“Harry Potter,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Twilight” are all renowned movies that were originally books. This has gotten many readers thinking: is the book always better than the movie?
Senior Marcella MacGonagle normally prefers the book to its movie adaptation, saying, “I usually lean more towards [the book], because, I mean, it’s the original. It’s more fun and creative to be able to imagine the world yourself, rather than have it being shown to you. But there definitely are arguments for adaptations. I can see why people could appreciate them more.” MacGonagle says, “It’s a good way to make books more accessible for people who don’t like to read or find it harder to read, or might have a learning disability, but I definitely think it’s very easy to go wrong and lose the original message or meaning.”
When asked about particularly good or bad adaptations, MacGonagle says, “Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me on the bad side is the movie ‘Destroy.’ Mr. Pulsinelli actually wouldn’t let us watch it when we read the ‘Iliad’ in ninth grade, because he said it was so horrendous. So we ended up getting together and having a movie night and watching it, and it really was just awful. But I think that the ‘Harry Potter’ movies were done very well and that the ‘Hunger Games’ movies are one of the best examples.”
Seventh grader Charlotte Bohne also has a particular experience with a bad movie adaptation. She says, “Okay, so [there is] this book called ‘My Side of the Mountain.’ I loved it, and so I decided to watch the movie during my birthday, but the movie sucked horribly. It killed my favorite character, causing the next two books to not be able to happen because they’re following that main character that they killed, which [was] just no; it ruined my birthday.”
Anyone who has been in faculty member Vanessa Eicher’s eighth grade English class knows her opinion on movie adaptations. Eicher says, “I think they do different things. They’re different mediums, like oil paint looks different than watercolor, so you can do things in a movie that you can’t do in the book, and vice versa. But I don’t think that the book is always better. Like I like the movie of ‘The Giver,’ because there’s a whole scene at the end, where the giver Elder talks about why the community wanted to do all the things it did, and they have some good points that [aren’t] in the book, or I like the movie of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ better than the book, because it’s just so much more concise … and the movie is so well done. So, yeah, I’m always interested to see what a movie does, because … it’s got to find movie ways to do it, if that makes sense.”
Sixth grader Henry Apprill typically prefers the movie, saying, “It’s usually better because you can actually see what’s happening instead of hear.” Apprill especially enjoys the movie version of “Harry Potter.”
On the flip side, Bohne finds the movie to always be worse, saying, “I’d say that there’s no such thing as a good movie adaptation. They all sort of suck. None of them are perfect.”
Seaburians feel as though there are certain elements that can help with movie adaptations. When asked what makes a good movie adaptation, sophomore Livia Roesler says, “A good cast, for sure. I think that the Hunger Games cast was beautiful. It was perfect, exactly what we needed. I think also, the writer helping a lot, because I feel like if the writer doesn’t help, then it’s just a whole different movie, basically.”
Freshman Ayden Wahla says, “If the book has a lot of visual pieces, like, if it can be transferred into a lot of visual scenes, that’s what I think would make a really good movie adaptation.”
With all of this debate, there is one thing we can all agree on: the book and the movie will always be different. Eicher says, “Ultimately, it’s an interpretation. I don’t know that you can totally adapt. It’s too much, all that internal stuff that happens.”