Book to Movie Comparison: Into The Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

The book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer follows the true story of Christopher McCandless's journey to Alaska to live alone in the wilderness, the people he meets along the way, and his eventual death.

The book was adapted into a movie directed by Sean Penn and released in 2007. Like the book, the film shows the triumphs and failures that Chris went through on his journey of life and death as he tried to survive alone in the wild. 

You can preview or watch the movie here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WydJ1w31OEI


Here are my thoughts: 
Firstly, I recommend reading the book before watching the movie.

The book tries to present the facts to the reader, even though Jon Krakauer admits that he is a bit bias, and give as much information as possible about Chris's story.

Emile Hirsch plays Christopher McCandless in the film. I think this was a good choice, he looked quite a bit like Chris did in the pictures I've seen and did a decent job of portraying Chris in the movie. I think that the casting for the movie was done very well.

For me, a lot of the movie seemed fake. I knew that the overall story was true, how Chris left his home to travel and eventually goes to Alaska, but I also knew that in a lot of the scenes we don't know exactly what Chris said to certain people or what he was thinking. Even if the people he talked to along his journey were interviewed, a memory of an event is not always 100% accurate. Because I knew that a lot of things in the movie were things that just could have happened, and didn't definitely happen, it made it not seem so real.

I feel like the movie was clearly made in a way that Chris's family approved of. In the book it is obvious that Chris struggled to deal with finding out that his parents had been lying to him.  The movie shows the family grieving over Chris leaving them, even showing Chris's father sitting in the middle of the street clearly in agony over the loss of his son. It also makes it seem like in the end Chris has forgiven his parents, which I believe is how his family wanted themselves to be depicted as.

There are several things in the movie that were clearly added to make it a better story. For example Chris's romance with Tracy who was played by Kristen Stewart. In the book it was only briefly mentioned that Tracy had a crush on Chris.

I feel that the movie depicted Chris as somewhat crazy for wanting to leave the comforts of society. For example, one scene shows Chris talking to an apple that he is eating and makes jokes about it. I think the book never said one way or another whether he was crazy or not. The book simply presented the facts to the reader so that people could form their own opinions about Chris. Jon Krakauer did give his own opinion, but I don't think it does much to influence the readers' opinion. I felt that the movie was trying to force an opinion onto the audience by depicted Chris as crazy.

Overall, I liked the book better than the movie. I think it was a decent adaptation of the book, however I wasn't thrilled with it. I rated the book 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads and I think I would give the film a 3 out of 5 stars if I had to give it a rating. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't the greatest movies ever and I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would.