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*DISCLAIMER* This rant contains serious spoilers for both the book and the movie, so if you don’t want to ruin either I suggest you stop reading right now.

Let me preface by saying that I very rarely expect to be satisfied by a book-to-movie adaptation: The DaVinci Code? Pissed me right off. The Narnia Chronicles? Make me irritated they’re not doing the movies in order. The Golden Compass? Cheaped out and decided to end the movie a few chapters before the ACTUAL ending (resulting in a much happier ending than the book had, I might add). The X-Men Movies? Way to totally change  e v e r y t h i n g. However, there are moments I am pleasantly surprised. I adored Coraline (and the 3D version was wicked awesome – yes, I said wicked awesome, it was THAT good), and  I also thought… um, well I can’t really think of a second example so I’ll just move on.

I saw the Time Traveler’s Wife on August 23 – that’s a Sunday – and it even involved going to TWO theaters to see it (the first one we tried was sold out, believe it or not). I loved the book. I adore Rachel McAdams. The fact the TV trailer had a Carolina Liar song in it made me jump around (love them!). I was therefore totally stoked for this movie (you can ask my boyfriend how much I talked about it, and how I whined about seeing it – and the fact it wasn’t in the Timmins theatre – until he caved and went with me in Toronto when I was at home this past weekend). I was then was sorely disappointed by the time the credits rolled, and left angry and irritated. My boyfriend (who hasn’t read the book) said he enjoyed it (well, as much as a guy can enjoy a romantic drama I assume!).

In my (obviously-completely-right-because-who-in-their-right-mind-would-disagree ;) opinion, the film left out a few VERY key things, and of course a million still-important-but-not-quite-key-things.

Commence ranting.

My biggest issues?

1. The flick was missing most of the scenes from Clare’s childhood in the meadow; at the very start of the movie, we’re basically just TOLD “Okay hey, here’s this girl in love with this guy she’s never met because he time travels, and it’s true because we say so”. I think they showed us honestly, 3 scenes from the Meadow, and that is one of the most INTEGRAL parts of the book. Their story begins in the meadow, NOT the library; but the movie made it begin in present time rather than in Clare’s present/Henry’s future. Without the development of the characters throughout Clare’s childhood – all the times the met, how she hid it from her friends, how Henry beat up (and left tied to a tree) a guy that took advantage of Clare (I could make this list for days) their relationship is seriously lacking solidity.
2. At the end, when Henry time travels and gets his (eventually)fatal injury – he loses BOTH his feet, and permanently in the book. In the movie, he is only supposed to be stuck in a wheelchair for a few months. That took away the impending feeling of doom… sure we still KNEW he was going to die (thanks to foreshadowing), but there was that little glimmering hope he might heal somehow before the fatal time travel was due to happen (yes, even though they drilled it into our brains that “you can’t change the past”). Nope, that hope isn’t there in the book because if he travels, he can’t do shit since he has no feet… plus it explains how he could be more easily mistaken for a deer by Clare’s father and brother.
3. THE ENDING!! God, why did they change the flippin’ ending!? Okay, I know why: apparently it’s because test audiences couldn’t figure out the old lady at the end was Clare in her 80′s, but how dumb were their test audiences? One of the sweetest/most heart wrenching things about the book was the ending, and how Clare spent her WHOLE life waiting for Henry one last time, after countless “missed encounters” when he time travelled to see Alba (their daughter). They got their goodbye on the porch on New Years, she didn’t need closure or anything… so really, they might as well have left that entire scene out if they were going to screw with the ending like that.

And that brings me to a few less important changes, though still irritating by their own right:

1. Clare’s family, for the most part was MIA: in the book there’s this great Christmas dinner part; which they skipped. The lack of interaction detracts from the part of the ending when Clare’s father shoots Henry (while he’s time traveling). We barely even figure out it was her father first, and it’s lacking the same dynamic the scene held in the book.
2. Mrs Kim didn’t even exist.
3. Henry’s ex girlfriend, Ingrid, totally didn’t exist and she played a fairly significant role in the book.
4. There was very little (if any) reference to the fact that, in the future, Henry (and Alba’s) condition is studied and actually somewhat “normal” – that is, more than JUST Henry are afflicted. They even have a name for persons who travel: Chrono Displacement Disorder. In the book, the scene when Henry travels to the future and meets Alba is completely different (they’re virtually two entirely different scenes). In the book, Alba tells her teacher Henry is her dad, to which the teacher responds with “But your father is dead” (or something to that effect). Alba just says “He’s a CDP, like me” and the teacher accepts this as the truth. Totally left out of the movie, and while rather irrelevant to the plot it was still and interesting point/concept and it would not have been hard to toss it into the film.

And for those that are inevitably going to tell me to enjoy the movie as a standalone film (as I just did to a friend while discussing whether or not S. Darko was a good movie), for the record I also found the characters to be about as interesting as watching paint dry. They were bland and two dimensional for most the movie, and just when they FINALLY started to develop real characters it was almost like the movie went into fast-forward and we zipped along to the end.

How is it movies like Benjamin Button and Titanic can get nearly 3 hours to tell a story, but this one got under 2? Even Bandslam (The Disney movie with Vanessa Hudgens) got 5 more minutes than this one (and yes, 5 minutes could have been enough to time to at LEAST fix the damn ending).

I would have much preferred they lengthened the movie by 30-45 minutes (bringing it to roughly 2.5 hours) and expanded the characters (and plot) as opposed to taking a perfectly good book, chewing it up, and spitting it out.

There’s rumors floating around that there now might even be a TV adaptation of the book – can we bastardize it anymore? I don’t even know how a TV series could work – I mean, Henry dies, everything that happens is set is stone, you can’t change the past, yadda yadda. How could this last longer than one season? I think they should hire me to develop a TV show – I’d like to see a spinoff series (with input from Audrey Niffenegger) formed around Alba and her time traveling experiences; perhaps even the story OF Clare and Henry told through her eyes as she time travels back to see them… or something. I really don’t see a TV show working, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.