Brainstorm Media released a new movie on Prime Video called “The Other Zoey” on Friday, Nov. 10. It’s about a college student named Zoey Miller, played by After’s Josephiene Langford, who has totally unsubscribed to the idea of love, and believes it is all about compatibility. Meanwhile, the school’s star soccer player Zach MacLaren, played by Outer Banks’ Drew Starkey, is in a very public relationship with girl’s soccer star Zoey Wallace.
Zach gets in a bicycle accident and hits his head, resulting in short-term amnesia, and when Zoey Miller is standing by helping him after the accident, he is convinced she is his girlfriend, instead of Zoey Wallace, who is away on vacation. When Zach’s doctor tells Zoey that he is not to be given any big news that will upset him, she decides to keep up the lie that she is his real girlfriend. The basic storyline is a decent one, but the more intricate writing of this movie needs a lot of work. It’s hard for actors to deliver bad lines without giving the audience secondhand embarrassment, which was the case here.
This movie felt like it had a low budget, as if it didn’t have enough money to hire the best writers, directors and designers. Langford and Starkey have been in other successful projects where they portrayed their characters perfectly, so audiences know these are good actors, however even the best of actors cannot portray badly written characters well. If this movie had better writers, directors and designers, audiences would have enjoyed it much better.
The general production of this movie felt low, and the cinematography could’ve been greatly improved. The film felt like a high school production of a film project for a movie production class. A movie is a big system of working parts, and when a few of those parts don’t work to their full potential, the entire movie functions improperly.
Zoey Miller and Zack MacLaren were played by good actors, but were written not even for the best actors in the world. Langford and Starkey did the best they could with those characters, but they just weren’t written well. Audience members could count on one hand how many lines in this film were not cheesy.
This film had some high points and some low points. While the general storyline is pretty good, the individual lines are where the main issues lie. This movie deserves a 4/10 rating; it’s more fun to watch to make fun of rather than to actually enjoy. It’s watchable, but it’s definitely not the best movie of the year.
