West Side Story Movie Review

“We’ll find a new way of living, We’ll find a new way of forgiving, Somehow, Someday, Somewhere!” -West Side Story

We had the privilege of seeing an early screening for the new West Side Story, coming to theater’s December 10th. This is the movie I have been looking forward to all year long, ever since Disney announced they were re-making the classic and with Steven Spielberg as the director. I absolutely LOVED all of the singing and dancing, but wanted to give you the rest of my thoughts about the film…

Brief Synopsis: If you are familiar with the original film (or staged musical), then there are no major surprises with this re-make. For anyone who hasn’t seen the original, the story line is about two star-gazed teenagers and their forbidden love. A Romeo and Juliet type of story, Maria, from Puerto Rico, her brother runs the Sharks. Tony, immediately smitten with Maria, part of the Jets, but is trying to make his way out of the gang and bring peace to the New York neighborhood. It takes place in the 1950’s, each group of kids are fighting over territory, trying to push each other out.

Release Date: December 10th, 2021

Rating: PG-13

Length: 2 hours, 36 minutes

Other: Here is the part I give a few spoilers to share my thoughts about certain scenes you may want to be aware of as a parent trying to decide to take your kids. Our children are 7 and 9 and it wan’t so much the length of the movie that bothered them, it was the sad ending. SPOILER ALERT: if you don’t know, the two leaders of the Sharks and Jets are killed, then at the very end Tony is shot in the back and killed. Then the movie pretty much ends after that scene. My kids said it was quite possibly the saddest ending of a movie they had ever seen. Mind you they have seen all of the Star Wars movies and Marvel movies, even End Game where Tony Stark dies to save the world and they still think this was more sad. They told me they would NOT want to watch it again unless I was able to fast forward to just the fun singing and dancing sequences.

One more specific scene I want to mention is toward the end where Anita gets pushed into a group of Jets, shoved to the ground and you can hear her yelling for help. Finally someone comes to get the Jets off of her, but she comes up with her dress unzipped in the back, leading you to believe that the group of Jets were going to take advantage of her. She leaves and the person that came to her rescue calls the Jets “rapists.” Thankfully this went over the heads of my kids, but definitely something to consider if you have someone that may be very sensitive to that sort of thing.

There are definitely some choice words in the movie, non that I thought were more than most PG-13 movies. There is obviously some violence with the Jets and Sharks having a big “rumble.” Also, some of the Sharks switch back and forth from using Spanish to English and there are no sub-titles. Spielberg said it was to keep the film as authentic as possible and not take away from the Spanish language. My kids didn’t seem to mind, you could still understand what was going on, although it did make me want to freshen up on some of my Spanish!;)

Official Trailer:

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