Review of The Fault in Our Stars (2014) by Patrick L — 19 Aug 2015

"Despite the bad title, The Fault in Our Stars is a touching teenage romance".

DVD Movie Review: The Fault in Our Stars.

Date Viewed: October 9 2014.

Directed By Josh Boone (Stuck in Love).

Screenplay By Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, Based on the novel by John Green.

Starring: Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort,.

Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, Sam Trammell, Lotte Verbeek and Willem Dafoe.

You'll probably need a big amount of kleenex in order to see "The Fault in Our Stars" but it is well-acted and it is a touching romance. When I first heard about this movie, I thought, "Wow! A TV disease movie of the week premiering in more than 3000 screens, this is going to be bad". I was completely wrong. Shailene Woodley is terrific here as Hazel Grace, a sixteen-year-old cancer patient who falls in love with a boy named Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort).

Waters suffers from osteosarcoma, a disease which caused him to lose one of his legs. Grace is still coping with terminal thyroid cancer and her mother, Frannie (Laura Dern) urges her to go to a support group. Her parents believe that she is depressed but she doesn't want to be in a support group, she wants to have friends and be a normal teenager. Soon, she meets Augustus and starts falling in love with him. Waters is in the support group with his buddy, Issac (Nat Wolff). He just lost one eye to cancer and he'll likely lose the other.

Hazel and Augustus are obsessed with "An Imperial Affliction", a novel about a cancer-stricken girl named Anna. She parallels Hazel's own experiences with the disease and the book was written by Peter van Houten (played by Willem Dafoe). Hazel and Augustus really want to go to Amsterdam to find him but Hazel's medical team are against the trip. Soon, Hazel's parents let them go on this trip and she and Augustus hope to meet van Houten. There is a tragic climax at the end but I won't tell you what it is.

Woodley and Elgort previously shared the screen as siblings in "Divergent" and they are great together. The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber avoids all of the cancer movie cliches and they make it faithful to John Green's novel. There are some faults in "The Fault in Our Stars" but you cannot deny on how well-made it is.