Are books better than films?
'Films can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make characters
into living, breathing flesh and blood, but books let you LIVE everything'
I went to see Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters with the Spinebreakers. We all needed to
write something on the film and our views on it. I did my research first. I re-read the book, made
numerous notes, wrote down everything I wanted to see in the film and brought a notebook into
the cinema with me, ready to jot down my thoughts as the film played out before me.
The film was amazing – seriously, it blew me away. It was so, so much better than its prequel,
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and stuck so much closer to the book – something that
obviously made me exceptionally happy.
The people who worked on the film... they got a lot of things right. They got the characters, the
world, the creatures, the feel all right. They changed the plot, of course, and missed various
things out, adding others in their place. But this didn't matter – Percy Jackson and the Sea of
Monsters was absolutely stunning.
So why am I so obsessed with the things they changed? Why am I so much more in love with the
book than with the film?
The same thing happened with The Hunger Games. They got almost everything exactly right,
but it still... it didn't have the same feel to it. The suspense and emotion just didn't project from
page to the screen.
Films... they can do a lot of things. They can bring whole worlds to life before our eyes, make
characters into living, breathing flesh and blood. They can have us on the edge of our seats as
vicious battle scenes are fought right before us, have us sobbing over a death, a heartbreak or
smiling with joy. Films can make us see a lot of things – sometimes things that even books
cannot do so well. They are a pure escape – there's nothing like sitting in the cinema, devoid of
any other distraction, focused completely on the story playing on the screen.
And yet...
Films are great, but they just don't have the same...inclusion that books have. You're merely an
observer: you aren't feeling everything the character feels, aren't reading every single one of
their innermost thoughts, all of their doubts and fears and hopes. Films let you observe
everything. Books? Books let you feel everything, know everything and LIVE everything. With a
book, you can be the hero who kills the demon with one twirl of your blade. You can be the girl
who battles cancer, along with all the pain and uncertainty that comes with it. You can be a
demigod, you can be an alien, you can be an angel, a god, a villain, a hero. You can be in love,
you can hate, you can triumph, you can lose. You can be anything and everything. There are no
limits. No restrictions. Nothing is impossible, nothing is out of reach…
And that… that is why books are always better. When you read a book, nothing else exists and
you can be a whole other person in this completely new and amazing world. You can live as
someone else, free of your own troubles, even if only for two hundred pages.
Books are magic. Which is why I'm telling you all to forget about movie magic and get back to
the pure magic that lives upon your bookshelves. Because while the movies are good… the books
are ALWAYS better.
Do you think books are better than films? Send us your thoughts childrens.books@theguardian.com - or join the discussion on Facebook
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Your responses
ABitCrazy
The thing is... most days people prefer to have a day sitting in front of the television watching
the latest films and TV shows; some people even just watch TV for the sake of watching TV and
they're willing to watch any old junk. And it's more common to find people that prefer to sit in
front of the television all day than it is to find someone that wants to sit at home reading all day.
I love reading with a passion; I love letting my imagination run wild and imagining what all
these characters look like and how they're feeling. Films don't do that for you but books do!
Almost all books that become bestsellers get turned into films and sometimes the films really
please you and sometimes it can be soul-destroying!
Two of my favourite series of books have both been turned into films - The Hunger Games and
Twilight.
And after watching the first Hunger Games it totally ruined the book for me forever. I can't
imagine the Hunger Games the way I used to when I re-read the book. The Hunger Games was
somewhere to escape to on a good or bad day; it made you forget where you were and start being
a different person, even if it only lasted the length of a book. It felt like it was my life and not
Katniss's but now that I've seen the film I no longer imagine how the characters looked and
reacted to everything. But watching and reading Twilight didn't feel quite like that, because
when Twilight first came out in cinemas I was to young to watch it so I wasn't interested in it but
as we all know Twilight is now one of the most popular teen books and movies ever! So once I
got to the age of wanting to watch and read the books it was too late to think up my own
imagination of the book because by then I had seen and read so many things about Twilight I
already knew most of what happened. So films in some ways ruin books for children. And if the
Hunger Games turns out like Twilight - all the people that are too young to watch it now but
might when they are older will have already seen all the trailers and read all the articles in
magazines - the experience of reading the book will be totally ruined for them.
And then you have people that just skip the book and go straight to the film. I understand that
some people actually don't like reading so they probably won't read the book but they might
watch the film, but to just skip the book completely because they're desperate to watch the film
is disappointing. I like to read the books first to know where it all started and why they decided
to make a film out of it. I didn't read all of The Host (Stephenie Meyer's other novel) before I
saw the film but I did read some of it and it was a great book from what I read but also a great
film. And of course sometimes films seem to be the same idea as the book had but are not
actually based on the book. So it's a bit like Twilight for instance; Twilight's inspiration came
mainly from the American TV show Buffy The Vampire Slayer but had its own little twist. And
that's a bit like what films do to books. They make it seem like they've taken the idea from the
book but switched it up so it's not actually anything to do with the book.
And for this reason that's why I prefer books to films. Films destroy really amazing books! And
TV has changed books. Maybe some people only read books because they're the reason that the
films exist and I think that reading a book because of TV and films is a bad way to read; I think
people should read a book because they actually want to read the book and every book should be
a new story. And of course there are films not related to books at all and books that films aren't
based on, and sometimes that is exactly how it should be: sometimes it's best if the two things
aren't connected.
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