When the movie Dear John opens, we hear John Tyree (Channing Tatum) reading a letter he has written. "After I got shot, you want to know the very first thing that entered my mind?" he reads. "The U.S. Mint." On screen we see images of falling coins and his childhood face. "I am coin in the U.S. Army. Now, I have two small holes in me. I'm no longer perfectly culled." "Do you want to know the very last thing that entered my mind," he asks of his reader again. "You."

And so begins the newest film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe), perhaps the most prolific author of hardship-laden, tear-jerker romances in the last decade. In his latest tale of romance built against resistance, our two lovers are John Tyree, a young Special Forces soldier, and Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), a kind-hearted and optimistic college student John meets while on leave. She is on her spring break, and he is visiting his father. One fated afternoon they meet, and two weeks later when John has to return to his unit and Amanda has to return to school they are in love. Follow a seven year stretch of love letters, life changes, and a story which ponders not the way imperfections suddenly mean nothing in the face of love, but how both John and Amanda deal with the reality of the very imperfections of both their own love and that of others.

For John Tyree, his life and the love he has known seem a collection of flaws from the get-go. As a young boy, his mother left John without a word. As John tells another father dealing with the departure of his own wife, he spent many of the next years wondering when she was going to come back. And although his father (Richard Jenkins) may have never left John doubting whether there would be a hot meal on the table every night, as John continued to grow up in the fold of his father's undiagnosed autism, we see in John a sense of not really being loved, and never really connecting.

"You shouldn't be too hard on him. He loves you," Savannah tells John when she meets John's father. "I can tell&ellips; even if you can't." But as we see, John's relationship with his father has still left him fractured. Although he never expands on the subject for us, we get the idea that his teens were a time of rebellion and violence. He tells Savannah that he's a different person now, and offers up the Army as the force which changed him. In a moment of threat, we see remnants of that anger and violence reveal themselves and rise to his defense&ellips; but in the security and safety of Savannah's love, it is as if that side of him is able to rest and let him be.

For Savannah, her life and all she has ever known seems almost the polar opposite of John. The daughter of a wealthy southern family, her image is one of a young woman who has probably never wanted for much of anything. When John starts pursuing her, we see the depth of love that has been given her in the form of her family friend (Henry Thomas) who steps up to represent her father in assuring John that he will be hurt if he ever hurts Savannah. As John points out when he makes the argument that Savannah seems too good for him, she doesn't drink, she doesn't swear, she doesn't sleep around&ellips; and she is spending her spring break building a house for a needy family. Did I mention that barely into her first or second year of college, she has decided that her dream is to open up a day camp for autistic children?

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