Read Or Watch?

I’ve rarely come across a film, based on a book, that I loved more than the book itself. And that is usually the case with most people I’ve talked to also. I think the reason behind this is that movies are essentially competing with our imagination. As we read a book, our mind conjures up images that go far beyond the written word. We picture in our minds what is written but since our imagination is boundless, the pictures we come up with are usually quite fantastic. But the directors are forced to show everything to us. They have to visualize everything and leave nothing to our imagination. Naturally they usually end up as a disappointment since even the best special effects don’t stand a chance against our imagination.

My favorite example of something whose effectiveness vanished when translated from book to screen is the character of Lord Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book. With her descriptions, Rowling created a being whose very presence inspired fear. We imagined the scariest, most fearsome creature in our mind as we read the book and we were never forced to actually assign a face or image to him. But when Voldemort was shown on the screen, it was a huge disappointment. That was not a fault of the special effects. Nothing they could've done would've stood a chance against what we had imagined.

I think thrillers and suspense novels hold up better when made into movies. Action sequences and stunts definitely give us a much better adrenaline rush when seen rather than read. Kiss the Girls and The Firm are two books that I think the movies did full justice to. Ofcourse the list of movies that failed to recreate the magic of the books they were adapted from is much longer. Absolute Power, Timeline and Along Came a Spider are a few that spring to mind right away for this list.

With The Da Vinci Code’s release just 2 days away, I wonder which of the two lists the movie will fall into…