HSM3: The end of a journey

My sister has always been a huge High School Musical fan ever since she saw that Zac Efron, who she first fell in love with during a summer series called Summerland, was cast as the lead actor to play Troy Bolton. That being said, I can honestly say I found the music from the first two movies catchy.

This is the only one of the trilogy to be played on the big screen: the other two were premiered on the Disney Channel. High School Musical : Senior Year started off on an interesting note. The first thing you see on the theater screen is a sweaty Troy in the middle of the big basketball game. The entire theater erupted with a collective gasp. Mind you that the average age of the audience was middle school, with a sprinkling of parents and younger children. Not too many males, nor too many couples.

If you have already seen the first two High School Musical movies, you'd be a bit surprised with this one. For starters, all the singing and dancing scenes are a lot grander, and a lot more movie-esque. There were more reprisals in this movie than the other two, and, believe it or not, more romantic tension.

Basic plot run down is that the Wildcats are going to be graduating soon, so they need one last musical to make their high school career complete. Less drama club drama than the first HSM, but there was more high school than the second. Is it better? It depends on who you are, I guess. I think that this movie neatly wraps up the trilogy in a package with no loose ends, and a nice finality. It would be a shame for a College Musical to come out, because it's not needed. It did seem like it was trying harder, like it needed to prove that it was a real movie despite the previous two installments coming out on cable.

The soundtrack for the movie was still catchy, but they seemed a bit less fun to me. Granted, the characters have aged since the first movie, but it gravitated away a bit from the clever songs I heard on the first two soundtracks. I do like the song "A Night to Remember," because it's very memorable and the rhymes are quite impressive.

I enjoyed watching the movie, knowing that no one's high school memories are anything like that. Knowing that it's geared toward those not in high schools, it makes sense to make it seem so glamorous and amazing. But as a college student, it just seems completely unrealistic. But it's a movie after all, and unrealistic is okay. My favorite part of the movie actually happened before it even began, when the hamster in the hamster ball in the previews for Bolt was summarizing the first two movies for another hamster in a movie theater seat. It made the movie.

My rating: 3.5/5