I LOVE Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi action movie Children of Men. I’ve watched maybe six times and every time, the ending always almost brings me to tears. So when I learned it was adapted from P.D. James’ book of the same name, it was a no-brainer deciding what my next book would be.
After finishing the book, it wasn’t difficult to reach to the conclusion that I enjoyed the movie better.
While James’ book gives a more in-depth look at how human infertility and humanity’s slow death march towards extinction affects the sexual dynamic between men and women and almost demented ways humans try to cope with a world without children or a race of dead men walking, I feel the book dedicates WAY too much time describing the failing of human civilization and the Regrets and guilt of Theo Faron. It’s not even until after 2/3 through the book where it feels like the plot and story are properly paced and stuff of consequence actually begin to happen.
The film’s adaptation by, comparison, feels consistent in its pacing and the world building and woe-is-mes of Theo feel more compact a take up less of the audience’s time.
What books do you feel were worse than its film adaptation and why?
Eat, Pray, Love.
The movie was one of my favorites, just a good pick me up and kind of inspirational in the sense you can go after whatever you want. I love memoirs, they’re one of my all time fave type of books, especially if I don’t know anything about who wrote it. And although I had seen the movie and knew a lot of the things that happen, I couldn’t wait to read about them in greater detail and all the things they had to cut out to make a movie.
Almost everything in the movie, does not happen in the book/her life. The book is about a privileged woman who travels across the world to complain about her life and act as a white savior (and literally says that she knows what she’s saying sounds like a white savior, but since a guy from Brazil said it too, its ok), and then judges the way another culture deals with important things and she completely disregards and talks down about Indonesian superstitions, while preaching that Eastern religion and practices are better in the same sentence. I am personally very superstitious, its just how my brain works so I was really off put by that. How can you be like “I love the way this view point is, its so gorgeous and cute, but also you’re silly for practicing every other aspect of your cultural view point.”
Also in the audio book version, she does, what I feel like, is racist accents of people from other countries. There was no reason for her to do an Indian accent while reading the Indian portion. She doesn’t do a Texas accent when reading the man from Texas’ parts, I don’t remember her doing a British accent for the brief moment she talks about a British person, but she does one for the Brazilian man, the Italian people, the Indonesian and the Indian people.
She also talks about how she is God and God is her and she spoke to herself in the past from this moment that she realized that they’re the same person/spirit and that she, acting as God’s spirit, saved herself and spurred the whole journey and if you don’t meditate then you’ll never be saved and your life will be bad for not knowing how meditate. I personally am not religious, I have dabbled in a few different ways of trying to connect to spirituality, have even tried meditation (because I saw how it worked for her in the movie and felt comfortable trying it) but nothing feels right to me, so I’m not bothered by other people’s religious views bc who am I to say you can’t connect to God through that specific type of prayer?
The whole book is a big skip from my point of view!