The Fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our Stars, but in this Film Adaptation

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2014)

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about The Fault in our Stars' film adaptation. On one hand, I thought the casting was perfect (especially Gus and Issac), and I loved that the movie remained completely true to the novel, but on the other hand, the movie didn't really resemble the novel at all. Never would I willingly read a book or watch a movie about a romance between two teenagers with cancer--the whole concept just reeks of cheap sentimentality. But I read TFIOS because I was familiar with John Green's work and I knew that his take on cancer wouldn't be your average, clichÃ©d cancer story--and of course, it wasn't. For all its pretentious, unrealistic dialogue and overcrowded metaphors, the book managed to turn a clichÃ©d concept into a witty, cynical, but ultimately hopeful story that evoked Sisyphus (hence the hamster in An Imperial Affliction being named after the mythological figure): cancer was Hazel and Augustus' rock, but it was their rock, and they made the best of it. The point Green makes in the novel is that Shakespeare's notion that "the fault...is not in the stars, but in ourselves," is pretty much BS. The fault IS in our stars, in a seemingly random, chaotic universe that hands out cancer to undeserving kids.
I didn't get that depth from the movie at all. While I enjoyed watching Hazel fall in love with Gus slowly, the movie went down hill when she fell in love with him "all at once." The film suddenly turned into what Hazel's voice-over kept insisting it wasn't: a gooey, tragic cancer story. The trouble is that I don't know how the script or direction could have been altered to give the movie the book's poignancy. Like I said, it was completely true to the novel. Maybe they could have made Hazel's mom less of a horribly stereotypical mom (she was the worst part of the film, in my opinion). Maybe, just as Hazel can't breathe without her oxygen tank, John Green's story simply can't thrive without his prose.