A novel can prove to be a masterpiece after it's adapted into a movie and turns out to contain much more artistic value in written words than in picture frames. Acclaimed by the Time magazine as the best novel of the past decade, English writer Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" jumps into a Fox Searchlight produced movie of the same name, but shows itself as unfilmmable.
However, it's not the fault of director, Mark Romanek, or his excellent cast, since much of the movie carefully adheres to the novel from the setting to the plot and the theme to the tone. Set in the past in an alternative England, "Never Let Me Go" tells the story of a boarding school where hundreds of kids are cultivated to donate when they turn into their 20s or 30s. The donors' purpose is left murky until midway through the book but the strategy of incremental revelation is undermined twenty minutes into the movie: they are clones; they exit to grow kidneys, hearts and other useful body parts and then end up losing their lives after three or four organs have been harvested.
Sorry, that's the movie business. Screenwriters are trained to tell what's at issue in the beginning and then viewers must sit through to see if the ending goes the way they anticipated in their minds. That said, moviegoers of "Never Let Me Go" might expect it to be a story like "The Island", a 2005 sci-fi blockbuster about how clones struggle to run away for freedom. However, the new "clone" movie is more of an inner-world depiction than a showcase of any physical stunts and actions.
So the remaining bulk of the movie just revolves around a teenage trio with special effort to describe the unspoken jealousies, rages, despair, friendships, and puppy love of 12-year-old Kathy when she witnesses her boyfriend, Tommy, and her best friend, Ruth, pair off as sweethearts as the three can't help but come closer to adulthood. The story looks tepid and drowsy onscreen while it gets exquisite and heartbreaking in literature, and offers more than the story itself between the lines. That's the magic of words.
It's safe to say that any story about what it means to be a clone implicitly or directly asks what it means to be human. "Never Let Me Go" touches upon the issue again and essentially rests on the ultimate question of "why we all should live a life." It pushes people to ponder if what's shown in the movie is the way the developed world treats the rest of humanity in reality.
Nevertheless, the thoughts provoked here on big screen is not even half of what the book tries to tell. "Never Let Me Go" proves itself to be a great novel, mainly because it could never be great as anything else.
On my 1 to 10 movie scale, I give the movie adaptation a SIX.
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