Movie Review 'The Fault in Our Stars'

The Fault in Our Stars Movie
Directed by: Josh Boone
Starring: Shailene Woodley & Ansel Elgort

At the request of an avid reader and a source of constant encouragement Mrs. Schanz I will for the first and probably only time try something a bit different on Rachel’s book reviews blog.

Get yourselves ready for uncharted territory:

A movie review.

*Collective Gasp*

But hey when you’ve been as bad about updating the past few months as I have you have to thank the people who have stuck around in some way. So this is my way of saying a huge thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Here goes nothing.

Chances are unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of The Fault in Our Stars. And those of you that have been here for a while will also know it as the first book I ever reviewed. The movie came out on the day that I got out of school and I went to go see the premiere of it with a group of some of the best nerds I know. My expectations were set pretty high considering the fact that every time I watched the trailer I managed to turn into a giggly mess. And I can happily say that it lived up to every expectation I had and I sincerely enjoyed it.  As much of a pile of mush I turned into during the trailer, I was 10x worse during the actual show. The overall perfection of the movie coupled with the amazing midnight premiere energy made it mind-blowing.

I have always held the philosophy that if you are going to make a movie about a book, you must consider the source material to be worth translating to the screen. If all you keep from page to screen is the title, there was no point because you completely destroyed the source material and the world the author brought to life. My favorite part of this movie is that anything that got changed was so minor most of the time it’s almost not even worth pointing out and it took special care to honor the novel and the brilliance within it.

There has been an almost unnatural amount of hype around this novel, the film and well, Augustus Waters and I’m not even going to pretend for one second that there hasn’t. Despite all that, there really are moments of beauty in the story and I think that needs to be recognized and celebrated.  For people so tired of all the girls with their iced coffees who haven’t read the book talking about how “some infinities are bigger than other infinites” and how adorable Augustus is they could scream, I would still suggest trying it for yourself. People tend to take a good thing and run with it, but just try to be open- minded and allow yourself to enjoy it.