Adaptations: part 1

As any book lover would know, book adaptations can be very hit or miss. As many of us build connections to the books and hold high hopes for the films/series we can’t help but sometimes feel disappointed by the outcome but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad; we just hold them to higher standards.
So I thought I would discuss some of the adaptations of my favourite books and how I felt about them…

The first one I wanted to mention was the ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ which, if you’ve been reading my posts so far you’d know is a favourite of mine. So when it was announced that Tim Burton (someone who’s films I love) would be the director for the film I was super excited. However I was definitely let down by some aspects of it, one of them being the major plot difference towards the end of the story (spoiler warning now) which is when they manage to bring Jacob’s granddad back after he died, which left me sat in the cinema thinking ???. One of the reasons the whole series happens is because of his death and bringing him back just made no sense at all. Furthermore they switched the powers of Olive and Emma in the film, which although isn’t a big deal, makes it slightly confusing for the book fans. However, apart from the negatives, if this film was a stand alone film and had no relation to the books I would have enjoyed it a lot more, but it was still a good film and was enjoyable. The cast was brilliant and the film had some great aesthetics.
I would still like to see another adaptation of the books in a series format instead of a film, I think the books would work better that way and gives more time to develop the storyline and the characters.

Next, i’m going to talk about the Divergent series adaptation which can be quite controversial. Over lock-down I re-read the book and re-watched the films close together which definitely helped me form an opinion on them. But I didn’t think the films were bad by any means, they didn’t stray massively from the books and were enjoyable, the world was very similar to how I imagined it in the books. Are they perfect? no. But they’re good. The one bone I have to pick with them is the decision to split Allegiant into two parts which lead to us never being able to get the final film to the series as the films didn’t do great. I’m still holding out hope to have a new adaptation one day but I doubt that’ll be any time soon 😦

Straying away from series’ another book adaptation I was looking forward to was the Sun is also a Star, a book I fell in love with and read multiple times, so when I finally got round to the film recently I felt slightly disappointed. It’s not that it strayed away from the books much, it just felt like it was missing a mark with it and so much more could have been done to make it more important and impactful. I wanted to feel similar emotions to when I first read the book, but it definitely missed there. The film was still good though, it was cute and worked well. Just in comparison to the book it wasn’t my favourite.

To stop this post from getting incredibly long i’m going to make this a blogging series so I can continue to update and discuss different adaptations which will also combine my love of books and films! If you have any suggestions of adaptations to check out and discuss then please let me know!