Books are meant to be read

After mustering enough courage, I made my mind up to watch the latest Harry Potter movie. I couldn’t get a constant opinion from anyone; a lot of people said that the movie was good. So I thought it would be better than the last few and watched it. And yet again, it was a disaster(opinions may differ). The storyline was changed, there was hardly any content,  the storyline was loosely bound, and there were more lovey-dovey scenes than anything else. I found some of the special effects good, but that was about it. This adds to the huge number of movies, adapted from books that according to me were just not good enough.

I had finished the Bourne series of books over summer, and when I told one of my friends over chat that “I just finished Bourne Supremacy”, he was like “Yeah. It was a great movie”. That was when I first heard that movies had been made out of the Bourne books too. So, I downloaded them, burning precious midnight oil(Literally;I have unlimited internet only at night. I do most of my big downloads then). I saw the first two, and they were most unlike the books. They were according to me Good movies, but Bad Bourne movies.

When I had joined NITK, this was precisely the topic for my group discussion at a mock placement event. There have been some great movies, that have been adapted from greater books(If you haven’t done it already, read the Godfather and watch the movie). But the majority of such flicks turn out bad. They also screw up your imagination at times. You look at it from the Director’s eyes, not yours. Also very often, these books are too big to be made into a 2 hour entertainer. It seems that the Harry Potter guys have learnt a lesson..The last movie will come out in two parts.

What Filmmakers should probably realise is that if they want to deviate from the book, they must not associate it heavily with the book itself(James Bond movies are probably the most watched movies of all time, and we all know the response Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci code got). Hopefully, they do follow up, and save many book fans from those hours of torture(sleep sometimes :)).