Movie Review: The Fault in Our Stars

If you have not watched the movie you can still read this review. However, if you want to be absolutely sure that you are not going to see anything that may be considered spoilage, just don’t read my review. That is all I have for my Public Service Announcement for today. Thank you.

My Review

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really excited about this book. Why? The cast. I’m not a huge Shailene Woodley or Ansel Elgort fan. (Please don’t kill me.) I’ve never really liked Woodley, even in her The Secret Life of an American Teenager days. I think it’s something about her voice. It irks me. Both of these actors were not who I had pictured Hazel and Augustus as. But, as I was watching the movie, I learned to live with them. Both did a pretty good job with the dialog of the story and just making the story believable overall. This is huge considering the dialog and writing of The Fault in Our Stars is incredibly unrealistic. I thought for sure that any literary quotes or use of large words would come across as unbelievably cheesy, thankfully that wasn’t so.

One thing I did not like about the movie was the voice-over portion where Hazel is explaining her cancer story. It just doesn’t really fit with where they placed it in the story. I didn’t have a problem with the other voice-overs in the movie, though. Additionally, I didn’t like how it was pretty much 100% obvious throughout the movie that both Augustus and Isaac weren’t missing body parts. Augustus would occasionally limp around, but you could tell by the way his pants fit and the way his knee would bend that he still had both of his legs. And Isaac’s glass eye didn’t really look all that glassy to me. I mean honestly, couldn’t they have found real people with these disabilities. Diversity, people. It’s a thing. My final problem comes in the form of a mysteriously absent swing set. The swing set is pictured in the film and even talked about and sat on, but somehow it mysteriously goes missing towards the end of the film. If you’re going to cut out scenes of a movie, make sure you keep continuity.

All in all, I did really enjoy this book-to-movie adaptation. And yes, I did cry.