I've slowly become more and more inclined to "Theory 5: Purity of vision" over the past six years.
When I was younger, I valued movies more than books. I know that people usually replied that books make you exercise your imagination more, but to me that felt like a disadvantage of books, they seem to rely on a crutch (the imagination), whereas movies (in my child's mind) stood alone, proudly. I tended to see a book as infirm, incomplete until it got an adaptation, and even then, a bad adaptation seemed to me to somehow devalue the book itself, like an infection from a prosthesis. I literally couldn't sleep at night because of errors in book adaptations, it was like a hole in the universe itself.
Then I reread Harry Potter, especially the last book, and I came to love the descriptions of nature and feelings in the tenting chapters, and I suddenly realized how much I value how the book makes feel, and how irrelevant the quality of its adaptation is.
This theory got put to the test when the Foundation TV show came up, which I found awful, and for the first time I didn't care. The book was just as brilliant as before, and no bad adaptation could make me lose nights anymore.
Recently, this disappointment with adaptations together with the appreciation of literature itself made me more disappointed with movies in general, even original ones. I realized how many compromises have to be made to make a movie which simply don't exist in books.
Somehow I managed to make it to just last year with only seeing the first Harry Potter movie. I decided this would be a good opportunity to read the books, then watch the movie… something I had never done before. I’m currently part way into the 4th book.
While watching The Prisoner of Azkaban, I finally understood by book readers hated movie adaptations so much. Massive, meaningful, plot lines were completely missing from the movie. Places where the movie deviates from book create issues of believability that didn’t exist in the book.
I’m now excited to read the rest of the books, but less excited for the movies, lol. And here I thought the carrot of the movie at the end would help drive me to finish the books.
I've slowly become more and more inclined to "Theory 5: Purity of vision" over the past six years.
When I was younger, I valued movies more than books. I know that people usually replied that books make you exercise your imagination more, but to me that felt like a disadvantage of books, they seem to rely on a crutch (the imagination), whereas movies (in my child's mind) stood alone, proudly. I tended to see a book as infirm, incomplete until it got an adaptation, and even then, a bad adaptation seemed to me to somehow devalue the book itself, like an infection from a prosthesis. I literally couldn't sleep at night because of errors in book adaptations, it was like a hole in the universe itself.
Then I reread Harry Potter, especially the last book, and I came to love the descriptions of nature and feelings in the tenting chapters, and I suddenly realized how much I value how the book makes feel, and how irrelevant the quality of its adaptation is.
This theory got put to the test when the Foundation TV show came up, which I found awful, and for the first time I didn't care. The book was just as brilliant as before, and no bad adaptation could make me lose nights anymore.
Recently, this disappointment with adaptations together with the appreciation of literature itself made me more disappointed with movies in general, even original ones. I realized how many compromises have to be made to make a movie which simply don't exist in books.
Somehow I managed to make it to just last year with only seeing the first Harry Potter movie. I decided this would be a good opportunity to read the books, then watch the movie… something I had never done before. I’m currently part way into the 4th book.
While watching The Prisoner of Azkaban, I finally understood by book readers hated movie adaptations so much. Massive, meaningful, plot lines were completely missing from the movie. Places where the movie deviates from book create issues of believability that didn’t exist in the book.
I’m now excited to read the rest of the books, but less excited for the movies, lol. And here I thought the carrot of the movie at the end would help drive me to finish the books.