When I heard that there was going to be a Downton Abbey movie, I was ecstatic. When the show ended back in 2015, fans were devastated to say goodbye to the Crawley family and their servants for the last time. For four years, there was nothing. Then, out of the blue, it appears: a trailer for the movie.

The basic premise is this: the King and Queen of England are doing a tour of Yorkshire, and they are going to be staying at various estates of noblemen along the way. One of these estates is Downton Abbey, and when the family hears that their estate will be one of them, they explode into action. This movie is full of the characters and the plot lines that made viewers fall in love with Downton in the first place.

The movie was not as great as I thought it was going to be. One of the things that made Downton Abbey such a great TV show was just that – it was a TV show. They had multiple episodes to flesh out storylines, and it was always very balanced. It was humorous, fun, and whenever it did get serious, it was resolved rather quickly. 

In a movie, Downton does not make sense. Everything felt very rushed; a writer who is used to writing a plot line that gets resolved in a season’s worth of 45-minute episodes clearly struggled to get everything wrapped up in a neat little bow in two hours. Between getting reintroduced to the characters, meeting entirely new characters and all of the different plot lines, the average viewer is lost. I actually forgot about one of the main plot points because it was introduced and then left alone for so long.

In summation, while it was wonderful to see all the characters reunite, the audience is left wanting in the end. You almost wonder what the point is…nothing of consequence happens in the end. It would have flowed a lot more neatly in a six-or-seven-part miniseries, where the creators could really expand on the individual residents of Downton Abbey. This movie gets a 7/10.