From Page to Picture: Is either better?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase “the book was better than the movie.” Personally, this never really made much sense to me.

So in my attempt to get both sides of the argument, I found a like-minded and lengthy post on why it’s completely up to individual experience to decide if either is better. I get a little discouraged when I find that someone has said exactly everything that I want to say, but I’m not afraid to share their work in lieu of my nearly identical opinion. Or I guess it could just be my laziness. I guess you’ll never know for sure.

But anyway, check out this post from the Massachusetts Daily Collegian by Araz Havan back in 2013 before reading the remainder of this post. Or don’t. There’s not much else to say in all fairness.

There may never be a clear winner between books and their movie adaptations, honestly. I like to compare and contrast them in this way: Books leave so much up to your imagination. You piece the image together in your head how you want to see it. A well-done movie adaptation may show you a version you hadn’t pictured, but that is just another person’s interpretation that you can physically see, so how can it necessarily be worse?

Yes, it would be silly to not compare them at all. In fact, there is a lot to learn in doing so. It’s a quite common teaching technique that students read the book then watch the movie, or vice versa. Writing a compare/contrast essay generally boils down to pointing out the good aspects of both, really. Neither is inherently bad nor good, but determining which is better, if one even is, is up to you.