Don’t judge a book by it’s movie

Why are people so adamant about books being better than their film adaptations?

Most movie adaptations are great, but they just don’t have the same weight as a book. While watching a movie, you are an observer. You can’t feel what a character does. You aren’t reading their innermost thoughts and don’t know their fears or dreams.

Films let you observe everything, but books let you feel everything.

You can be a villain, a hero, a god, an angel or an alien. You can love and hate, win and lose. It feels as if there are no limitations to a book.

A lot of books and plays are reliant on the wording of the text. Metaphors, imagery and other figurative language make a book come alive in a way movies cannot. While reading you can see the author’s choices of words. It’s harder to do something similar in a movie.

When books are adapted to movies or shows there are often cuts to things deemed unimportant. For example, in the book “The Wizard of Oz,” there is a Queen of the Field Mice. She rescued the Cowardly Lion from the poppy field. This helped develop Lion’s character, but it was left out of the movie.

Books do not have nearly as many limitations. Authors can make them as long or short as they want whereas movies don’t go longer than two hours because audiences cannot focus for much longer. A film adaptation is always going to have to leave details out because of the time limits.

The characters are often cast completely different from what you might imagine a character to look like. When I first watched “The Hunger Games,” I know Jennifer Lawerance was not how I pictured Katniss, but after watching the movie I can’t think of her in any other way.

Actors might also have a hard time translating their characters from the page to the screen. A book can show the inner thoughts of the characters. Books usually show the feelings and motivations of a character, but a movie sometimes doesn’t do that. It can be hard to pick up on small facial expressions on a big screen.

There are of course some movies that were nothing like the books. The book “The Hobbit” was relatively short, especially if you compare it to “Lord of the Rings.” The movies on the other hand were anything but short. It added lots of unnecessary details. It was a great movie on its own, but it was not the same as the book.

Movie adaptations can be great. There are a lot of cool things you can see in a movie you might have missed while reading a book, but books will always be better.