It also throws in a limousine for apparently no reason at all. To anyone familiar with the book, the film is faithful to a fault from the dialogues to the clothes, the setting and the food, even while skipping over some of the unpleasant details including what would have been an awkward sex scene. Augustus lost his leg to osteosarcoma but now appears on the bend. When an impossibly charming 18-year-old Augustus Waters appears to take a liking to her, at a mutual cancer support group, and equally to the book – which is way out of his normal zombie reading – their fates are but sealed together. The only subject that gets Hazel animated is a reflection on what happens later, after the girl, Anna’s, death. That’s clear from even the book she swears by, An Imperial Affliction, about a girl dying from cancer, which ended mid-sentence. If Boone even gets halfway there, it is on account of Woodley (last seen in Divergent), who truly gets the unlikely Hazel Grace Lancaster that’s at the centre of this story.ĭiagnosed with cancer when she was 13 and a death experience later, Hazel is now 17, breathing with the help of a nose cannula, quiet, more tired than cynical about her circumstances, and quite adult in her reactions. However, where Greene brought in ethical theories, Venn Diagram, maths, metaphors and a very unlikable author with an equally verbose bent of thought, he also let his teens be teens in a world where few saw beyond her cannula plus oxygen tank and his prosthetic leg, including overindulging in video games.ĭespite a readymade audience that comes with such gigantic bestseller, translating all of the above from the romance and the loving to the disease and the dying was never going to be easy. Forty-four years after that opening of Love Story and the ailing woman at the centre of it surged the book and movie to a monster success, here’s another film trying to make the best of a bestseller that was saved from being mawkishly exploitative only because of the spunky, raw and brutally honest notes it managed to strike at regular intervals.īut even John Greene’s book The Fault in Our Stars was transparent in its almost obsessive philosophising, realising that in the well-endowed market of young adult fiction, cancer isn’t enough to get romance love. However, that’s not for the lack of trying. “The world is not a wish-granting factory” doesn’t have quite the resonance of “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?”.

The fault in our stars movie review