Book or Movie?
The internet has spoken: the book is almost always better than the
movie:
<http://www.vocativ.com/news/245040/the-book-is-better-than-the-movie/>
'Vocativ analyzed Goodreads and IMDb ratings for 800 books and their
movie adaptations ranging from "Harry Potter" to "Hannibal" and
discovered that the book had a higher rating 74 percent of the time. In
fact, books are considered "much better" on our scale than their movie
adaptations in 51.8 percent of cases.'
I recently watched "The Martian", and I agree that the book is much
better than the movie. While I enjoyed the movie, time constraints meant
a lot of the story had to be left out. For me, the major attraction of
the book was all the geeking out on chemistry, botany, physics and
orbital mechanics. The rescue story was a given. The movie did geek out
at times, but I accept that the general public would prefer more visual
effects. Another issue with movies is the baggage associated with major
stars. Personally, I don't have a problem with Matt Damon playing the
lead character. But when reading the book, I would not have had him in
mind. So, should you read the book or watch the movie? I'm going to make
an exception in this case and only recommend the book to readers who
like plenty of scientific details and the process of problem solving.
For everyone else, the movie is good enough.
For another movie, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", I saw the movie first
and read the novelisation later. I would rate the movie much higher than
the book. In such cases, where the movie is always intended to be the
primary and canonical medium for a story, you would hope that the movie
is better. If a novelisation turns out better, then the movie has
clearly been botched. This is especially true if the director was also
involved in writing the original screenplay. Knowing this, why would
anyone bother reading the novelisation? In my case, as a long-time Star
Wars tragic, I wanted to get additional background information, which
the book successfully delivered.
Related Links:
* "6 Reasons The Book Is (Almost Always) Better Than The Movie"
<http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/6-reasons-the-book-is-almost-always-better-than-the-movie/>
* Love Reading: "Books Vs Films" infographic
<http://visual.ly/books-vs-hollywood>
