Netflix’s The Half of It connects with teens on many levels

On May 1, Netflix released a movie called The Half of It, a teen romantic comedy about a smart girl, Ellie Chu (played by Leah Lewis), who lives in a small town in the fictional Squahamish, Washington, and writes papers for her classmates to pay for bills and overall take care of her father.

One day a jock, Paul Munsky (played by Daniel Diemer),  asks her to write a love letter to Aster Flores (played by Alexxis Lemire), a girl who he believes he loves and she secretly likes. Paul and Ellie unexpectedly become good friends. The movie also features Collin Chou as Edwin Chu.

I give the movie a 9/10 for the realism and the representation; the only thing I didn’t like is how some teen characters were very unrealistic which took me out of the story. The movie is different from most teen movies until it started talking about emojis and had every other teen character that wasn’t Emily or Aster obsessed with themselves and emojis, which makes our generation look bad, my biggest pet peeve about modern teen movies.

Other than that, I actually really like Netflix’s The Half of It because there aren’t very many movies, especially teen movies, with positive LGBTQ+ representation, let alone, LGBTQ+ main characters. Also, this movie has Chinese-Americans as the main character and there hasn’t been a lot of Asian representations in movies and TV until recently. Unlike most teen romance movies, The Half of It shows an accurate representation of love and how it can be messy and difficult. They even touch on religion at some points in the movie.