I never really had the desire to watch it myself. Still, it’s been on my list to watch for a while now. One reason that I had a personal interest in it was because the screenplay was written by Stephen Chbosky, who is the author of my favorite book of all time. I’m sad to say that I found this movie to be really disappointing.

I think the hardest thing for me to get into was the story. The story is all about these struggling artists that live in New York. They’re all very angsty and rebellious, and so maybe if I watched this at a younger age I might have been more into it. But now, I just see them protesting about having to pay their rent, and I think they’re all just entitled brats that need to get a real job. A lot of the characters have AIDS, too, but I never felt like the movie touches on this subject in any real, meaningful way. Because of the nature of what this movie is, I just really didn’t like most of the characters, and so it was hard to sit through.

One of the reasons I never really had the desire to watch this before is because I was familiar with the soundtrack, and never really cared for it. After watching the movie through, I feel like Rent has a really weird soundtrack for me. There are a few songs that I absolutely love, and then most of the others I just don’t think are that good. There weren’t many mediocre songs for me, I just thought they were either great or bad.

I didn’t realize how much I disliked the movie until I thought about it all afterwards. In the end, I didn’t like most of the characters, songs, or story, and those are kind of the main components of a movie musical. It has some highlights, I suppose, but I didn’t like the movie at a fundamental level, so overall I kind of felt like this was awful. I know this musical has a devout fanbase, so I’m sorry to those that really like it, but it just wasn’t for me.

1.5/5