Once I Was Engaged Review

Six years ago, back in 2015, a little LDS-themed movie called “Once I Was a Beehive” was released and made quite the storm here in Utah. Cheesy title. Cheesy premise. But a surprisingly great film that had excellent word of mouth. It stayed in theaters locally for 15 weeks and made about $730,000 at the box office. Not bad for a little Utah film. Fast forward to today and the movie now has a sequel, “Once I Was Engaged.”

It’s been a second or two since I’ve seen “Once I Was a Beehive.” I remember being uninterested initially. Then I remember giving it a go and being shocked at how much I enjoyed it. Then I remembered spending the next few months doing my best to convince others to give it a shot.

“Yes, I know it sounds dumb. A low-budget girls camp movie. But I promise that it’s really good.”

That’s how most conversations went. Usually if I was successfully, the person would come out and thank me for convincing them to watch it because they, too, thought it was a really great movie. Never once did I think we would ever get a sequel to the movie. But, well, here we are. This time it wasn’t hard to convince myself to go see it. Same cast. Same crew. Same director. OK, this is at least worth a shot.

The result?

Well… I… ummm… sorry. This one just did not work for me.

“Once I Was Engaged” is a movie that follows Bree Carrington as she goes off to BYU Hawaii for school. She meets a boy named Thys Chesterfield at the beginning of the semester. At the end of the semester when Bree thinks they are going to break up so that she can go on a mission and he can pursue his old girlfriend who is about to get off her mission, Thys surprises her by proposing instead. She says yes, even though she is not 100 percent in favor of this. But she eventually decides that getting married is what she wants to do, despite that being against her mother’s wishes, and then they begin the process of planning the wedding.

Essentially this movie is more of a spin-off to “Once I Was a Beehive,” set a few years after that movie. Whereas “Once I Was a Beehive” was a teen drama, “Once I Was Engaged” is a rom-com. Honestly this didn’t necessarily need to be connected to “Once I Was a Beehive.” It’s a much different movie with a different focus. Even though the entire cast returns, most of them are more or less afterthoughts. They’re either relegated to supporting roles or glorified cameos, showing up so that the movie could have a stronger connection to the first one rather than having a purpose in the plot to be there. This includes Lane Speer, the actual main character of the first movie, the non-member girl who gets roped into going to girls camp.

This is not necessarily a terrible angle to take. It’s much easier to get people to see your movie when it’s connected to a successful franchise as opposed to simply starting a new franchise. And if the goal is to make a fun and silly LDS rom-com, why not take one of the girls from your previous in order to accomplish this? The final goal is accomplished with what you wanted to do. You just had a built in audience of people who watched and loved the first movie. But as I thought about the movie in retrospect, this connection to the first movie did end up feeling more like a marketing gimmick than something that needed to happen.

Ultimately, though, I think my main analysis as to why I didn’t connect with “Once I Was Engaged” like I did with “Once I Was a Beehive” came with me doing a more deep analysis of why “Once I Was a Beehive” worked. Yes, it was a silly girls movie that poked fun at LDS culture, much like “The Singles Ward” or “The R.M.” from the early 2000s, but there was also a strong emotional core that made it rise above the self-referential comedy. You didn’t have to have gone to girls camp as a young woman in the Church to enjoy the movie because the story is really about learning how to overcome the loss of a family member and adjust to new changes in life. Lane is a non-member girl who gets roped into going to girls camp because her father passed away and her mother remarries a member of the church, thus she is thrown into a strange, new life and has a lot to overcome. You laugh at all the funny jokes in the movie, but you also cry and are moved by this emotional plot.

I don’t know anything about the process of how “Once I Was Engaged” was made or why certain narrative decisions came to be. And I don’t want to say the filmmakers didn’t understand why their first movie was so popular, but I can express my personal opinion the reasons why I connected with the first movie wound up not being the heavy focus of this second movie. Not only are we following Bree and not Lane, but there’s not a very strong emotional core to the movie that I was able to grasp onto.

