#The fault in our stars movie review how to

The depiction of cancer-stricken teens as their own somewhat self-defined subculture, with their own rules and in-jokes and sense of morality, feels genuinely fresh, and there's rich black comedy wrung from Hazel's trio with Gus and his best friend Isaac (Nat Wolff), whose own treatment has left him blind. The script is self-referential throughout, with Hazel's voiceover at one point labelling a late plot development 'one of the less bulls**tty conventions of the cancer genre'. Her intense guilt and fear about how her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) will cope after her death inspire some of the film's most wrenching and plausible moments.

It's achingly clear that beneath the arch posturing is a sweet, overwhelmed kid trying her best in an impossible situation, and Neustadter and Weber don't shortchange her home life in favour of the central romance. Hazel, though, is a fully lived-in character from the outset. Elgort seems understandably more at home when the cracks finally begin to show, and it's more powerful because of how effectively The Augustus Waters Persona has previously been established.

#The fault in our stars movie review how to

Just like Natalie Portman in Garden State or Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown or any other MPDG you care to name, Gus's main function is to teach the protagonist how to embrace life, and as such the romance feels imbalanced Гўв‚¬вЂњ a couple of key changes from the novel make Gus into even more of a fantasy, and even less of a real teenage boy with his own demons. The depiction of cancer-stricken teens as their own somewhat self-defined subculture, with their own rules and in-jokes and sense of morality, feels genuinely fresh. Eventually, Gus coaxes her into a wish-fulfilment trip to Amsterdam to meet her favourite author, a digression that works better on screen than it did on the page thanks to a fun, bristly turn from Willem Dafoe. If you can get past the fact that these are the kind of teenagers who casually throw Aristotle references into their banter, the courtship is touching and convincingly drawn as Hazel waits anxiously for Gus to text her, you sense this is the first time she's had the luxury of normal teenage girl problems. Green's characters are nothing if not hyper-literary, or to be less charitable, pretentious Гўв‚¬вЂњГ‚В 'There's always a hamartia, isn't there?' Hazel sighs in disappointment after Gus pulls out a cigarette, which naturally turns out to be a metaphorical cigarette. To the emotionally shut-down Hazel, he becomes something akin to a manic pixie dream boy, doggedly batting aside her fatalistic attitude while matching her penchant for philosophical pondering. In a support group, she meets Gus Waters (Elgort), a strapping, supremely confident and seemingly all-knowing hunk who lost a leg to his own cancer but is now in remission, and straddling an improbable divide between jock, nerd and spirit animal. While an experimental drug has bought her a few cautious years, Hazel is terminal, a self-described ticking time bomb played with earthy poignancy by Woodley. But this is a faithful adaptation of John Green's smash hit novel, which is in itself a far blacker, spikier and rawer affair than the log line suggests, and it succeeds by retaining his blend of dark humour and straight-talking sentiment. The trailers for Fault, in which Woodley and co-star Ansel Elgort embrace on an idyllic canal-side bench in Amsterdam exchanging cosmos-defying declarations of love, have done little to ward off the comparison, or to inspire confidence in the opening voiceover's promise. In adapting the story of the star-crossed romance between two teenage cancer victims, screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber plainly know they have an uphill battle to avoid being tarred with the same schmaltzy brush as previous entries in the sub-genre (Nicholas Sparks adaptation A Walk to Remember being the dubious prototype). 'This is not a story where beautiful people learn beautiful lessons,' Shailene Woodley's doomed, dignified 16-year-old Hazel warns us in the opening moments of The Fault in Our Stars.