While I found the movie to be a suitable movie adaptation, I don’t think it serves as an effective stand in for the book. If we’re strictly speaking from a plot and enjoyment standpoint, it checked all the boxes for me, matching the overall tone and emotional sentiments the book evokes. However, it lacks many of the literary elements that give the book so much additional depth.
The largest of these, which would be impossible for any movie, is the sense of time passing the book employs. Much of Watanabe's experience throughout the book is spent going through the motions of life without really experiencing his formative college years. The movie makes a good attempt by showing scenes of school life where his peers engage in lively conversation and protestors run past him as he sits solemnly eating or something like that, but we don’t get the same sense of the years slipping by. We miss out on that acute loneliness he feels during the periods where Midori doesn’t call him since the movie simply edits past it. This is obviously just a practical problem but I still think it changes the overall experience.
Additionally, the movie, aside from maybe one mention, loses the Germany/France connection we discussed so much in class. They even took out Storm Trooper! This was the strangest change to me since not only did he provide some necessary comic relief, he was the basis of a lot of Watanabe’s conversations with Naoko and Midori and gave an idea of what they found charming about him.
I enjoyed the movie and found the casting, set design and score really effective, but I’m not sure Murakami’s stories are really designed to be told through this medium.
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