It’s Friday! And that means it’s time to go feral. :) And since the upcoming release of ‘The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones’ movie is the driving factor for my next read (and Melissa may have an upcoming read due to a movie as well).. we have movies on our mind right now.

This week, we’re talking about movie adaptations of books we love:

Kristy’s say:

I always find a person’s reaction to a book being made into a move interesting – they are either super excited about it, or they are nervous and think “I know it won’t be as good as the book” – but yet still can’t resist watching the movie anyway.

Overall, I like movies based on books – I enjoy seeing the world come life visually, but I think the book is always better than the movie. I think of movies as complimenting a book, rather than the book “coming to life”. You might visualise a character different to those who are cast, the settings might be different than you imagined, or it may have a different feel altogether. Plus, movie adaptions will always add things to enhance the storyline or make it visually appealing, or remove things that affects the flow. And sometimes, these changes happen to be your favourite parts of the book – which can be frustrating. Changes are inevitable, and I don’t mind minor changes, sometimes I even enjoy them – but I do not like major changes, especially to the endings!

There are some movie adaptations I really liked, some I was “meh” about, and others I disliked completely. Some movies that I enjoyed were: Harry Potter (all of them), Warm Bodies, The Hunger Games, The Host (I was surprised by this), The Green Mile and Lord of the Rings. Ones I have been “meh” about are: Twilight (all of them), Beautiful Creatures, Beastly, Eragon and Now is Good (Before I Die).

The one exception to my “I always like the book better” is Perks of Being a Wallflower. I watched the movie before reading the book, and although I enjoyed the movie, I did not enjoy the book at all. I know a lot of people love this book, but I could not connect to it (the characters or the style).

When it comes to movie adaptations, the one thing I don’t really like is making multiple movies out of one book (such as Breaking Dawn, The Hobbit and the upcoming Mockingjay). I personally think it is better to have one longer movie than two separate ones, as two movies can make it seem dragged out. However, if it really is required to have multiple movies to make the visual version better, I am open to the idea.

Melissa’s say:

I don’t know about you guys, but I get really protective of the books I love. The Hunger Games was a classic one for me. That series was seriously so dear to my heart just for the simple fact that I’d never read dystopian until I’d read that, and it gave me something no other book had ever given me before.

So when I heard about the movie franchise, like the other fan girls and boys out there, I counted down the months and days until the release, and I saw it on opening night when it came out here - if for nothing else, I needed to see how they were going to present Panem to me. How were they going to bring this alive on the screen? Personally, I loved that it remained so true to the book (as close as it could be done anyways) and I thought they did a genuinely good job.

Same can be said of the movie Warm Bodies. It might have received some flack in general from people that hadn’t read the book about how silly the storyline was, but for people like me who had read and loved the book, it was PERFECTLY aligned to the storyline itself. I felt they did a really great job of this and bringing the world to life.

Then there’s other movie adaptations of books that I’ve seen and they’ve done a terrible job at representing the works of fiction IMHO.

To be fair, I haven’t read Beautiful Creatures. But I am going to this year at some stage. I did watch the movie though, and I was a little disappointed in how this was actually done. As someone that has not read the book, the plot should be easy to understand and not confusing - and I felt confused as someone that had no background to the book at all. And from several people, I heard that the movie had a different ending to how the book ended too, which I never think is acceptable in movie adaptations.

I feel that anytime an author is directly involved in the production of the movie, that can only be a good thing. Directors have a duty of care to the fans to make sure that the film is presented in a way that is true to the work of fiction (where possible) also. There’s so much riding on making sure that readers of the books aren’t disappointed, and I think now more than ever producers are starting to realise this and keep this in mind when creating films (Especially from what I’ve seen of the Divergent set at the moment).

Overall, if the studios want to keep making movies out of my most loved books, I am keen to see them since I love seeing the interpretation of all these worlds coming to life. But I remain protective of the books I love nonetheless!

So what do you think about a book being made into movies? Is it a good or bad thing? Does it make you love the book more or does it ruin it for you? And does the movie ever live up to the book?