Ender's Game

[stormlord]

I got a taste of all this when the Lord of the Rings movies were made several years ago. I had already read the series written by Tolkien, so none of the movies surprised me. However, I didn't enjoy the movies, either. I'm an avid reader and I think books just go into the details more and that's what I enjoy. It's just hard to squish it all into 2 hours. Movies are nice on occasion, but I think I prefer to read and watch different plots rather than the same ones. Knowing how Lord of the Rings would end didn't help me enjoy the movie. And if I had watched the movie before reading the books then the same thing would happen if I read them after. Still, if I HAD to choose between reading it first or watching it first I think I'd watch it first because at least when you read it later more details will come out rather than less. Then again, I still think it's playing with fire.

It's not so much that you can't squish a lot into 2 hours of movie, it's that the human mind can't absorb it all in 2 hours. The best movies have to be watched more than once and/or you have to contemplate them afterwards. This is at least how my mind works. I need time to absorb things. When I'm reading a book I don't read it all at once. I might read an hour in a day. I'm also a slow reader. So for some matter of days I'll be thinking about a scene or a character in the book and I get a lot of opportunity to swim around in it.