Sunday 8 April 2012

To Kill a Mockingbird

There are some books that just shouldn't be made into films. This is without a doubt one of them.

From start to finish this film makes a travesty of one of the best books ever written. The book provides suspense and drama with a beautiful well-paced story. The film tries to condense the story into two hours and in doing so misses almost everything that makes this story great.

There is no tension, or any real discovery by Jem and Scout, over the racial issues that exist in 1930s America. Boo Radley is just a bizarre character that has just been added on to make the book's ending make sense (although it fails at that!). While characters are never introduced nor developed.

Now yes I understand that this is supposed to be told from the perspective of a six year old child so I shouldn't expect a perfect story (unreliable narrator and all that crap). But I would really appreciate some development of Scout's character, some understanding of who she was and who she becomes. The book manages this well, the film is quite frankly pathetic in its attempts.

Gregory Peck is perhaps the only enjoyable part of this movie, and he was well deserving of his Oscar. Sadly for me it wasn't nearly enough to merit this movie being anywhere near a Top 100.

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