by: Lola D.M. (Grade 11)

Have you ever finished watching a film, and just thought, “The book was WAY better than the movie”? If so, you’re not alone, and in this article we’ll be exploring why books are (almost always) better than the movie. 

Reason #1 – Limited Running Time

Reading a book can, depending on how much of a bookworm you are, take a long time – anywhere between an hour and several months. You read at your own speed, following your own pace. A movie, however, usually lasts between two and three hours and, if you’re in a cinema, it has no pause button.

But, more importantly, due to the limited time frame that movies must adapt to due to humans’ limited attention span, most filmmakers can’t fit everything from a novel into it’s adapted screenplay. A book has everything, and there’s only so much you can fit into a film.

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Reason #2 – Limited Time Period

Books can, also, span decades in great detail. Take, for example, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – a single novel (with three volumes) that was adapted into a trilogy of movies directed by Peter Jackson. And yet, many will vouch that the book is better because it covered over a hundred years, with Tolkien delving into the individual thoughts of each character, as well as the personal histories that characterised them. This is impossible to achieve in a film, and hence things will get left out.

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Reason #3 – Script

While it is true that a movie has the power of visual stimulation and entertainment, it’s still quite limited by the fact that it needs to tell a story primarily through dialogue. This especially affects a book that has a lot of inner dialogue, or an extensive view into a character’s mind. A loss of inner thoughts can sometimes lead to under developed plots and characters. Also, there are so many novels which are just beautifully written, with lavish, painfully gorgeous writing. No film can recreate that.

Reason #4 – Personal Details

As mentioned above, certain personal details that particularly characterise a character in books are often left out in movies, leading to “bland” and under-developed personas. Sometimes characters aren’t even included in films, or are altered completely. Take Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, written by Ransom Riggs as a novel, and made into a film directed by Tim Burton. Is the film good? YES. Did Burton completely alter some characters, such as switching Emma and Olive, and anger many readers? YES.

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Reason #5 – MORE

In books, overall, there’s just more. More details, focus on characters and their development, and more depth to the meaning. This makes books more, in a way, three-dimensional.

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Reason #6 – Lost in Translation (no pun intended)

Filmmakers, occasionally, lose the essence of what the author created. The director perceives the author’s writing in one specific way, altering it towards their own ideas. A prime example is Stephen King’s The Shining. King himself was unhappy with the way Stanley Kubrick approached the film, disliking Shelly Duvall’s “scream and run” character, and Jack Nicholson’s instant and rapid descent into insanity; this contrasts the book, where Jack Torrance experiences a much more agonising mental change. Jack Nicholson is marvellous, but the film misses that humane element of a slow, agonising mental shift towards insanity.

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Reason #7 – Imagination

The main culprit, however, to why books are better is your imagination. When reading a book, you receive mental images of the way the characters look, how they sound, how the scenery and setting looks, what the world is like… It’s all created by you, the reader, and is unique to your mind. And that’s the beauty of books.

BOOKS ARE UTTERLY PERSONAL TO YOU!

When reading, you create the world, based on your own experiences and thoughts; you take out some message that means something to you as an individual; you cling to your favourite characters because you relate to them, or envy them, or whatever… The author tells the story, but your imagination creates the world based on your own experiences and interests. But the point is, you manipulate the books, and adapt them towards your own pleasure; whereas, when watching a movie, you watch a director’s adaptation – the director’s thoughts, views, ideas… 

Your mind and imagination are powerful. Every person has a slightly different image or idea when reading a book, in the same way that a filmmaker creates the film with their own ideas of what it should look like. So, to sum up…

The book is better because it’s in YOUR world, while the movie is in someone else’s.

But, of course, as the title says, not all books are better than their movie counterparts (take Forrest Gump as an example)… just most of them.

Do you have an opinion? Know any books that are better than the film, or vice versa? Leave a comment below!