Are Books Better than Films?

1100 Words3 Pages

According to the article, “ Are Books Better than Films?”, “Films can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make characters into living, breathing fleshing blood, but books let you live everything” (“Are Books Better than Films?”). Very often book lovers are unsatisfied with the movie adaption of their favorite book. No doubt there have been great book based movies but that does not take the place of reading the actual novel. Reading books is better than watching the movie. This is better because often the movie tends to misinterpret information, which changes the plot, and lack sufficient character development.
One of the many famous movie adaptions is from the teen novel series The Twilight Saga. Written by Stephanie Meyer, it has been extremely successful. The series is about a male vampire (Edward Cullen) and human female (Isabella Swan) who fall in love and struggle to keep their relationship. Teens ran out and got the books hot off the press and staked out movie theaters the first weekend it came out. The first weekend the movie came out in theatres it made over $69,637,740. It also ranked the number one movie in 3,419 across America ("Twilight (2008) - Box Office Mojo.").
In movie versions, the director seems to overlook material that the reader finds vital to the plot. In the first Twilight book, when Edward and Bella get out of the car he does not touch her because he does not want to risk losing control (Meyer). In the movie, Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, he swings his arm around Bella shoulders and states he was going to hell anyways (Hardwicke). When the director did this he changed the plot because in the book none of the other characters knew Edward and Bella talked. Then all of a sudden Edward and Bella w...

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...the chance to increase vocabulary and knowledge. Movies do not equate to books because they lack the following criteria. They do not have full character analysis as the book does nor do they stick to the story line of the book. Directors tend to take their creative liberties too far and begin to alter the plot and create new images of the story. Readers would love to see a great novel come to life but keep it the way the book has written it.

"Are Books Better than Films?" Theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 06 Nov. 2013. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
"Are Movies Better than Books?" The Premier Online Debate Website. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. London: Atom, 2007. Print.
"Twilight (2008) - Box Office Mojo." Twilight (2008) - Box Office Mojo. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
Twilight. Dir. Catherine Hardwicke. Paramount Pictures,2008. Film.

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