Movies Based on Books

I recently watched a lot of movies based on books, so I thought I'd do a little review here.

Mockingjay: Part 1

This is the most popular book to movie franchise right now. I saw the movie a few months ago. I loved the Hunger Games books. I think the movies are pretty good, but certainly not as good as the books. I don't especially love the casting. Jennifer Lawrence is a good actress and I like her a lot in other movies, but she's not how I pictured Katniss. She has grown on me with each sequel though. I liked this movie, but I'm even more excited for Part 2, when we get to see more of Peeta! It's kind of annoying how movie companies keep splitting the last book in a series into two movies, but it makes a little more sense with this book because there are two distinct parts.

The Host

I saw this about a year ago, but I wanted to include it because I really liked this movie! I actually never read The Host, but it's written by Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight books. I watched this movie not expecting too much, but I thought it had an intriguing premise: aliens are trying to inhabit earth by taking over human bodies as their "host". It turns out some humans are able to resist better than others. It sounds weird, but it's a really good fun story. It's kind of hard to describe, but definitely worth a watch.

Divergent

This is probably my favorite movie of the bunch. I read Divergent and liked it (although the other books in the series weren't nearly as good). The movie made the book come alive almost the way I pictured it, which rarely happens! This is one movie where I thought the casting was perfect (unlike the Twilight series and Hunger Games). I loved the casting for Tris, Four, and Eric. I also thought they did a good job with the fear landscape scenes. Maybe this book was easier to adapt because it has more action sequences and less thinking/feeling/emotions that can't be conveyed onscreen. For that reason, I thought the movie was just as good as the book. Maybe even a little better, because Four is smoking hot! (and so are his tattoos!)

The Fault in Our Stars

I never read this book, but I'd heard a lot about it. I knew it was a tear-jerker, so I decided to watch the movie instead of trying to get through a depressing book. The movie was cute, but not great. Shailene Woodley did a good job and was completely different from the character she played in Divergent. However, her love interest was embarrassingly awkward at times. Maybe he was awkward like that in the books, but it came across as really lame in the movie. If you can get past some of those totally cheesy initial lines, the love story is pretty cute, especially the fact that they bond over a favorite book. But both characters have cancer, so you know it's not going to end well. 

I kind of hate depressing endings, but this one at least had some depth to it. I cried a bunch watching the movie, so I can't even imagine how much I would've cried reading the book.

Overall, I would recommend all of these. The first three are more light-hearted and fun, and I would watch all of them again. The last one is a tragic story that I will probably only watch once. It makes you contemplate life and death and the meaning of our existence, which is sometimes more than I want to think about when I watch a movie.

Edit: Forgot to mention another recent book-to-movie: Gone Girl

My mom read the book and said she wouldn't recommend it. She said it was dark and she didn't like the ending. So I didn't read the book, but I was interested in seeing the movie to see what all the buzz was about. It was a good psychological thriller. It's a movie where you're constantly second guessing everything that happens and trying to figure out how the characters are manipulating each other. I heard that the movie's ending was different from the book, so I read the last 100 pages of the book to find out how they differed. People lied. They are a few minor details that are changed, but overall the endings are the same. The ending is kind of frustrating, but with a plot like that, you can't expect to like how the story turns out.