I'm feeling very silly and childish at the moment. This is bothering me even though it really effects me in no way. But I feel I must defend a book I love... so here we go haha.
This is a semi-response post to my friend's blog.
Annie, if you end up reading this, which I sort of doubt, please don't hate The Fault in Our Stars because the trailers gave away so much of the movie and there wasn't enough character development.
Ok, so I'm a big believer that books are generally better than movies... I cannot think of one book turned movie where I've liked the movie better. Even my very favorite movie, Jurassic Park, can't hold a candle to the novel Crichton wrote. There's so much more you can do with the written word than can be smashed into a 90-minute blockbuster. Theater of the mind.
Now, did I think the TFiOS movie was perfect? No. There were parts that I missed from the book. I felt they made Hazel a little too clingy at the beginning (the whole montage of her checking her phone... totally doesn't happen that way in the book! Made her feel too "typical teenaged girl" to me). I missed her friend Katelyn, because she made it seem like Hazel did have some other social interaction in the world. I felt that they should've kept in Gus's ex girlfriend who died of an "asshole tumor," to reiterate that there's nothing heroic about dying with cancer. You didn't get to see enough of the relationship between Issac and Hazel (Though, I thought Nat Wolf was fantastic as Issac and I'm excited to see him be Q in the Paper Towns movie). I could kind of go on and on.
Did I dislike the movie? No. As far as movie adaptations go, I felt it was pretty damn faithful. Maybe this is just because I was a little disappointed with the Divergent movie compared to the book, but most of the major plot points were there in TFiOS. It was semi predictable, I guess, but I read the book long before hearing anything about the movie, and it didn't seem predictable to me at all when I read it the first time. The reveal of Gus dying was so much more impactful. Plus, movie trailers are usually edited by different people than those who edit the movie. They're trying to sell the movie, make you want to see it.... and they almost always give away everything anymore. So I can see how someone who didn't read the book can get the gist of it from a 2-minute trailer. Plus it's been on the NY Times bestsellers list for like 2 years now, most people who haven't read the book knew what was going to happen before seeing the movie. I really enjoyed Shaileen Woodly, she was how I pictured Hazel in my head in most ways. I was a tad disappointed with how they portrayed Augustus... he was too full of himself. He's that way in the book too, but I felt it was amped up a bit in the movie. (Fun Fact, Green was talking in an interview about how he's mostly called Augustus in the beginning, when he's like an Emporer longing to be remembered, then he's mostly referred to as Gus toward the end to kind of cut him down a bit... totally didn't realize this until the 3rd reading... even though he says the line, "You used to call me Augustus" while at the gas station...)
Then there's the sub-plot of finding out what happens after An Imperial Affliction. They don't talk about that book enough in the movie. It's all a metaphor for how Hazel worries about what will happen after she dies... will her parents be ok? What will happen to her friends? She needs Van Houten to answer questions about what happened to the people in Anna's life so that she can feel more at ease about her own future... They did kind of show this in the movie but I liked how it developed better in the book. Oh, and there was not nearly enough video games in the movie haha.
I've been on my soap box long enough, I guess (and it's after 1:30 in the morning now, so I should maybe sleep). Longish story short, which since we've talked you're already starting to see, the book is so much better than the movie. John Green has become one of my favorite authors. And even though I should probably feel silly saying that since he writes YA novels, I don't care. I still like YA novels better than most adult fiction. You can't fit everything in a movie. We don't have long enough attention spans for that. Unless you're Peter Jackson and you want to turn the Hobbit into 3 movies even though it's not that long of a book... I mean seriously, all of the LOTR books are longer and only got 1 movie each...
Also, Looking For Alaska is still probably my favorite John Green novel. And I'm actually very glad that they haven't turned that into a movie. I want that one to remain how it is in my head. Probably because it made me so much more emotional.
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