Movie Review: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Spoiler Warning)

I know that this seems like a very weird topic for us to be covering on this blog, but we watched it together last night, and were really impressed with how it covered pregnancy and anything related in a really good way.

Here is a link to the trailer for those who haven’t seen it:

What to Expect When You’re Execting Trailer

It is a story about 5 different couples, each are connected in some way, and each has a slightly different connection to the main theme of the film pregnancy and children.

1. The couple played by Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro, she is unable to conceive a child, so they are adopting a child from Uganda
2. A celebrity couple played by Cameron Diaz and Matthew Morrison (better known as Mr Schuster in Glee) were sleeping together while being a dancing couple on a celebrity dance show, and she falls pregnant.
3. A long term couple who have been trying for years, played by Elizabeth Banks and Ben Falcone, have been trying everything from special diets to apps on her phone, to try and get pregnant and finally it works. ( a bit like us)
4. Then there is Dennis Quaid (Ben’s characters father) and his gold digging wife played by Brooklyn Decker, who happen to fall pregnant at the same time as his son.
5. The final two aren’t really a couple at first, but a young pair who go for a drink after a bet, and end up having one too many, which results in her getting pregnant.

There are more big actors like Chris Rock, who are part of a group of fathers who take their children out each weekend, and feel free from the criticism and judging that they get from their wives.

The story does not go as simply as you may think, each couple has complex yet interlinking stories. That involve miscarriage and the problems in a relationship that it causes, the feelings of failure by a lady who can’t conceive and then loses her job, a lady whose life and career has been focused on how amazing pregnancy and “the glow” are, yet to discover that being pregnant while an amazing experience, is not all sweetness and light. Made especially jealous as her husband’s stepmother has a very easy and straight forward pregnancy, and stays looking really thin. As well as having a simple labour, where a baby is born because she sneezes.  It also highlights the different views of men and women, from different backgrounds, going into having a child, and how this can cause problems.

What we liked was the way that every angle was covered. It was not a simple case of people sleep together, they get pregnant, they have a child. It showed the world that may not realise, that there are couples that can’t easily get pregnant where as others it can happen after having sex once. It also covered how not every pregnancy will go to full term, people do have miscarriages/still birth/etc. As well as the way some couples need to chose to adopt, as they are unable to conceive personally.

In summary it was a nice feel good film, which covers both the good and the bad aspects of pregnancy, yet not make you feel depressed when you finish watching it.

I am quite interested in getting the book from the library, to see if like many other books become films, the books are much better than the movie counterpart.

Enjoy the film and I will let you know what the book is like once I have read it.