Book vs. Movie

I chose to analyze a blog post that compares the Hunger Games book to the recently released movie.  The announcement that the popular first book in the trilogy was going to be made into a movie sparked a lot of controversy because of many people’s rigid belief that books that get adapted to the big screen are terrible compared to their literary counterparts. 

I have to say that I usually agree with the idea that movies are never as good as the books.  For example the Harry Potter series are an example of excellent books that most movies do not live up to the expectation.  The fact is, that long books, such as each Harry Potter book (starting at the third book) have so much written into them that it is almost impossible to fit everything of importance into an allotted amount of time for movies.  That also brings up the issue on what is important enough to include in a movie from the book.  Different people have different opinions on almost everything, and the same goes for important scenes that are left out of movies.  Face it, when adapting a book into a movie, producers will not, in most cases, be able to fit everything into that one movie, and therefore they will not be able to please everyone in the audience.

Lately, movie producers have been trying to “fix” the problem of not including parts of the book that are deemed important by hard core fans by splitting up one book into two movies.  This “started”, in some sense with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and soon was followed by Twilight Breaking Dawn.   By splitting one long book into two movies help to solve the problem of omitting important scenes from the movie, which, in the end, is all filmmakers can do on that front.

Another main reason why many people think movies are not as good as books is that it is possible that the movie’s cinematography, special effects, costumes, make-up, actors, and other details as such do not live up to the audience’s expectations.  One of the great things about books is that books can describe any type of event happening such as big explosions, magic of any kind, characters of unimaginable sorts and any sci-fi thing that can be imagined, can all be written into a book as long as writers can think of ways to write it.  However, there is a limit to what movies can do.  Movies have budgets that they have to stick to and creating the big explosions, magic, characters, and sci-fi all take up a huge portion of the budget.  Quite frankly, movies do not have the means, either financial or production wise, to produce everything that happens in the book exactly as it happens.  This makes a lot of viewers angry, but it needs to be understood that some things just cannot happen.  This is the main reason why books will always be better than movies; because with books anything can happen and you can interpret it any way you want.  With movies, however, you are basically letting someone else do all the creative thinking for you.

Going back to the comparison of the Huger Games book to the movie: many audience member thought that the movie did a great job of adapting from the book.  In fact, the article I read rated the movie higher that the book, in their opinion.  The article talked about the pros and cons of the movie.  The pros being that the movie was long enough to fit everything of importance in, and that the characters, cinematography, and special effects were believable.  The cons were basically that the movie was too long (a bit of a paradox) and that the characters looked too good for the situations they actually were in.  I believe that this article proves the fact that for a successful book to be made into a successful movie, the movie has to incorporate most of the details of the book in a way that is visually stimulating to the audience.