Why Books Are Better Than The Movie (Most of the time)

  I remember one plane ride last year. My mother sat next to me with her newly bought iPad primed and ready to watch a movie she bought on iTunes. We each took an earbud and pressed play. 30 minutes in, I gave up.
   That movie was "Anna Karenina" based off of the classic novel by Leo Tolstoy. It was supposed to be a pretty good book, but I had never read it. However, the movie was just a piece of crap. I couldn't figure why it was so bad, I just really despised it.

The Pile of Cowpies That I'm Referring To

   This year I saw that Anna Karenina was free on the iBook store on my iPad so I bought it and am currently now reading it in all of it's 900 page glory. It's actually pretty interesting. It's a bit like Downton Abbey, but set in imperialist Russia. And, the further I get into it, the more I realize why the movie sucked so badly.

Tolstoy's Baby

   It was because they writers who had turned the book into a screenplay had completely ignored the nuances of the story. They focused on the book's title characters too much. Sure her illicit affair is a single plot line but the movie focused too much on that one aspect.
   Anna Karenina is not just about Anna Karenina. It's about her brother and her brother's friend and his sister and his wife and Anna's lover. It's not just about the frick-frack. The book actually sets up the background for the characters, it shows who they are as people and how they react to situations. In fact, Anna doesn't even show up until you get about 10 chapters in.

   Lots of movies based off of books suffer from a lack of attention to detail. It's great if a book has an awesome or intriguing idea behind it but you can't just make a film based off of one thing. You have to use that idea as the spider at the center of a web, and from that web weave the characters and ups and downs and everything that makes any piece of art compelling and beautiful.