MY WORLD

IF I STAY

Hello again! Today in this My world section I’m going to talk about a movie I saw yesterday: If I stay.

This movie is based on a book with the same name, which I read some months ago. The story is about Mia, a seventeen year old-girl who suffers a car accident involving all her family. While she’s in coma, she has and out-of-body experience and she sees all her family and friends in the hospital. Then, she realizes that the decision to live or to die it’s up to her, so while she relives some of her best memories, she tries to decide if she wants to wake up and live a life way more difficult than she ever thought or if she wants to give up and die. 

I really liked the book, because even though it’s very sad, the sad scenes are mixed with happy memories, and I liked that contrast. That’s why I think the movie was a good adaptation, because they kept the essence of the book by combining the parts in the hospital with the memories. A thing that also made me think it was a good adaptation was that Mia is narrating the movie, and I think this makes the movie approach more to the book.

But, although I loved the movie, like every single book adaptation, it has differences with the book. Here are some of the differences that I noticed:

 [THIS MAY CONTAIN SOME LITTLE SPOILERS]

- The first difference that I noticed was Kim, Mia’s best friend. In the book she was so different, she was described as a little girl with black hair and who was always wearing a braid, and in the movie she’s got light brown and loose hair. I know it’s not a very big difference, but a thing that I love in adaptations is that the characters stick with the description of the book, and in this case it wasn’t like this, the opposite of Adam, Mia’s boyfriend, who was exactly like I imagined him.

- Mia is a really good cellist, and she gets the opportunity to audition for Juilliard, a prestigious music school. So, another difference was that in the movie before the Juilliard audition, Adam prints a big picture of the ceiling of the hall where Mia is going to audition and he sticks it in Mia’s bedroom ceiling, saying to her that if she sees it every day, the day of the audition she won’t be that nervous. This did not appear in the book, but I think it’s a very cute detail and I like it in the movie.

- Some things that I missed in the movie are the ‘’concert’’ that Adam’s friends give in the hospital to distract the security guard so Adam can get in the room to see Mia, and Kim’s mother, a very emotional woman who cries for everything. These two things brought a little bit of humour in the hospital scenes, and they made me smile, so it was a pity that they weren’t in the movie.

- The last difference I’m going to comment is the ending. I’m not going to say anything about it because I don’t want to give big spoilers, but although it was quite different from the book, it was as beautiful and emotional and it l made me cry so much, just like the book.  

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