I read this book in high school. It wasn’t until later that it was announced a film adaptation was in the works (at the time it was M. Night Shyamalan who was tied to direct. Yikes, right?), and the consensus seemed to be that this was a huge mistake, that the novel was one of those “unfilmable” kind of stories. How would they even logistically film a lifeboat that housed a boy and a live tiger? How would they express the magic realism, or whatever you want to call the business on the boat and the mysterious island?
It turned out to be an example of someone taking source material and simultaneously making it their own as well as capturing everything people loved about the original story. Screenwriter David Magee, whose previous work on Finding Neverland I also found underrated, cannot get enough credit for this. Somehow he and Ang Lee were able to make the animals as beautiful and sympathetic as they were in the book, make the survival story just as vivid, and maintain the religious themes with the same poignancy as author Yann Martel.
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