The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian opens today and I am very excited. After the first movie came out, I quickly ran to buy all of the books so I could prepare myself and immerse myself into this fantastic world that C.S. Lewis created. I read them throughout all of last summer and when I finally finished the last book in a lawn chair overlooking a lake in East Texas while on a camping trip, I felt like a more complete person. I felt like I had completed some milestone in my manhood, some mission that had been laid out before me since I was a young child, back when most everyone else was reading The Chronicles for the first time.
There are a lot of opinions and viewpoints about books that are translated into films and I’m not going to embrace either side too heavily, but I will say this: having read the books all the way through beforehand, I feel, will optimize my movie experience. Now, this could just be how I approach the situation, but I really feel that if you go into a movie after reading the book with an open mind, EXPECTING the movie to miss on some if not most of the details, you will leave the movie with a more enjoyable feeling. I am not such an extreme book purist that it pains me to watch a movie leave out details and skip out on some story for pacing or for some other reason, that I would post rants after rants about how everyone should boycott the movie because of it…but I can see how a lot of people are. Let’s take LOTR for example, I saw all of the movies first, loved them immensely, and then I began reading the books and found that a lot of the “in-between-action-scenes” story was cut out or short-cutted, and that really upset me. Why? Is it because I loved the LOTR books more than I loved the Narnia books?
What about you? What books have you read that became movies? Did you like the book/movie better? Were you outraged? Better yet, what books-to-movies have been the worst translated? Are there movies that you’ve seen that have totally destroyed the books they were based on? I think this is a hot button issue that sparks a lot of controversy and intensity among movie fans. I just want to know what you think.
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Scotto
Well I must say that I didnt read all of it, but Jurassic Park was one of the first books-to-movies that I read. There were a lot of noticeable differences between the book and the movie, but I liked the movie more.
To me there is always a danger when you make a movie from a book…with the risk comes great reward…ask Tom Clancy how that’s going for him!
All his books-to-movies seem to do well! And I highly enjoy those movies!!!
One that might get overlooked, but was great…Passion of the Christ. I thought that it captured a lot of the Holy Bible plus captured some feelings of various religious/ethnic groups!
May 16, 2008 at 2:48 pm
johnny thunders
the problem with a lot of adaptations is that people can’t separate themselves from the original context if they read the book first. in a lot of cases the movie is supposed to be different. sometimes the book can’t be directly translated and in other cases (hitchhiker’s guide) the author just wanted to do something different with the different media. of course the movie isn’t going to be like the book, it’s not a book. it’s a movie. moving media is always going to be different than reading because it takes away the imagination that you use when you read the book.
pacing in a book is far different from pacing in a movie. also, in a visual medium things don’t always need to be said, they can be implied. a lot of complaints i hear about things being left out of books are things that are actually there, just not explicitly said.
not that that excuses every translation. a lot of times people translate a book to film with an agenda rather than just trying to make the best possible movie of the source material. sometimes people try to translate it too closely and it ruins it. it’s a hard thing to find a middle ground because you’re either going to offend the book purists or scare off the people who didn’t read the book and don’t want long monologues for each character.
a lot of people would complain about changes made to the characters in comic book movies. i don’t care if they change something about a character (spider-man having organic web shooters, eddie brock not being a muscled up jock, etc.) as long as it doesn’t change the core of the character and what makes the story great.
in regards to what scotto said, my favorite tom clancy story comes from the commentary for the sum of all fears. i haven’t actually heard this, but i’ve been told it from several sources. supposedly the beginning of the commentary is the director introducing himself and then tom clancy saying something to the effect of “hi, i’m tom clancy, the guy who wrote the book that they ignored.”
so yeah, you can’t please everybody.
May 22, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Truth on Cinema | The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
[...] shortcuts the filmmakers have taken, and I’d like to use a quote one of my commenters “johnny thunder” wrote about the comparisons between film and [...]
May 28, 2008 at 8:34 pm