Kurt Loder Reviews The Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow
The Fault in Our Stars arrives on a flood tide of tears already shed by the 10-million readers of John Green's young adult novel, on which the movie is based. It's a teen romance played out in the black shadow of cancer—you're thinking Love Story. But that 1970 schlockbuster, still remembered with hoots of derision, deployed fatal disease as a cheap emotional manipulation. Here, cancer is simply the world in which the characters are forced to live, for however long they might have. Since Green drew the story from his own work with terminally ill children, the heartbreak he stirs arises organically; it's not just a commercial calculation. The movie doesn't reach for tears, but tears come, writes Kurt Loder.
Edge of Tomorrow, according to Loder, is a machine-tooled product of the Hollywood blockbuster factory that delivers great writhing gobs of alien-invasion action in a perhaps overly tricky time-loop structure.