No Spoilers!
I love film adaptations.
I love the idea of books turning into film, even if they don't always turn out
the way we want. I love comparing between the two, seeing which one
is better, which one worked for me ‘cause I’m a geek like that.
As a reader, it always
seems that 90% of the time, the book turns out to be better. Now, I'm saying
90% because there have been proven exceptions in the past, at least in my
opinion. Telling the story in another medium could actually help improved upon
it. I think sometimes it doesn’t matter if the film is a faithful adaptation as
long as it was able to tell a better story. That’s not the case for Winter’s
Bone, well not exactly.
When it comes to which
version of Winter’s Bone told the better story, I think it’s debatable. The
movie was surprisingly a very faithful adaptation of the book. The story is
almost identical with few minor changes and the book gives us more detail of
course. The movie has a strong cast and
each person portrayed their parts perfectly, close enough to what the book
describes.
So if these two versions
are so similar, how to decide which one is superior? The usual answer would be
the book because the book gives us more. In my case, I choose the movie. If you
read my review of the book, you pretty much know how I feel about it. Because the
two versions were so similar, I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie either. However,
I think the movie was the superior version.
Why? Well, as I said
before, it’s debatable. If you like the book, you more than likely would prefer
it over the movie. What made the movie better in my eyes is the fact that it
gave less detail. As I was reading the book, I remember spotting several things
that could’ve been easily cut out and nothing of the main story would be lost.
I understand that the author add these details so we’d feel more for the
characters and feel the atmosphere of the book, but in my opinion it affected
the pacing of the book.
The movie manages to
take out these details as well as making us feel for the characters. Though when
it comes to the characters, I think the credit here goes to the actors who portray
them, especially Jennifer Lawrence.
Winter’s Bone book and
movie were very similar, but the movie wins for giving me more with less, if
you know what I mean.
What do you think, do
you like the book or the movie better?
I actually haven't read the book yet, but saw the movie on Netflix. I had never seen any of Jennifer Lawrence's acting before, and since she is, of course, Katniss, I wanted to see how she'd do. The movie itself was just "eh" for me, but her acting was surprisingly good.
ReplyDeleteI loved her acting too. She is gonna be awesome as Katniss.
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