#Cinema Sunday: One Day Film vs Book

Hey everyone! Today, I thought I’d take a step back from books (shocking, I know) to review a book adaptation I watched this week. Cinema Sunday is a really fun tag hosted over at Escape 2 Fiction and I thought I’d give it a go. I can’t work out if that site no longer exists or if my computer is playing up, but never mind. Here’s the tag!

Have you seen One Day? Read the book? Which do you prefer? Let me know in the comments!

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Back in January, I read One Day for the first time and instantly fell in love with it. Find my review of it here 🙂 It’s a standalone novel by David Nicholls that follows Emma and Dexter through their lives on same day every year. It’s a great idea, but I wasn’t sure how well it would translate onto the screen.

As it turns out, not very well.

One of my biggest problems was that there was no consistency with the length of time spent on different years. Yes, they’re not all going to be the same length but one of the days was, I kid you not, about 30 seconds long. And then the final ones were around half an hour. The best part about the book One Day was that it was full of little details that created an overall sense of really knowing these characters. And if I hadn’t read the book before, I WOULD HAVE BEEN SO CONFUSED (referring back to the fact that one of the years was 30 seconds long).

Emma was played by Anne Hathaway (who I loveeee) but I don’t think she was done justice! First of all, Emma is supposed to be from Yorkshire. Anne Hathway is not from Yorkshire… and she wasn’t for most of the film 😂. There was the occasional twang on a word but otherwise it was just the generic posh-british-accent-that-some-americans-seem-to-think-is-how-everyone-speaks. Additionally, in the book, Emma is intellectual and shy but in the film they just turned her into a nerd. That was annoying. The film focused more on Dexter – whose plot was probably more suited to the film (ie more dramatic/full of drugs). But it’s not a film about Dexter, it’s about both of them!

To conclude, One Day is a brilliant book. I knew it would be interesting to see how it was adapted, but I thought it was a shame how much stuff was missed out. The ending was really sweet and almost made up for it – but it was only great because it followed the book directly! 😦 If you’re looking for a more interesting take on girl-meets-boy then I’d highly recommend the One Day film. But if you’ve read the book before, you’ll be dissapointed!