The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Written by: Maisie Knights, Books Editor and Head of Social Media
While the newest Hunger Games addition to the franchise isn’t necessarily bad, it’s a far cry from the page-to-screen adaptation greatness of Catching Fire. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows the childhood backstory and rise to power of the Capitol’s merciless leader, President Snow. It provides a deeper insight into the trauma he faced as a child during the Rebellion which is only ever hinted at in the original book trilogy. The novel is a 517-page rollercoaster of how hatred and prejudice can be harboured and groomed into pure and utter evil. Snow’s rise to power, and those he betrays in his journey, are all key components missed in the film. A key complaint when comparing the book and film is how they rushed through Act 3: The Peacekeeper, completely erasing a great chunk of Snow’s character development in the districts. Overall, the book is a slow-burn with an overriding villain arc which makes sense. And, if we’re being honest, the good looks of Snow’s on-screen actor Tom Blythe take away a lot of his bad qualities. Instead of giving us an internal monologue straight out of something from Joe Goldberg and You, we received an angsty, misunderstood blonde. But President Snow is much more than that.
Insurgent by Veronica Roth
Written by: Akanksha Pandey, Senior Editor
As a former bookworm who would consume books like air, my obsession with reading more or less ended when the dystopian genre started disappearing. The book that I think was done no justice, whatsoever, when it came to its film adaptation was Insurgent, which was the second book in Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy. In a dystopian world where society is split into 5 groups known as factions, Insurgent follows Tris continuing her efforts to stop Jeanine Matthews, the leader of Erudite from taking over. I found that the biggest weakness of the movie was how little the movie focused on Tris’s character development. This led to some of the characters having a lot of depth in the book, but were ultimately skimmed through in the movie.
The books delved into Tris’s personal growth, focusing on her internal battles as a divergent and as someone whose life had been completely uprooted. Insurgent shows Tris’s fears, her struggles and her shortcomings. Yet in the movie, Tris was portrayed as a very strong character, and the movie failed to show the reality of her journey into becoming that strong character. After the death of her entire family, Tris’s journey of acceptance was a rather long and complicated one, which the movie completely ignored. The movie failed to get into the complexities of other characters such as Four, Tris’s partner and a fellow Divergent, who had so many layers to his character in the book. The movie missed out on some critical scenes and stories from the book that were essential in shaping Four and Tris into the people that they become in Insurgent. Overall, the movie seemed very rushed and the lack of focus on developing the characters resulted in a movie packed with action which failed to address character complexities.
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
Written by: Jack Mayfield, Staff Writer
When asked to imagine Call Me By Your Name, you undoubtedly think about Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 film starring Timothée Chalamet. However, this is an adapted screenplay of the novel released a decade prior by André Aciman. Call Me By Your Name is a romance set on the Italian Riviera, the focal point being Elio, the son of a professor, and Oliver, an older American student housed by Elio’s father. The story follows the brief summer the pair meet, and the events that unfold. Whilst it may seem pretentious or contrarian, I truly believe the original medium is superior. Firstly, viewing the world through the thoughts and feelings of Elio is impeccable storytelling and impossible on the screen. Furthermore, there is also a large section at the end of the novel which is entirely skipped from the film, the moments in Rome being some of the best of the whole story. Whilst the picture is a work of art in itself, I would highly recommend reading the original first as I did since there is nothing like imagining the paradise where this story takes place.
