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The Old Man and the Sea - Comparison Between the Book and the Film

Decent Essays

After having read the Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea" as a book in class, we also watched the film which was made afterwards because of the story's enormous popularity. As always, there are some ways in which the book differs from the film as well as the fact that they have several things in common. Taking into consideration that this novel was Hemingway's last desperate attempt at breaking through after all his previous narratives flopped I thought that the film might be different from the movie indeed because he might've wanted to bring the story into perfection in this way. Also I assumed it to be very boring to spend a whole film showing how one single man overcomes his mental and physical problems and eventually manages to catch a …show more content…

Those trains of thought, though not essential for the story, make it gripping. So what do we expect from the film?
 More depth in the story and events through an extra role, flashbacks or different storylines.
 Making the story less longwinded by bringing in more physical interaction.
 The general storyline with Santiago's thoughts, norms, values and struggles and how he overcomes them to be a little more exaggerated for extra psychological depth in the story and make the message clearer.

After having watched the film the first thing that struck me was that because of the lack of computer techniques and animations (there was no computer in the days it was produced), and the obvious changes between studio scenes and the ones made out at sea made the whole film resemble a comedy rather than a serious drama one. This doesn't matter, of course, because the story in general is very serious; it's a struggle between life and death. The first real difference between the book and the film become clear at the very beginning of the movie, when a writer asks his wife "how shall use that old man in my story?" and the woman answers: "You have to decide; you are the author!" It is from then on very obvious that Hemingway and his wife play a part in the film themselves, and that the old man is their image because they have to overcome some problems as well. After the man sold his car and

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