Book vs Movie: The Hate U Give

It’s the age old debate. What was better, the book or the movie? Since I’m a bookish person, I often tend to say the book, but in my experience my judgment often depends on whether I first saw the movie or read the book. Whatever comes first determines how I picture the characters. The hate u give by Angie Thomas was written in 2017 and was turned into a movie in 2018. I’ll try to compare the movie and the book in the following post. All judgment is purely my opinion and is of course not universally valid. If you want to form your own opinion you can check out the book and the movie in the library!

The Story

The hate u give tells the story of sixteen year old Star Carter. Star lives her life torn between two worlds. One world includes her poor, predominantly African American neighborhood and another is her fancy, nearly all white school. One world contains her family and her childhood friends and the other world contains her boyfriend and her school friends. In one world she is just Maverick’s little daughter and in the other world she is cool “by default” because she is black. It is tough, but Star balances her lives and she is happy until her childhood best friend, Khalil, is shot by a police officer. Star’s two perfectly separated worlds collide with each other and she has to make some difficult choices. Because she is the sole witness, only she can tell the world what really happened that night. But can she speak up if every word she says endangers her family?

The Book vs The Movie

I read the book before I watched the movie and this is most likely the reason why I wasn’t very happy with the casting of some characters. Starr and her boyfriend Chris especially looked different in my imagination. I will not use that as an argument against the movie since the way people look in books is mostly a matter of interpretation. But some characters did not only look “wrong,” they missed entirely. DeVante, one of the main characters in the book, didn’t exist in the movie. Some of his storyline was written into the role of Starr’s older brother but readers of the book will miss DeVante’s cheeky character. Since DeVante didn’t exist in the movie, the role of Uncle Carlos also had to be changed. Carlos is the brother of Star’s Mum and he is a cop. These are the similarities between book and movie. In the book Carlos is also torn between two worlds. He knows the life in Star’s community and judges what happened to Khalil, but he is also a policeman and he knows the job and what can happen on the job. Carlos tries to help DeVante to get out of his gang, but since there is no DeVante in the movie that part of the story misses too. Carlos’ character simply had a bigger role in the book then he had in the movie. But it was not only Carlos. The characters of Starr’s school friends were changed too. Maya and Hailey play a part in the movie but I missed an entire story line. The book describes a fight between the three girls during which Starr decides that a person who can’t understand or support her is no friend to her. The fight also happens in the movie, but we just see the escalation, we don’t see how Starr grows and we don’t see how much it costs her to break with Hailey.

All in all, you could say that the movie was less drastic than the book. We don’t see the full amount of police brutality that Angie Thomas describes in her book. And the riots in Starr’s neighborhood also seem less violent and more civilized in the movie than they were in the book. That might be the case because the producers wanted to receive a certain rating. But, whatever the reason was, it made the movie tame.

My Opinion

I really liked the book. It was one of the best books I read in a long time, and I was very curious about the movie. But as you might have noticed, I didn’t particularly like the movie. I mean it wasn’t a bad movie. I loved the soundtrack, but the movie was simply not as good as the book. The problem might be that the book was written from Starr’s perspective. And turning a story that was told in first person into a movie is always difficult. The other thing I complained about where the significant cuts in the story. Yes, I know, the movie is already over two hours long and they had to make cuts, but it still pained me. To sum up I would like to say The hate U give by Angie Thomas was an outcry. It portrayed what is wrong in today’s society and the book managed to do that in a way that will impress teens as well as adults. The movie, on the other hand, was a nice movie, but if you say the book was an outcry then the movie was just a whisper.

Enough of my opinion. Check out the movie and the book in the library and form your own opinion!

-Post by Alex Schenck, Library Intern

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