Vicky | BLOGGER
Better Days: The Differences Between Movie and its Novel
Bullying has been a hot issue in recent
years, and there are hundreds of cases
regarding to campus bullying each year.
In order to attract people’s attention, many
movies have been focused on this issue.
Among them, Better Days is one of the most
popular movies. The movie
Better Days is adapted from its original novel, In His Youth, In Her Beauty, which is written by Jiu, Yuexi. This novel features the theme of youth campus bullying, and there are three main characters: Chen Nian (the female leading role), Xiao Bei (the male leading role) and Wei Lai (the main bully). Although both novel and movie deliver the core issue of school bullying to the public through portraying the two main leadings’ miserable life, there are some differences in the two works, including the characters’ personalities, the relationship between the two main characters, and the ending plots.
Firstly, some of the characters’ personalities in the movie are different from those in the novel. Although the female leading role, Chen Nian, is the victim of bullying in both of the novel and movie, she shows different personalities in the two versions. In the novel, her most notable feature is stuttering, while it is completely removed from the movie. Therefore, she is braver and more fearless in terms of dealing with her suffer in the movie compared with that in the novel. In addition, the main bully, Wei Lai, who does poorly in studies and creates an image of bad girl in the novel has the opposite performance in the movie, which makes it harder to imagine that she is the kind of person who will bully others. These changes bring another perspective and unexpected surprises to the audience.
The last and the most obvious difference is that they share distinct endings. At the end of the movie, Chen Nian accidentally killed Wei Lai in a fierce quarrel and conflict, and Xiao Bei chose to commit the crime for her by disguising himself as a rapist in front of the police. After the investigation, Chen Nian was eventually persuaded to the jail for her sin. However, in the novel, she only injured Wei Lai but didn’t kill her. Instead, Xiao Bei was sentenced for seven years because he killed the real rapist in order to protect her. Nevertheless, no matter what kind of ending, they both depictedhow hard Xiao Bei tried to take care of Chen Nian, and how important she was in his life.
To sum up, there are three significant disparities between the movie Better Days and its novel: characters’ different individualities, two main leadings’ relationship manifestation, and unpredicted separate endings. Despite these divergences, Better Days is a great medium to let the public experience dissimilar clarifications of the plot and most importantly have a better understanding of the issue of bullying.
