Never judge a book by its film adaptation. Do you concur?
(submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)
I do, to a point. It depends on what the difference are between book and the film, and the reason someone liked or disliked the adaptation. If I can, I tend to try and read books before the film. Sometimes I end up watching first, and either being pleasantly surprised by the book, or disappointed because it wasn’t as good as the film. I think you can’t judge if the reason for disliking the film is down to poor quality, whether it’s badly shot, edited, written, acted etc. I think if there’s a kind of objectionable reason you disliked the film, you might still enjoy the book.
On the other hand, maybe you really didn’t like the plot, the themes, the characters or the overall story – in which case, depending on how close it fits with the book, the book likely won’t be for you, either. If you watch Hunger Games and come out thinking I don’t like dystopian stories with teenage protagonists, then the book likely isn’t going to do much to convince you otherwise. But if you walked out thinking This was okay but I wish they had time to explore more of … whatever it was you wanted, maybe the exploration of that factor is actually in the book.
For the most part, I try to keep adaptations and the books themselves in my mind as separate entities – sometimes one is better, sometimes the other, and I do like reading books after seeing the adaptations, seeing what changes they made and understanding why. So overall, no, I don’t think you can judge a book based on the adaptation, as there are always going to be some changes, and the ‘experience’ of a piece of media can be so vastly different from one medium to another.
What about you – do you think you can judge a book based on the film adaptation?
Unwrapping Words 