It's actually kind of hard for me to talk about The Fault in our Stars for anybody who hadn't read the book as someone who'd already read the original novel, seeing as the film stays very close to the source material, whether it be for the film's best or worse.

Anyway, The Fault in our Stars is a romantic dramedy released in 2014, based off the novel of the same name by John Green. The plot revolves around "Just" Hazel Grace, a snarky, very literate teenager who's suffered from terminal cancer since she was thirteen, and is forced to carry aroudn and breath through an air pump due to tumors in her lungs (which in a way gives the movie one of its trademarks.) She attends a local support group that she despises at a local church, but it's there that she meets Augustus Waters, whom she quickly befriends for his attitude against the group as well.

From that point the film is their friendship slowly building up as they spend time together, talking about their viewpoints on life, mortality, fate, and basically walking from event to event, seeing things and taking in experiences.

As I said, the film is extremely faithful to the novel, borderline scene by scene. On one hand I give the movie credit that it has an extreme eye for detail; I could almost remember every single line or moment word by word from the book as the film was playing out, and the writing had lots of memorable quotes with words that held a lot of weight, again, as I'd expect from the source.

But on the other hand, that's the movie's biggest downfall. The movie pretty much sacrifices any creative freedom to enslaving itself to the novel's events, and as it tries to cram the book's narrative into a two-hour film, the pacing is far to fast for us to get invested into the leads' relationship or get a feel of their personalities. They do have personalities, but it feels as though the movie cares more about describing them rather than show us them acting off of them or allow them to interact with one another.

As such, many of the moments that had potential to be emotional or dramatic only feels like the movie's connecting dots. There's a brief moment with Willem Dafoe's character that made me snicker, but worst of all the film doesn't take any chance to develop its own style or tell the story in a fluent, visual manner above words on paper. The dialogue can actually come off as very blatant and awkward when it's put straight on the screen; it never sounds like how actual people talk, and it nails down as much exposition as possible rather than let it subtly seep in.

Which is a shame, because there is some legitimate talent here. The performances are well done, the shots are attractive, and the soundtrack does capture the feeling of teenage youth pretty well, but it all feels like it's under a contract and just wants to do its job right and be done. By the climax, it was an absolute bore to sit through, considering I new every string the film was about to pull.

Overall, if you haven't seen the novel and go in with a dry experience, you might enjoy it more than I did. But if you're like me and have read the novel going in, it'd probably be best to just stick with that. Or if you haven't and there's a test tomorrow.

From me, The Fault in our Stars receives 5.5 Twilights out of 10.

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