Les Miserables the Movie: Ugh! Ugh! Agh!

Since part of my intent with this Les Miserables retrospective/preview has been to review anything major released for the movie, I couldn't not mention the biggest bomb that dropped this week: the screenplay.

Somehow officials from Universal -- or a disgruntled studio intern -- decided to post the entire screenplay of the movie on Universal's website.  At present, its page is no longer loading, which suggests that the release was a mistake.  Still, if Universal wanted to keep the movie completely under wraps until the last minute, the damage has been done: thousands have read the script by now, including yours truly.

I was conflicted about whether to read it.  I'm the sort of person who readily consumes spoilers (part of my attraction to Game of Thrones and the A Song of Ice and Fire series, for instance, was that I knew where certain characters ended up), but I also know that there are cases where it just isn't as powerful if you aren't surprised.  This seemed to be the case with Les Miserables the movie.  However, I'm weak, so I did give in and read the screenplay as fast as I could so that I did not pick up every detail.  Now I'm trying to forget what I read so that when I see the movie, it still seems fresh.

Even though I've read the screenplay, I'm not going to review it, at least not until the movie comes out.  Otherwise, it would be like doing an early review of the movie.  I will probably just use it in a point-by-point comparison sense, to see what was left in or cut out.  

The only thing I will say about the screenplay is that it gave me chills.  If the movie manages to do it justice, we have a winner.  That said, I've seen situations where something that really worked in the script did not work as well on screen.  Still, from what we've seen, Tom Hooper should be able to pull it off.        

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