A Review of The Movie, Look Both Ways
This review will officially be my first to see the light of day; my sincere apologies to the other reviews on my note app.
I’m not too proud to say that I had no intentions of watching this movie. But the strangest thing happened; the preview played on Netflix, I saw Aisha Dee — I loved her in The Bold Type, and I was sold.
Now here’s the thing, I had almost zero expectations when I set out to watch it, but I was surprisingly impressed. I finished watching this movie I can only describe as thrilling with a dumb smile on my face. Lol, it was really good.
Look Both Ways is a movie about Natalie, played by Lili Reinhart, who had a 5-year plan; to graduate from school, move to Los Angeles and establish herself as a creative animator. Out of spontaneity, she had sex with a close friend, got sick and had to take a pregnancy test on her graduation night.
This is where the movie gets better; her future diverges — two parallel storylines of “what ifs,” playing out simultaneously.
In one future, Natalie isn’t pregnant, she moves to Los Angeles with her best friend, lands the most fantastic job with her idol, meets a guy, falls in love, and breaks up, but somehow things don’t pan out as expected. She doesn’t find her mojo — her idol called her work “derivative.” She’s forced to quit her job, return home and start again — she eventually builds the career she wanted.
In the alternate future, Natalie is indeed pregnant; she doesn’t move to Los Angeles — which she didn’t take very well. She had to move back in with her parents, had a kid, worked odd jobs, co-parented with Gabe (the guy she had a baby with), found her mojo, and created an animated series that won several awards.
In the end, she was okay.
Saying I loved this movie would be a disservice — it would be the biggest lie I’d have ever told. I enjoyed it so much. And the best part for me is not knowing which of the timelines is true.
She uses her life experiences from both realities to reach her goals.
Despite life taking her on different routes, Natalie still succeeds in attaining the objective she set out to accomplish from the beginning. It took more than five years to achieve her success, but she did.
We’ve all had moments in our lives where we ask ourselves, “what if?” What if we hadn’t done this? What if we’d given a relationship another shot? What if we accepted a particular job offer? What if we had done it all differently?
The truth is, life is a sum of our actions, choices — good and bad, inactions, decisions, and every hesitation. We can plan for it, dot the i’s, and cross our t’s; heck, we could draw a career map, and sometimes it just doesn’t go as planned.
If we are lucky, though, it does but more often than not, it doesn’t — and that is okay. But somehow, we’re okay in the end — because just as one action leads us away from the path we’re carving for ourselves, it’s probably also leading us to the best life we could never have imagined.
There isn’t a clear-cut path to what you consider success. There are multiple routes to achieve success, just as there are multiple routes life can send you down, but understand this, no matter which one you choose (as long as they’re good decisions), there is a high probability that you will end up exactly where you want to be.
So, live your life — allow yourself to make mistakes, enjoy moments, and make them count. You, my friend, will be fine.
In the famous words of — a wise person, we’ll be okay in the end, and if somehow we’re not, then it’s not the end.
