The 4 Things People Who Read the Book are Sick of Hearing

Photo courtesy of flickr.com

It is well known knowledge that the book is nearly always better than its later movie adaptation. It drives book lovers crazy to see their precious novels portrayed on the big screen with actors that don’t match the characters’ descriptions and plot changes that don’t even make sense.

Obviously it is difficult to capture chapters and chapters of carefully constructed sentences and themes within two hours of film, but it’s still hard to accept the fact that the movie isn’t going to be able to give its audience the same feelings and afterthoughts that the novel did.  But that’s not even the worst part. The most frustrating part about the movie version is listening to the comments of those who didn’t read the book. So to all of those moviegoers, here are the 4 things people who read the book are sick of hearing:

1.  “I didn’t really get it. It was too confusing.”

This statement undermines the greatness of the novel the movie was based off. The movie can be difficult to understand without having read the novel because the movie doesn’t have enough time or the ability for depth that a novel can provide to fully demonstrate every idea and event going on within the plot. The movie may contain gaps or rush through certain parts that readers are able to fill in with their prior knowledge. When people who only watch the movie say the storyline was too confusing, they often assume the novel is just as confusing. Not only does this defer them from reading the novel, but it doesn’t give enough credit to the novel’s plot, which was fully explained and developed….just maybe not in the theater. This definitely was apparent in the movie adaptation of Life of Pi. The novel itself is very popular and anyone who has read it knows that the themes presented through storytelling are captivating. But while the film had beautiful cinematography, it wasn’t able to clearly capture what the novel was trying to portray because the ideas require a lot of analysis and caused confusion in the movie version.

2. “OMG. It was the cutest love story everrrrr!”

This comment is a real heart-wrencher when the main point of the plot was in fact, not to develop a romantic love story. Hollywood can’t help but turn everything into a quest for eternal love and forever after. It’s what sells and it’s what keeps the lines long at the ticket stand. It can just be extremely frustrating when people miss the real message the author was trying to send out because they get caught up in the cute couple hype. These types of comments have come up a lot about characters Gatsby and Daisy after The Great Gatsby movie came out this spring. The inaccurate build-up of these two as a super-romantic couple, and the surplus of Gatsby and Daisy couple costumes spotted on Halloween, only serves to show that Fitzgerald’s messages on the coveted “American dream” and the emptiness of the upper class were completely looked over.

3. “Wait….I thought this happened, not that….”

When people who read the book and people who only watched the movie discuss the plot and they have completely different ideas of what happened, it’s not a memory lapse. The movie often changes the plot for clarity given the limited time frame, but sometimes it changes the plot because it thinks it will be more successful in the movie industry this way. This angers readers who feel that the plot never should have been changed because now everyone who hasn’t read the book thinks that what happened in the movie was actually written that way. One of the most blatant examples I can think of where the book’s plot is drastically different than the movie’s is in Jodie Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. The novel is about two sisters and (spoiler alert) at the end, one of them dies. But in the movie, the other sister dies instead. I then heard from several people who only saw the movie that they thought the movie’s decision made more sense. No, no, no. That’s because they didn’t read the book and didn’t get the same message from the novel’s ending that the readers did.

4. “I’ve already seen the movie,  why read the book?” or “I’ll just wait until the movie comes out.”

Not only did the person not read the book, but they have absolutely no intention to. No matter how much you tell them how beautiful the imagery is or how much the protagonist’s journey was an inspiration to you, they will never understand why you would flip through pages rather than just sit back and stare at a screen. To them, the book is the same thing…just a more boring version. There’s not much you can do for these people anymore except cross your fingers and hope that no one else travels over to the dark side. With The Hunger Games: Catching Fire coming out this November, you can bet that thousands will travel to the theaters with only the knowledge of the first movie tucked away. Maybe they should read the book to know that the symbolic mockingjay pin did not come into play when Katniss randomly stumbled across it. Maybe they should read the book to know the strategies and split-second thoughts that were going through Katniss’ mind as she fought to stay alive. But alas, these things will remain a mystery to those who just want to wait for the movie. On the other hand, those who have read will have clench their teeth and suffer as the screen changes up their favorite stories.