Shailene Woodley – Film Dice

This review will not be very objective, but opinions never are, so why even try pretending? I pre-ordered The Fault In Our Stars when it was first announced. I haven’t read it more than once, but I did enjoy it a lot. It made me want to read more of John Green’s work, and I admit I was oddly hyped for a movie about teenagers with cancer.

The Fault In Our Stars is the story of Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters. It a story about young love. I liked the book because it managed to be deep in that teenager way I remember. Back when I read books that flew far over my head because I was searching for something. John Green captured that without being pretentious, unlike us back then. It’s hard not to know beforehand going in, even if you haven’t read the book, that this is going to be a tearjerker. One of the taglines reads: “One Sick Love Story.” Enough said, but not quite. Don’t let yourself get depressed out of seeing it, for the story has a lot of humour and love in it.

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Yet another movie based on a bestselling young adult novel. Can this one set itself apart? I was willing to let a lot slide, considering the message in this film is fairly harmless. But after discussing the film with someone who had read the book, I realised this wasn’t just a case of poor adaptation.

The story’s concept is “what if the world worked according to this random rule”, peppered with characters and general melodrama. This type of story is something I see a lot of in fanfiction. They often sound lame and contrived, but it’s all in good fun, and is (when done well) an experiment to explore other aspects of the characters and relationships of existing franchises. When movies get made out of these “what if” scenarios, you’re almost always in for a long intro with a lot of reading and/or voice-over exposition. Divergent is no exception.

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