“Finding new and preferably ways to degrade a friend's mother, was always held in high regard.”

Being an adaptation of The Body by Stephen King, Stand by Me is a story about a group of four friends who go on a sort of little adventure in order to find a kid’s missing body. Unfortunately for them, however, another group of much older teens is also looking for the body, and let’s just say they aren’t the nicest kids in the world. Stand by Me is a story about friendship, loss, identity, and simply just a group of friends who are worried about their futures as they are all about to enter middle school.

And before I watched this movie, I knew it had good reviews and all, but I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy it, seeing that all of the main characters were young teens/tweens, and were being played by teenagers. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that, but you never know what you’re going to get when your main cast is all that young. Well, let’s just say I was extremely pleasantly surprised by all the performances here. I found all of them to be entirely believable as teenagers at this age, and it was honestly way better than I expected. All four of them are great, but the two standouts were definitely Will Wheaton and River Phoenix, who played Gordie and Chris, respectively. I definitely already see why River Phoenix was a once-in-a-generation talent.

Speaking of Gordie and Chris, they are our two main leads, with Gordie being the central one, so I’ll talk about him first. Gordie is a young and aspiring writer who has recently lost his brother and is dealing with parents who are treating him as if he were dead to them, and, quite frankly, a mistake. This alone would have made him a compelling character, but what he goes through over the course of the very short runtime of this movie, and particularly how we see all the emotions that he’s going through in Wheaton’s performance, make him even more so. He also kind of serves as really the only character who somewhat knows, or at least has somewhat of a path laid out for him, on what he wants to do in his future. You would think that this would make him a somewhat unlikable character, but his lack of confidence and selflessness for his friends make him otherwise.

The other main character, who is somewhat of a side protagonist, I guess you could say, is Chris (as I already mentioned), and is very similar in a way to Gordie, but also very different. He also comes from a troubled home, but we don’t really hear much about his home life other than his father, who is kind of not really in the picture. Adding onto that, he wants to aspire to do big things in life, but lacks the confidence, just like Gordie, only he doesn’t really know what to do. When it comes to River Phoenix’s performance, I would say he was probably the best in the movie and had the most emotional scenes.

The other two characters in the group, Teddy and Vern, definitely don’t have nearly as much of an arc as the other two, but they serve the story just as well. They are two kids who don’t really aspire to do much with their lives at this point, at least not yet, and are kind of just living their simple lives as schoolkids. The funniest bits from the film also come from them. No matter who you are, I find it hard to believe that you can’t at least relate to one of the four out of this group.

To cap off this review, I really just like the themes of this movie, specifically how relatable they are. The movie’s sort of whole message, or really what it is all about, is how most kids go on some sort of adventure, or hang out, or do whatever, and they don’t even know that it is the last time they will ever really interact with one another. I’m sure many, if not most of us, have gone through something like this before, and I know I certainly have. This film really hit me because of that, and, funny enough, something very similar happened to me as I transitioned from elementary school to middle school. I had some really great friends who were on my baseball team, whom I hung out with all the time (specifically two of them), but once fifth grade ended, my family and I moved away. Though I knew it was probably going to be the last time that I got to really hang out with those friends, the movie’s message still hit home.

Though I wouldn’t say Stand by Me is one of the best movies in the world, its simplicity with its story, along with its message, really make it a must-watch, especially for those who can relate to it.