A Comparison Between The Book And The Film Of The Old Man and the Sea Essay

A Comparison between the Book and the Film of the Old Man and the Sea

Watching the film of The Old Man and the Sea has changed the way I imagined the story to be, in my vision Santiago would have been older, frailer and more dependant, but the film has shown him to be the opposite of these. In my view, the boy would have been older, stronger, wiser but be more dependent on Santiago. The village, including Santiagos shack, in the film almost resembled the exact image that I had, only I thought the terrace would be more crowded and lively.

The effects in the film completely changed the way I imagined Santiago and the sea, some of the special effects were poorly filmed and therefore ruined that particular part of the story because it became unrealistic and fake. The image of the fish jumping was well captured in the film, although it was obvious that it was a real catch taking place edited into the film. Only once the fish was alongside the skiff with the Santiago, it was once again obvious that it was a plastic figure, but the size of the fish related to the skiff was accurate to the book.

The techniques used in the film were good, using a narrator who kept tight to the exact words of the book and rarely strayed, this allowed the viewer to relate to the book which means that the film became more accurate. Unfortunately, the text that the narrator did leave out was vital to understand the story with its hidden meanings. The voice of Santiago in the film is what I expected, full of long suffering and tiredness, but the voice of Manolin is not how I assumed it to be, the boy in the film had a stronger accent and his voice was harder than I expected.

The images used in the film were less dramatic to what I first portrayed it to be, in my imagination I thought that the capturing and killing of the fish would be more dramatic and far more detailed than was shown. The dreams that Santiago have was well shown in the film having a wavy image made the feeling of a dream realistic, and the lions and the beaches are what I was expecting to see.

In my opinion, the book is by far superior to the film, containing more detail. The book is, of course, what Hemmingway wrote exactly, so it gave the exact effect that Hemmingway wanted, but the film was taken from the book and it did not contain some parts which Hemmingway had wrote, so parts of the story and its significance was lost. Understandably, the film could not contain every detail that the book had because it would be too long and would therefore become unpopular to all. The film was a failed attempt to match the book, which was a superbly written novella.