Super long and boring pointless waste of a movie

What started out as a great premise for a film turned into a long jumbled drawn-out unnecessary mess in Ayat Ayat Cinta, directed by Hanung Bramantyo.

In other words: It sucked.

If only the director had chosen to explore the essence of the story a little deeper, that of Fahri's search for love and marriage through an Islamic point of view and his understanding of Islam through finding love, Ayat2 could have been an eye-opening, divine breath of fresh air in an already teeny-puppy-love-saturated Indonesian film industry. But instead, Bramantyo decided to go the soap opera route (Indonesian soap, no less), inserting in the film not just melodramatic crying and whining with holier-than-thou wails to Allah, but also a rape trial, a coma-reviving marriage, incest, and *gasp* death (in a hospital bed while praying, by the way), thus pulling the movie as far away from the essence as possible and dragging the audience through tangents that take away from what could have been a touching experience.

It really is too bad. I had high hopes for this film, considering a couple of my friends have said they loved it.