Many books have been adapted into movies. Some examples are Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, About a Boy, The Fault in Our Stars, the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hunger Games trilogy. One movie that was adapted from a book I enjoyed is Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee. The novel was written by Yann Martel.
Though both the book and the movie are powerful, many people prefer the book to the movie. Of course, the excellent acting, the precise direction, and the fabulous use of technology made the movie thrilling to watch. But the book is more detailed and gripping. The movie is a visual medium, but the book has no such support. So the author relies on words to tell the story. Yann Martel has amazing writing skills that allow readers to enter into the world of Pi.
Here are some of the differences that I noticed between the book and the movie:
In the book, Pi has friends in the Indian town of Pondicherry, but all of them are boys. The movie has a female actor playing a sort of romantic interest for the teenaged Pi.
In the book, Pi soon establishes himself as the alpha male on the lifeboat with Richard Parker (the tiger). He puts the tiger into a submissive role. In the movie, Pi is extremely nervous around Richard Parker almost until the end.
In the book, the author vividly describes in gory detail how the hyena kills the zebra and the chimpanzee. In the movie, the director does away with the gory scenes.
Another important difference is the treatment of the relationship between Richard Parker and Pi. After reading the book, readers are left with the impression that Richard Parker is Pi’s alter ego, which he creates to cope with the tragic, frightening events in the lifeboat. In the movie, the events are portrayed more like a fictitious story that Pi tells the insurance agents, seemingly to get rid of them.
The differences between the movie and the book seem deliberate and necessary. To make the movie rated PG, the film adaptation cut out the gory scenes. The movie also focuses only on the relationship between Pi and the tiger Richard Parker. Because an audience experiences a movie in one sitting, a moviemaker has a limited amount of time to tell a story. When adapting a book into film, various scenes in the book are shortened, edited, or deleted to fit the required time format. On the other hand, a visual medium can depict a scene with stunning clarity. Regardless of the imagery that the novel may use to describe a scene, it simply cannot compete with the onscreen imagery that the film version is able to provide. For example, no matter how hard readers try to visualize a boy and a Bengal tiger stuck together on a boat, seeing it actually play out onscreen is thrilling.
