I hope some of us can agree that sometimes movies don’t do the books justice when it comes to bringing the story to life. I can probably guess what you’re thinking: “Oh, she’s one of those people.” You know, the ones that are always like “the book was way better than the movie.” For the most part, I would say that is the case. There are times when I can’t help but acknowledge the major disappointment gnawing at me after watching a film that was incorrectly portrayed.

Of course, each person interprets the stories they read differently, so it makes sense that readers don’t always get the same feeling from the film as they did from the book. I believe that movies can never do the books they are portraying enough justice because a lot of the emotions which are extremely detailed in books either will be poorly interpreted by the actors, or just thrown out the window and unacknowledged all together.

An example of this would be the book Eragon by Christopher Paolini which was made into a movie in 2006. Many people have added this movie to their worst book-to-film adaptation, one of those people being Emma Chan who writes for the Collegiate Times.

Chan mentions that when she was six years old she loved the movie. I mean the story did involve dragons after all. Sadly, her love for the movie Eragon changed after she had read the book and decided to rewatch the movie. She states, “Aside from those very generalized plot points, the rest of the plot was so twisted and altered that all the emotion and wonder I had experienced while reading the book had vanished.”

Although I have not had the opportunity to read this book for myself, I can understand where she is coming from. I have also experienced this disappointment with other adaptations.

Another movie that has seemed to have fallen into the unfortunate pile of horribly made book-to-movie adaptations is The Great Gatsby. Daisy Webb from Film Daily wrote, “the film somehow felt like little more than an extended music video—the not-so-great-Gatsby.” Webb isn’t the only one who shares this opinion. Matt Wilson from Taste of Cinema wrote something similar, he states, “The film is more about the typical type of music video-like spectacle, typical of a Baz Luhrmann film, rather than conveying the themes of the book.” Although The Great Gatsby has never been one of my favorite stories, it is a shame to see it flop when the book is considered a classic.

The list is endless when it comes to failed adaptations. Then again, if we erase the knowledge of the book existing from our minds, we might have considered the film to be pretty good, but it’s just not that easy to ignore. It is even harder to ignore when the book is one of your favorites and you cannot unsee the film that horribly portrayed everything about it. On the bright side, I suppose it is worth getting a visual of a story brought to life, even if it is not the most accurate.

As much as I believe that books are better than the movies they are made into, there is no need to be an extremist about it. At the end of the day you will always have your own unique imagination and there is no greater visual than the imagination.