The Fault in our Stars

I read The Fault in our Stars at the beginning of the summer on vacation because I knew the movie was out soon, and I actually got around to seeing it in the theater before it was gone (normally I forget and then the movies I'm most anxious to see are gone). Anyways, ultimately my first reaction was; Augustus Waters is the Edward Cullen in this movie, which was kind of disappointing to my book imagination because I remember I picturing Augustus as a proper British boy. I know weird minor thought, but when you read the book before seeing the movie (or most of it like me) then you tend to notice the book to movie differences. Now, I know it’s not just me because the scheduled post movie fix your make up in the bathroom and complain session concludes my theories on the differences becoming blatantly obvious. Despite noticing these differences, my overall opinion of the film are that it was fantastically executed from the book – all of the important emotional parts were emphasized, which is what I think won over the crowd emotionally. I have to say that my favorite part was the scene of Hazel climbing the Anne Frank Museum stairs with the quotes from Anne’s book in the background, pointing out the parallelism between the pain Anne faced in the attic and Hazels physical pain. That scene was absolutely perfect!

I would rate this film with a 4 out of a 5 only for my personal opinion, and the reason why I held off for so long to post my personal feelings on the interweb... It is obvious the targeted audience for this film it tween/ teens, and from what I have read on the internet, often kids of this particular age group tend to think that puberty and adolescents is the end of the world. What makes this film even more depressing and emotional, in my eyes, is that it's a film that teens are going to fall in love with watching characters close in age they can relate to relationship wise and can admire/ look up to... until they die at a young age. Augustus die so young before his life even really gets to start. Now, I don't fault John Green (the author) it is an amazing book turned into an amazing movie, and I know there are different messages you could pull away from this, but my only change would be to give young kids a message that life does get better as you grow past the hard years of adolescence.