First off , this was a great movie - not as good as the novel , but still a very good movie.
What bothers me - in the book , the story is told from the viewpoint of Chief Bromden and I do not understand why the film wasn't done from that perspective - would have made it even better and it is classic cinema as it is. -jmho
Probably to generalise the appeal for a bigger audience, to make it more accessible in a way. Quite often things get changed between book or original script so that it has more appeal to what a film-going audience might want at the time, or to suit studio preferences.
shareWhen you can watch a movie there isn't much need for a narrator. It works sometimes but mostly they turn it into a third person perspective. Forty years later, Fifty Shades did the same thing. The books were told from Ana's opinion but the movies weren't.
shareThat's it, having one character being the main protagonist and another being the POV character is very technically difficult in a movie, and tends to reduce the feeling of immediacy. It's sort of opposite from reading a book, where seeing as person through a character's eyes rather than an impersonal narrator makes the story seem more intimate, but in a film things feel much more personal if the camera observes the character directly, without the interposition of a narrator.
Which is, BTW, one of the many, many reasons it's so hard to adapt "The Great Gatsby" to film, the story is so much about the narrator. But Chief is more of an observer than an active participant for much of the story, and IMHO this us one story that should be given as much immediacy as possible.
I actually thought the movie was better. I didn’t like that the book was from Chiefs perspective because I had to constantly decipher his poor English and that got really annoying.
I also didn’t like that most of the patients checked out before Chief escaped, now I think it was a good idea to give closer to those characters and show that they were able to break free from the hospital but the chiefs escape is this big epic moment and I think having the other inmates leave the hospital before that kind of lessens the impact.
I didn’t like that the book was from Chiefs perspective because I had to constantly decipher his poor English and that got really annoying.
I hadn't read the novel til last year. I first watched the movie back in 2007. It was a big shock to me that Chief wasn't deaf at that scene towards the end of the movie. That would have been ruined with Chief's narration.
shareDue to his schizophrenia, Chief is a bit of an unreliable narrator in the book. So keeping that perspective might had made the storytelling more confusing than engaging.
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