I was lucky enough to pre-book tickets for the UK exclusive advanced screening for
The Fault In Our Stars, along with the purchase of our tickets we also get a limited edition poster and a lanyard. The poster I believe is the Spanish version, so thats pretty cool and plus I prefer it to the promotional one it just seems more ethereal looking.
At the beginning of the day I read the last couple of chapters of
TFIOS because I had to yet to complete it, though it didn't bring on the water works as I was already spoiled a long time ago about the ending, so yeah that was fun. After I finished it I counted down the hours to the screening that has a 6.30pm start time at my local cinema, so my sister and I made sure we left with plenty of time!
When we arrived at the cinema a booth for the merchandise was set up along with a line formation so we ran as fast as we could to join the line, which luckily got us to the front. It's a good thing to as masses of girls came through the doors and joined the line right away, the line ended all the way down the cinema! After a few minutes each person in the line was called to go up to the booth to collect their freebies, the only bad thing was that they didn't give us bags to put our posters in. So by the time we got called into the screening we had to prop them somewhere that wasn't the floor, we don't want our posters to get dirt now do we?
Now here's where my annoyance began, so after all the fangirls battled it out for the seats, which fortunately I nagged the back row seats, they began to settle down. I was quite surprised that my local cinema was packed to the brim of teenage girls and a few boys too but obviously not as many! As the lights began to dim, the screen lit up with John Green but there was no audio, it was completely mute, I can only assume he was announcing the film to us. After that the film began... still no sound, we saw Hazel looking to the stars again assuming she's introducing us to her heartache and then we get a few flashback scenes of Hazel and Gus. Then the title,
The Fault In Our Stars, appears and the next scene is of Hazel in the hospital but still no sound, there were a few other scenes and I was contemplating complaining to restart the film again because we essentially aren't getting our moneys worth, these advanced screening tickets are pricey! But the audio suddenly came back on halfway through the scene where Hazel's doctor suggested that she should attend some support groups. Okay, so thats my rant over with, I'm just annoyed that someone didn't do their job properly and no one apologised.
Due to these unfortunate events I was very disengaged towards the film, I mean I still enjoyed it but because of that fiasco it ruined the event for me. But now lets get on with this review before I get any more miserable.
It was weird seeing the book I had literary just finished reading come to life, some of the lines were exactly referencing the book. So a very surreal experience seeing this book come to life, though it isn't the first for me! Of course some scenes were added into others but I won't go into detail about it because everyone in Hollywood has seen this and read the book by now, so I would just be repeating the same old same old...
But what I will say is that I loved the movie, everything was perfect, the script, cast, cinematography, everything, and thats hard to pull off with an indie seeing as how many things that could possibly go wrong. Though there was definitely something that it was lacking, maybe because it was just so fast paced or I couldn't connect to it, its still a thought provoking movie. But one thing that may shock you is that like many others in the audience I failed to cry, it just takes a lot for a film to break me, the last film I watched recently, well the only film of the year that made me cry was
The Normal Heart. So yeah, there's that, but as soon as the credits rolled on the whole audience broke down, literary crying right, left, and centre! I was quite surprised by the amount that left, which was half the audience I'd say, missing the Q&A session after the film which began straight after the credits.
The Q&A was about fifteen minutes in length maybe longer and of course the audience were only concerned about Shailene, due to the fact she was crying through the beginning of the Q&A. The one thing I noticed throughout the Q&A was that Shailene clearly had her Tris tattoos from
Divergent on, which meant they filmed this pre-recording very recently as they're currently filming
Insurgent.
After the session had ended we were shown a deleted scene from
TFIOS, a scene including John Green! So some of you may have to wait like me (so I can fully re-watch it this time) to see the full features of the DVD, which probably won't be released until Christmas time!
****
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I saw
TFIOS on Thursday 12th June at my local cinema.
As always this is an honest review.
