One Extremely Disappointing YA Book to Movie Adaptation Scored an Abysmal 7% on Rotten Tomatoes (2025)

To all YA book lovers out there, stay strong because it is time to be transported back into a decade, which caused bookworms a great amount of disappointment. The 2010s saw many YA book-to-movie adaptations as production companies started to hop onto the same train that took The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen on a trip through the districts. The golden child of YA adaptations certainly led the way by offering a unique story and a twist on how relatable the heroine is. The beginning of the 2010s took the baffling world of Panem out of the imagination of Suzanne Collin’s readers and brought it to the screen in even more mind-blowing detail. But then came The Mortal Instruments. And Divergent. And The 5th Wave. Apologies, but the list unfortunately goes on, leading to 2016's Fallen.

It is almost hard to believe that there is a movie out there that is even worse than The 5th Wave and its nonsensical story preoccupied with a stereotypical and painfully bland surprise love triangle. The downfall of YA book-to-movie adaptations sadly didn’t stop with Cassie’s confusing attempt to save her brother (or humanity?) amid a strangely developed alien invasion. In fact, Scott Hicks's movie based on the first book of Lauren Kate’s successful Fallen series was a disaster. First published in 2009, Fallen marked the beginning of a collection of six books. Keeping the success of the novels in mind, it is even more frustrating that one of the worst YA book-to-movie adaptations only scored 7% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fallen

PG-13

Release Date

November 10, 2016

Director

Scott Hicks

Cast

Addison Timlin , Jeremy Irvine , Joely Richardson , Harrison Gilbertson , Sianoa Smit-McPhee , Lola Kirke

Runtime

91

Main Genre

Drama

See Also

Republican lawsuits target rules for overseas voters, but those ballots are already sentHere's how many Category 5 hurricanes have hit the mainland U.S.

What Is Lauren Kate’s Fallen About?

Blamed for the tragic death of a friend, teenager Lucinda Price is sent to the monumental yet grim boarding school Sword & Cross. Apart from finding comfort in her quirky new friend, Penn, who takes Luce under her wing and shows her the ropes of the intimidating school, the teenager is strongly drawn to two other students who seem to have an eye on her as well. Daniel and Cam are the boys in question, one of them pushing her away like the scum of the earth and the other desperately trying to wrap her around his finger.

Next to being caught in a twisted love triangle, Luce is constantly haunted by dark visions and growing shadows. When she discovers that both Daniel and Cam are connected to her past and are actually fallen angels who have known her forever, Luce slowly comes closer to unraveling the daunting truths of a past she never knew. An epic battle between heaven and hell threatens to rip her true love away from her, forcing her to make a crucial decision.

The Acting in Fallen Is Profoundly Bad

The Fallen movie offers unforgettable acting, but it is safe to say that it is not for the wonderful reasons that fans of the novel series longed for. Frankly, it is quite the opposite because the first few minutes into the movie are enough to form the opinion that maybe, just maybe, something went tragically wrong in the acting department. Whether it was due to the straight-up bad script or a non-existent connection to the actual characters from the book, the cast failed to pick up the magic from Lauren Kate’s paper and embody it on screen.

Addison Timlin, who portrayed Lucinda Price, one of the main characters in Fallen, unfortunately struggled to form any sort of real personality. This led to the conclusion that even Kristen Stewart’s often weird portrayal of Bella in Twilight was deeper than what Timlin delivered in Fallen. The same can be said for her two love interests in the movie, Daniel Grigori, played by Jeremy Irvine, and Cam Briel, portrayed by Harrison Gilbertson, who apparently was stuck with the same forced acting skills.

If anything, the acting makes Fallen an insipid, draining watch, solely taking viewers on an aggravating journey of forcing oneself to continue watching as failure unfolds. At best, Fallen is a solid, if sad, throwback to Harrison Gilbertson and Jeremy Irvine’s younger years, just before the former appeared in the action thriller Upgrade and the latter landed his role as Young Sam in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

While it is surely impressive that Harrison Gilbertson appeared in one of the best movies in 2023, the Academy Award-winning biopic Oppenheimer and Jeremy Irvine will appear in the highly anticipated spinoff Outlander: Blood for my Blood and portray the role of Claire’s father, Henry Beauchamp, there is no doubt that anyone involved in the 2016 Fallen movie would rather erase any proof from their growing filmography.

Fallen’s Annoying Plot Changes and Filler Scenes

To fans of Lauren Kate’s novel series, the Fallen movie is a disappointment on many levels. As is common with questionable book-to-movie adaptations, another issue that is hard to ignore is the plot changes. A major point that stands out is that Luce and Penn meet in a memorable way. Their interaction in the book is based on someone mocking Luce in the cafeteria and dumping a bowl of meatloaf over her head. When she is in the bathroom to get cleaned up, she is met by the supportive Penn, who immediately shows empathy and helps her out. It is a rather important moment that sets the tone for their entire friendship and how Luce’s standing in the school is. Instead, the movie leaves out key details, such as putting her in an embarrassing moment where everyone sees her, including her future love interests, and fails to lay a profound foundation between Luce and Penn.

In general, the movie is filled with filler scenes that hold little to no importance for the overall plot or don’t make any sense. Whoever thought of adding scenes of the students partaking in fencing classes to the movie out of nowhere should rethink the point of a school for dangerous teenagers. They have to give up their phones and anything, literally anything, that could somehow be turned into a weapon, but then they go on and have fencing classes? That’s... interesting. On top of that, key moments are stretched out in an exhausting way, which makes the movie feel unnecessarily long. Add an annoying amount of flashing lights and painfully draining dialogue, and wrap it in bad editing, and there you have a book-to-movie adaptation that should have been better: the Fallen movie.

Ultimately, it comes as no surprise that Fallen scored only 7% on Rotten Tomatoes. Even though the expectations for the movie were high due to the success of Lauren Kate’s novel series, the Fallen movie, unfortunately, is nothing more but a terribly executed Twilight rip-off, which fails to hit the essential spots of a captivating YA adaptation. Fallen is available to rent on Prime Video and AppleTV.