Movie Comparison/Contrast

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If I Stay Movie Comparison/Contrast Choices- sometimes you make them, and others they make you. In If I Stay by Gayle Forman, Mia Hall, an Oregon country girl, has to make some life changing choices. After being thrown from a car on a snowy morning, she must decide whether to stay or to go be with her family, who didn’t survive the crash. Mia uses her music, classical of genre, to cope through the hard times and eventually make a choice- to stay. The movie adaptation of the book is just as mesmerizing as the book, but some aspects just aren’t quite right. Between the book and the movie adaptation of If I Stay, there are many conspicuous similarities and differences that enhance and/or undermine the story. For starters, both versions…show more content…
In the book, the car crash scene is described much more vividly than in the movie. Mia finds her mother and father, then herself. When she gets to her dad, she sees “gray chunks of what looks like cauliflower,” which are pieces of his brain, and she knows he is dead (Forman 14). Next, she sees her mom, who’s “lips are already blue and the whites of her eyes are completely red” (Forman 14). Mia then finds herself, but before she does, she knows both of her parents are dead. She, and the audience, hold no sort of hope of her parents surviving after that. I think that for sure affects how she fights to stay alive and her feelings towards what decision to make. I think it also affects how the audience feels towards the movie, it makes them more hopeful that Mia will survive. In the movie, however, the crash scene leaves a lot of confusion. Mia awakens and, while observing the wreckage and looking for her parents, finds herself. She never sees her parents at the scene, so that does give her, and the audience, some glimmer of hope that they may survive, because she, or the audience, don’t know their condition at all. I, personally, liked it better the way the book portrayed the scene. I liked how her mom and dad got to go together, which her mom mentioned before was what she would want. It was a positive look into the awful tragedy. The car…show more content…
Mia scores an audition with Julliard. She is super nervous for her audition, so Adam, her boyfriend, does something to make her not so nervous. He printed out, page by page, a replica of the ceiling of where she would be auditioning. He put it up there, so, as he says, “If you look at it every night, it won’t seem so scary when you get there” (If I Stay). This scene wasn’t in the book, which I don’t like. Adam isn’t always very supportive of Mia auditioning for, and possibly going to, Julliard. The ceiling scene said a lot about Adam and his true feeling for Mia. Even if he isn’t always supportive of Julliard, it shows he’s always supportive of her. I wish this scene would have been in the book for that very reason. The movie does have some things, including Adam’s grand gesture, that aren’t in the
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