Redundant for those who have read the book

Rating: 6/10 (24 May 2006)

If you have neither read the book nor planned to read it any time soon, you shall find this movie perfectly entertaining. However, to all those of you who have already read the book, the movie may very likely appear simply boring.
Generally I prefer to watch a movie adaptation of a bestseller novel *after* reading the original story itself. Following this habit, I read the book in the last three days before I saw the movie tonight. Accompanied by a very fresh and detailed memory of the novel, I found myself yearning to fast-forward (not that I could) during the whole movie - until the very end.
The thing is, this movie offers no additional value to the readers of the book. The acting is average, quite unimpressive - neither in good nor in bad way. The camera work is plain as well, there's hardly any spectacular scene - not even the final one, which has certainly been designed to be moving but doesn't really fulfill that expectation. There is little special effect in this movie - which is nobody's fault because the story simply doesn't require much. In the end, nothing of this movie exceeds a reader's own imagination in any aspect.
On the negative side, the story has proved to be quite hard to compress for the screen. Even with a length of over two hours, the movie has cut off some significant parts of the original story and squeezed what's left even more remarkably, resulting in many small inconsistencies, logic holes and incredible speedups - specially regarding the development of human emotions over time (or rather no time, in the case of the movie), all of which not present in the book. I don't want to blame the screen writers for doing a bad job, I just think the story is simply hard to adapt in this way. Maybe if the movie had cut even more parts of the novel, it could have handle the remain more properly?
Bottom line, the story itself is definitely worth enjoying - as long as you don't take it as an religious insult, of course. Whether you choose the book or the movie is up to you, however the former makes the latter pretty much redundant.
PS: Sophie is definitely more attractive in my imagination. ;)