Books and movies

Faith has finished Prince Caspian now and started The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  She had been wanting to see the movie version of Prince Caspian -- we saw it when it first came out on DVD, but she didn't remember it -- but I told her she had to read the book first.  Then, when she had finished, I looked in our movie cupboard and discovered we had only Netflixed "Caspian" rather than buying it.  We ordered it from Amazon, and it arrived today.

I had been telling her all along that books are always better than movies, but she hadn't believed me.  And this morning, when she had read chapter 2 of Dawn Treader and was telling me about it, she told me that Caspian was going on his voyage to find the seven swords, a complete invention of the movie entirely unfounded in the text.  So tonight I decided to make my point.

We started the movie, and every time it did something differently from the book, I asked her, "Did Peter fight with other boys in the book?" "Did Susan kill people in the book?" "Wasn't Trumpkin much more pleasant in the book?" "They skipped the whole scene where they followed Aslan, didn't they?" "Did they attack Miraz's castle in the book?  They just added this to make Peter look like he's not a good king."  It didn't take her long to realize that a lot of the things she'd enjoyed in the book simply weren't there in the movie: "All right, now I believe you: The books are better."

All in all, a lesson worth the $14 we spend on the DVD.

To be fair, "Prince Caspian" was the perfect movie to prove my point with, as they made it much darker and more violent than the book.  "Dawn Treader," despite its "seven swords" and tacked-on "be yourself" preachiness, was much more faithful to the text.  "Prince Caspian" went out of its way to make likeable characters dour and show the good guys in-fighting and making stupid decisions that get people killed.  My favorite part of Prince Caspian is the early chapters with the Pevensies traveling with Trumpkin and how thoroughly pleasant and cheerful and kind they are to each other.  Hollywood seems to believe that such characters are "unrealistic" and that audiences would rather see characters sniping at each other.  (What was the direction they gave the girl playing Susan in this movie?  "Be as snotty and stand-offish and unpleasant as possible at all times?")  Why portray goodness and give children a model to emulate when you can instead demonstrate that all supposed heroes have feet of clay?

(I'm a bit bitter.  I had such a crush on book-Peter when I was young.)