The Book Was Better -- Or Was It?

Reading a novel before watching its TV/film adaption(s) is the correct order of doing things. Going the other way around I always find it challenging to picture my own visuals of a book's world and characters: seeing first someone else's vision of it and then replacing it is difficult. It's like most of the author's work had already been done and experiencing the story again via reading feels otiose. Comparing my own, already existing mental images to an adaption is more worthwhile.

Forrest Gump

Often times a film or such fails to capture the essence of the original work due to it requiring too many special effects, not being able give enough depth to characters, or the screenplay having to cut story parts to fit within reasonable running time etc. However, evidently sometimes an adaption is actually better than the book it was based on. Such is the case with Forrest Gump, a six Academy Awards winner as a film directed by Robert Zemeckis and one of my all time favorites. I was utterly surprised how much I disliked the novel when I read it last year.

The novel's author Winston Groom wrote a sequel, Gump & Co., soon after the movie had come out. I read that book years ago and thought it was fine. It had seemed like a continuation to the movie. I ponder if Groom intended it as such too to a degree. For instance, the sequel doesn't acknowledge Forrest being a mathematical idiot savant like he's in the first novel. The film adaption ignored that detail as well. The film also reduced the focus on Forrest's American football career and cut out the absolute farce of a space trip the man does with an ape and the first female astronaut. When returning back to Earth the three end up as prisoners to some cannibal tribe of all things.

The movie has many merits purely of its own making too. For instance how it ties Forrest to historical events and people, using special effects to seamlessly insert Tom Hanks into old clips. Only in high school I also finally learned -- when it was pointed to me -- that Lieutenant Dan not having legs was also a visual effect. I had seen the movie many times at that point but had never considered that maybe Gary Sinise hadn't actually lost his legs.

Dracula

I recently read Dracula by Bram Stoker. I was curious beforehand because I had heard that the novel was written in epistolary form: its story told via diary entries, letters, and such. It turned out to matter very little. The characters write of happenings in such meticulous detail that most of the time the book could be using regular third person limited. I find it perplexing that anyone would write letters or diary entries that repeat word for word pages worth of elongated dialogue.

It has been a while since I watched Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaption but I recall it being convincing -- and accurate too now after reading the book. The movie might even be better than the book but I should watch it again before claiming that.

Another thing maybe worth mentioning about Dracula is how Jarkko Laine, the novel's Finnish translator, had decided to use different Finnish dialects for the few different English dialects, such as Cockney speech, spoken briefly in the novel. That's always a risky decision, or at least I find some Finnish dialects nigh unintelligible in written (and spoken) form. Although I guess Cockney is a bit of that too. 

I Am Legend

Francis Lawrence's 2007 I Am Legend was a fair pastime. On my 5-star scale I'd give it 3: an entertaining movie. I spotted the novel it's based on in library and decided to quickly read it (it's a short one) just to see how it compares.

First of all, I hadn't expected the book to be so old. I suppose the movie's contemporary setting had led me to believe the book would be more recent. But no, Richard Matheson wrote it in 1954. It is set in the 1970s though: a couple of decades into the future at the time of its publication. The novel has been adapted to film twice before too: The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971).

I don't know if I could call the latest movie better than the book. I definitely do prefer its "vampiric albino zombie-like cannibalistic mutants" (like someone had put on the film's Wikipedia article) over the novel's archaic vampires. Crucifixes and garlic are such a thing of the past in vampire fiction. I enjoy way more the modern way, how White Wolf's World of Darkness RPG universe for instance does vampires. Fire and sun make sense; garlic and crosses don't. You can have older tropes in smaller scale and still be modern though, like how the no-reflection intrinsic appears as Clan Lasombra's clan curse.

But other than me preferring one type of monsters over the other, it's hard to compare the two works because they differ quite a bit from each other. The biggest difference is where the I Am Legend title comes from. In the movie Robert Neville (Will Smith) develops a cure for the virus and thus becomes a legend.

The book however does something completely different. Not all people infected become mindless undead. Instead of looking for a cure, they have accepted their new condition and are rebuilding society. Robert they see as a threat, the last human who has also killed many of their kind. The book ends with Robert realizing he is legend like vampires once were for humans.

I found the novel quite odd; the movie's point was far easier to understand.