Before I dive too much further, I do want to point out that focusing on marriage is a direction that makes sense. The girls are no longer teens and having them deal with college and marriage is another major milestone in a girl’s life after struggling with the challenges of being a teenager. And given the fact that today’s younger generation does have a more progressive and perhaps less traditional take on marriage and dating than the older generations of the Church, for better or for worse, there were potential avenues to go down if the filmmakers had the ultimate goal of telling another important and relevant story that provides strong themes to hold onto for young people in the Church. But that didn’t seem to be the case. The focus seemed to be much more on the comedy element, poking fun at the traditions and clichés of an LDS wedding. The only drama in the film involved if she was actually going to marry this guy or not rather than some deeper theme that they could’ve focused on.

Even then, if I try to take a step away from all of this and put on my rom-com judging hat rather than being disappointed that the focused on Bree and not Lane, or being disappointed that there wasn’t a strong, emotional theme for me to connect to, I’m not so sure this really succeeds as a rom-com. Structurally speaking, the balance was off. Because they were also much more interested in making fun of the intricacies of LDS wedding planning than giving the rom-com part of the film much time to breathe.

If you dissect the movie, there is a traditional rom-com arc. But Act 1 and Act 3 are extremely short. We start with Bree in her wedding dress, the day before she gets married, then quickly flash back to her saying this is the guy she met and fell in love with. There is the brief drama that they are going to break up, but he shocks her by proposing instead. There is tension with her mother and confusion in her own mind as she is deciding on if she wants to get married or go on a mission, but again, this happens fairly quickly in the movie. She commits to getting married and they set a date for two months in the future.

Act 3 I will not speak of in detail, but it is also even more abbreviated than Act 1. There is the main conflict in every rom-com of whether or not the couple is actually going to get married. Something always comes up and divides them. This drama happens much later than it should’ve and there is a lot of things that happens in a very short amount of time.

So if Act 1 and Act 3 are both very short, what is Act 2? Wedding planning. There is a literal, virtual checklist that the movie shows us and we go through that literal bullet point list of everything involved in their wedding planning. This is where we decide to poke fun at every single element of planning an LDS wedding. Call it a series of short stories inside the larger story of the rom-com. There is zero drama and very little suspense, unless you really care about who Bree is going to select for her bridesmaids, where the reception is going to be held, what to do at the Bachelorette Party, what wedding dress she wants to pick out, and how to manage the financial parts of the wedding, given that Bree’s dad is in between jobs and Thys’s parents are super rich and prosperous. I laughed at some of these individual things, but in context of the story as a whole, this elongated Act 2 went a long way in dragging the movie down.

I did realize in the final part of the movie that I have a closer than expected connection to the director of the movie than I thought. Maclain Nelson, director of the both movies and lead actor in “The Saratov Approach,” is the son of a high councilor in my single’s ward a few years back. Said high councilor and his wife show up at the very end as the parents of Thys’s ex-girlfriend, and I was like, “Oh hey, I know those two!”

Speaking of Thys’s ex-girlfriend, she’s played by Tiffany Alvord, a YouTuber and singer I’ve been following for the last decade. There’s also a cameo from a certain Utah Senator and Stacey Harkey, formerly of Studio C and currently of J.K. Studios. I’m not sure how they managed to rope all of them into being in this movie, but that led to a lot of “Oh hey!” moments. In which case, that means that there is a small percent chance that this ends up being viewed by people who were involved in the making of this film. If that does happen…

Sorry.

But as the director of “Avocado Toast,” a movie I watched and reviewed a few weeks ago, would confirm to you, I don’t think it does anyone any good if I sugarcoat my opinion of a movie just because there may be a personal connection. I don’t have to be rude about it, but I can give what I see as constructive criticism so that people can do better next time, whatever their filmmaking project may be.

For the record, all of the acting in the movie is fantastic. That’s not the problem. And all the technical aspects of the filmmaking are also done well. This a well-shot, well-made film in regards to the editing, cinematography, lighting, camera work, and all of that fun stuff, especially considering this is still an indie movie without the major budget of a traditional Hollywood studio film. But it’s the idea of the film that ultimately failed.

If there is a third “Once I Was” movie coming, I would hope the filmmakers would go back and realize what made the first one so good. And now that I have all may bases covered, most of you, if not all of you, will be simply people curious if you should watch it or not. To that I say go for it. If you liked the first movie and you’re curious about this sequel, give it a shot. You might like it more than me. Just know that it does not have my personal stamp of approval.

Grade: 6/10