The weekend isn’t over for The Fault in Our Stars, but so far it’s had great reviews and a great box office. It’s also brought the majority of its audience to tears.
But according to Amy Kaufman of the Los Angeles Times, the film is not only making audiences bawl their eyes out, it’s also redefining the tear-jerker and teen romance genres.
In the recent past, teen romance movies have been action or fantasy driven like Twilight or The Hunger Games. The Fault in Our Stars has no fantasy or action. “If the film lives up to expectations it may not only shift the way Hollywood caters to young adult moviegoers but the way the movie business feels about tear-jerkers too,” Kaufman wrote, “Typically only a couple of movies with emotional, romantic overtones are released every year; they usually open around Valentine’s Day and are often based on a book by Nicholas Sparks, the king of the genre.”
However, the movie has disappointed some fans of the original novel by John Green. “The movie’s a betrayal,” wrote Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic, “It goes to almost outrageous lengths to manipulate the audience—which is exactly the opposite of what the characters, and the story, purports to do.”
Everything down to the soundtrack and the camerawork is designed to bring forth those tears. These aren’t elements you would have in a book, and it seems like they work for some fans, but for others, they fall flat.
But with a Rotten tomatoes score of 82%, harsh critics of The Fault In Our Stars are few and far between. “Part of the ingenuity of The Fault in Our Stars is the way it short-circuits any potential criticism through a combination of winsome modesty and brazen manipulation,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, “these kids are so nice, so wise, so good-humored, and they also may be dying. What kind of a monster could look at them and find fault?”
Image via YouTube, Yahoo Movies