I know Summer isn’t the bad guy. The movie knows Summer isn’t the bad guy. And yet, I see a lot of people thinking Summer is the bad guy.

For anyone who doesn’t know 500 Days Of Summer (2009) is a movie about a guy named Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) who falls in love with a girl named Summer (Zooey Deschanel). And, Summer sort of kind of only likes Tom. The movie covers the 500 day period of when Tom first meets Summer to when he finally is able to move on.

The movie is largely about unrequited love and learning to move on.

When Tom and Summer first get together, she is very honest with him and says that she doesn’t want a boyfriend and isn’t looking for anything serious. Tom hears this and decides to pursue the relationship anyway, believing that he can change her mind. He is then shocked when she breaks up with him.

Tom did it to himself, and the movie does everything in its power to show he’s in the wrong and making things to be more than they are. At the end of the movie it re-plays all the “happy” memories he had of her but show what really happened. Making it clear that he was so much more into her and wasn’t recognizing her cues for him to slow the relationship down. And yet, somehow, people choose to see Summer as the the bad guy as the movie.

They say that she was leading him on at the beginning of the relationship. Or was messing with him after they broke up.

But, Summer was completely honest with Tom and broke it off with him when she noticed how he was taking the relationship much more seriously then him.

Personally, I don’t think the movie has a villain. It’s just the story of two people in a relationship where one person was way more into the other person then they were into them. Some people want to say Tom was the bad guy, but I don’t think that’s true either.

Sure, Tom got hurt because he didn’t listen to Summer’s warning, but the guy was head over heels in love with her. Yeah, he may of over reacted when she broke up with him but he was clearly depressed, the guy just needed some therapy.

In fact, most conflicts in movies would probably be resolved pretty quickly if the main characters just went to therapy. There that’s my takeaway. It’s a good movie, go to therapy.

Also, the movie has a killer soundtrack.