The book is better than the movie

I could challenge you to find movies that are better than the book they were based on but you would be hard pushed ( 0r wrong). At best you may put together a short list of movies that have done their book counter parts justice and that leaves all the other books that have been torn asunder by the big screen. When you pick up a book and delve into the life of its fictional characters, you can often find yourself immersed in their world. Sometimes when it's particularly well written you take a bit of that world away with you. You have ideas about how the characters looks and sometimes might have actually seen their story play out in your mind. At times it can almost be devastating to see that made into a movie and have the whole thing fall apart in front of an audience of thousands.

Last night I went to see Gone Girl in the cinema. I will warn you at this point that I had previously read the book so there may be spoilers ahead. If you have not yet familiarised yourself with the story then you might want to read on. I read Gone girl last year when the whole buzz around it as a book was just beginning and I was curious to see what the all the fuss was about. This kind of thinking when choosing a book doesn't always pay off because it was the same sort of media frenzy that caused me to read fifty shades of grey, a travesty of mammoth proportions but I will save my rant on lady porn novels for another day.
I found myself quickly drawn into the story and within pages I had drawn my own conclusions about where the narrative was going and then midway through the book, my assumptions about the characters were flipped on their head. I could not put it down although I refuse to say I found it unputdownable as my inner grammar Nazi flinches when I use made up words. Everything I had thought about where the story was going was wrong and the story was deeper, darker and more complicated than I had imagined. When I reached the end of the book and the central character makes a choice that infuriated me (and most other readers from what I could gather) , I felt cheated yet this did not take from my overall enjoyment of the book and in fact I later went on to read several other books by the same author.

I had heard many great things about the movie in passing. I had steadfastly refused to read any reviews in case it gave anything away about the movie. I didn't know if it was likely to do the book justice but I didn't want to have my mind made up for me by critics. I wanted to go see it with for myself and make my own judgements on it. By only reading the headlines of articles that referenced it, I had manage to gather that the ending had been changed somewhat and some people were less than pleased about this. I assumed that they had gone and changed the one part of the story that everyone griped about most and even though it does bother me when crucial parts of a book are set aside for the sake of a good movie, in this case I was willing to make an exception.

The movie had a running time of two and a half hours which is usually longer than I will sit in a cinema, I know I am like a small child. We chose half priced Wednesday as the night to go see it for obvious financial reasons but it also happened to be during one of the the worst Thunder storms I have ever witnessed. The night seemed to have a vaguely apocalyptic air to it. All the same we arrived at the cinema armed with noms. 
The whole thing was seamlessly done with David Fincher directing. The camera work was impressive and if you took apart the film scene by scene you would have to agree it was flawlessly put together. In some ways he did do the book justice but there were elements added that I don't remember from my experience of the story. I did feel pleased with myself knowing where the story was going when my boyfriend who had not read the book whispered a ludicrous possible plot twist in my ear. It was lucky I didn't blurt out the real ending there and then. It was only towards the end that he started to take some liberties with the story and the changes everyone was annoyed about were not the ones I had been expecting. I found one characters behaviour angered me many times more when watching it play out on screen and the ending left me feeling as though I personally had been affronted . All that being said, the book is still an excellent thriller in it's own right and the movie makes for worthwhile viewing. If you are inclined to read the book then read it before you go see it because once you've seen the movie, you wont read it the same way and the experience will forever be tainted. Trust me the shock element plays out better in darkly lined pages.