Review of The Fault in Our Stars (2014) by Makarthekorok — 05 Jun 2014

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. No, I have not read the book. I plan to get around to doing that eventually. I was expecting a lot of cliches and a lot of cheesy, overwrought emotionalism. Yes, there was some of that, but it didn't end up bothering me in the way I expected it to. Yes, this movie is very sad, but I think everyone will know this going into it, regardless of whether or not they have read the book. It is, after all, a love story about 2 individuals with cancer that starts by explaining that love stories aren't the way you see them in the books. There are a couple of amusing ironies like this throughout, because, of course, this is a book, or movie, so, by definition, this is how love is portrayed in the books and movies. Later in the movie, a character named Gus wishes to be remembered, and worries he will not be, and Hazel remarks that like all the best love stories, it will die with the two of them. Of course, this is false, because their love story is enshrined in a wildly popular novel and now a movie.

Anyways, this movie likes to tow the line between cheesy cliches and genuinely heartbreaking emotion. It does a great job. There will be the occasional line that makes you cringe a tiny bit because you feel like you've heard it in hundreds of love stories before, and it's not getting any more original. But then there will be a line or two that pleasantly surprises you with its originality. Similarly, there are a lot of subplots that end exactly the way you would expect them to, but there are several that don't. For instance, the subplot regarding the favorite author of Hazel ends differently than I had expected, and this pleased me, and a certain eulogy a certain character reads also takes a different turn than I had expected. And despite this being primarily a teenage love story, I found Hazel's interactions with her parents to be some of the most powerful scenes in the movie. Between some of the doomed love story cliches, moments like this keep popping up and surprising the viewer, and, by the end of the movie, I was left feeling that the movie's originality, for the most part, overshadowed its cliches. You might leave the theater feeling a little bit miserable inside, but, for me, that's okay, because the emotional rollercoaster was worth it, and we all knew somebody was going to die in a movie about a romance between two teens with severe Cancer, one of whom is depressed and the other of whom is obsessed with defying Cancer through cheesy symbolism involving cigarettes. Also, a certain blind character provides comedic relief in an otherwise intense movie. So, yeah. It was good. Not the best movie I've ever seen. Not even close. Probably not in the top five or maybe even ten movies of the year, but it was good, and it was worth my time.