YMMV / Barcelona: A Love Untold

• Harsher in Hindsight: Young, kindhearted Celine dies because she was callously gunned down on the street. In the context of Filipino peoples, this is harsher in hindsight after the countless innocent deaths brought about by Duterte's drug war. Plenty of these deaths took the lives of young people in the same way as Celine's was in the movie.
• Narm: The film has some of the most amateurishly crafted promotional material for a KathNiel project. See the ''Barcelona'' poster◊, with its baffling center design (a movie still badly blended into the sky backdrop), poor-quality title bevelling, the prominent use of Times New Roman, among other things. Compare it to the brighter, more attractive sheen on promotional material◊ for She's Dating the Gangster, which was released two years before.
  • The film itself is lovely-looking (as one can tell from its main page image), although there's some Narm in terms of tone. A movie critic, writing for major publication Rappler, described Barcelona as so drearily dramatic that it seemed more like a maudlin wedding montage for Bernardo and Padilla than a film. Although fans still consider it a favorite, especially over the years, and international fans have always been more lenient on KathNiel, these complaints of melodrama were apparently enough for the network to write their next project in a fashion that came off as too frivolous and lighthearted, by the opinions of many. The Hows of Us in 2018, fortunately, marked the pairing hitting their stride with a deft balance of comedy, romance, and drama.

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