Everytime that I go to watch a movie that has been based on a book, I hear hordes of people mumbling about how rubbish they expect the movie is going to be in comparisson. I know that I have heard probably a thousand times that any movie based on a book is going to be absolutely terrible!

Now I admit that Hollywood needs to come up with some more original ideas for movies. And, fair enough, a vast majority of the movies that are based on books don't capture the books the way that we imagined them. But that isn't really the director's fault. He portrayed the book as he saw it, and sometimes that works out amazingly well, while other times it ends up being terrible. For an example of a movie that turned out really badly I just need to look at The Golden Compass.

First off, I really have a problem with the name. I grew up reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I always knew the first book as The Northern Lights. I knew that in America, the name of the book had been changed to The Golden Compass, but I expected that the movie would be named according to what the rest of the world know the book by. What annoys me even more is that I saw the book in the bookshop the other day with the new fancy movie cover. In tiny letters at the top of the cover was printed "The Northern Lights", and at the bottom in huge letters it read "RELEASED AS THE GOLDEN COMPASS". It really upset me. Especially since they changed the name to reflect the movie and the movie was truly awful. I loved the books... I couldn't stand to watch the movie again. And it ruined my memory of the book. I haven't read it in years and years, and yet I had such fond memories of it. And now all of those memories have been erased to be replaced by the worst performance I have ever seen Nicole Kidman give and an average performance by Daniel Craig.

On the other hand of the spectrum, however, I recently read Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I watched the movie first and I absolutely adored the movie. I have watched it so many times that I have the scenes saved in my head and when I was reading the book, I could pick out which quotes had been used and which had been altered ever so slightly. I was given the book for Christmas and it has taken me a long while to gather the energy to read it. And it's quite a good thing that I did wait, because I read it in 2 days flat. If I had started reading it before the vacation, I would never have done any of the assignments that I had due for the last couple of days of term.

I was really disappointed with the book though. I found some parts of it really funny, parts that the movie had left out, and I was so sad to find parts of the movie that I had really enjoyed that were left out. I was really disappointed at the fact that Captain Shakespeare wasn't in it. His original character, Captain Alberic, was not nearly as entertaining. Robert De Niro really made that role for me and I think that the movie wouldn't have been the same without him. I was also so disappointed by the ending. It is completely different. In the movie the ending is filled with action and suspense. It almost felt as though Gaiman was rushing to finish the story with the book, and after watching the movie and seeing so much action and drama, I was expecting the same of the book and it let me down slightly.

That isn't to say that the book Stardust isn't absolutely amazing. It is so beautifully written and I suggest that anyone who enjoyed the movie read it. But I think what it comes down to is that movies that are based on books should be looked at as separate entities, separate stories that have very little to do with the book themselves. If everyone went to a movie and viewed it without having the book that it was based on in mind, then they would probably find that the movies were good in their own right. Not as a representation of a book, but as a movie on its own. Books and movies should just stay separate. If you need to go and see a movie that has been based on your favourite book, you should expect that it will not come out the way that you imagined it. But if you go with an open mind, you might find that you enjoy both the movie and the book even though they are completely different.