When I chose to watch Paper Towns as just another teenage romance film, I could not have been more wrong. Paper Towns is not your typical high-school boy-meets-girl love story; it provides food for thought instead of making you reach for a box of tissues.
In Paper Towns, Quentin Jacobsen aspires to live an ordinary life – acquire a degree and a job, tie the knot and have kids by the age of thirty. This is essentially society’s definition of the ‘successful’ life, and he assumes he’ll be happy once he ticks off all these items in his head. But one day Margo whisks him off in the middle of the night to have the adventure of a lifetime. Margo was a close friend of his during childhood, but a friend no more.
Adventurous and quirky, Margo challenges this belief: “Isn’t there anything that could make you happy right now?”
That question really made me think. We try so hard to craft the perfect life for ourselves, we forget to be happy along the way. We think we’ll be content with ourselves and our lives once we’ve got that high-class education, that perfect job. But happiness really comes from within. In the film, Quentin later feels that he edxperienced the best few days of his life when he followed Margo and her revenge plot though to the end, and when he set out on his first ever road trip in pursuit of her.
The plot of Paper Towns does have a bit of excitement, but at times the film feels rather slow. There’s also some nostalgia as Quentin and his friends look back on their final year of high school and recount all they could never get to do anymore. I’ve been through the exact situation the same year. You can watch the trailer here. Rating: 4/5
