Books to Movies

This week it was either write about my garden or the movie I saw this afternoon. In the past I have turned over the dirt by hand, but I haven’t had a vegetable garden for a number of years and the wildflower seeds I threw in the dirt patch had turned the area into a waist high tangle of wildflowers - emphasis on the wild part. I cheated and had he gardener use his roto tiller to clear the area and turn over the dirt. For now there is just a blank canvas of clear dirt waiting for me to decide what to plant, and not enough garden to write about.

So, about the movie. I didn’t want to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo until I’d finished the book. I read the last page yesterday and made plans to see the movie this afternoon. I was curious how they would alter the story for the movie.

The basic plot is a journalist whose been convicted of writing a libelous article is hired by the head of a big family corporation to find the killer of his niece who disappeared forty years ago. Oddly enough the journalist isn’t the girl with the dragon tattoo. She works for a security firm and ends up helping the journalist with his investigation. It is definitely not a cozy.

The book is hugely successful, though as I was reading I could just hear an editor pointing out that the story didn’t really start until around page 90, and it was confusing whose story it was supposed to be, and that at around 590 pages, it rambled a bit.

I think it was originally written in Swedish and they left a lot of Swedish words in it to describe things with no explanation of what they were. There were a lot of references to places without describing what they were either. I hoped seeing the movie would clear all that up.

Okay, for starters, the movie didn’t clear up any of it, because none of those things were in the movie. They took out all the food references and always making pots of coffee, too. But seeing the movie so soon after reading the book was an interesting experience. I basically spent the whole two or so hours contemplating the differences between the two versions of the story. I also wondered if the movie would have made sense if I hadn’t read the book first.

I can certainly understand why authors are often so upset about how their books change when they’re adapted for a movie. Stieg Larsson would probably be hysterical if he wasn’t dead. Telescoping aspects of the story is understandable, but the movie gave the tattooed girl a back story she didn’t have in the book. And they took out a lot of the back story the journalist had in the book so he seemed flat. Characters did really big things in the movie they didn’t do in the book, which I thought changed who they were. The movie didn't even show the girl's dragon tattoo.

It was odd how there were some scenes in the movie that were directly from the book and other major events that were totally altered. I forgot to mention it was in Swedish with subtitles.

I saw Twilight right after finishing the book and felt completely different about that adaptation. I thought the movie was true to the book.

How do you feel about seeing movies based on books you’ve read?