Into the wild, book and movie comparison

Into the Wild, book and movie comparison

Into the Wild is a book written by Jon Krakauer, it is also a film directed by Sean Penn, they both talk about the life of Chris McCandless, a young man who went on a journey throughout the United States, leaving everything behind and isolating himself from society and from his family. But the novel and the movie both have different ways to the Chris McCandless’s story. We’re now going to take a look at the biggest differences between the movie and the book.

The book is more a biography of Chris’s life based on notes he wrote and letters from people and interviews with people who knew him, the story is never being told by one person. The story also doesn’t follow any type of chronological order and starts with the death of the main character, it is possible that Krakauer did that in order to make the story seem like a police investigation and not like a long endless story.  In the book, you also don’t really know much about Carine, Chris’s sister.  The movie shows a lot more than the book and goes deeper by showing us Chris McCandless’s relationships with people. The movie also follows a certain chronological order, unless you read the book, you can’t guess that Chris dies until the very end. The story is told by Carine who now has a much more important role than in the book, she tells the story and in the meantime gives us an “inside look” on Chris’s relation with his sister and his parents.

While the movie gives more details about Chris’s relation with people, the book doesn’t always stick with the story of Chris McCandless and gives us far more details about the environment, details Chris would never have known, for example why the bus was in the stampede trail and that Chris's abandoned car was used in undercover drug operations.

In the book it talks about him being ‘moody’. He was a loner.  He chose to be a loner.  I did not really see that in the movie.  In the movie he seemed like a nice guy who just wanted to explore Alaska.  I thought of him more as a man on an adventure than someone trying to isolate himself from family and friends.

In the book, Chris is being showed as “intelligent”, Krakauer tells us that McCandless went to Emory University and that he graduated in April of 1990 with a “bachelor’s degree in both history and anthropology”. He also “maintained a 3.72 grade point average” during college. McCandless has to be very intelligent to go to college. Wayne Westerberg, one of the people that Chris met during his journey, said that, “You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent. He read a lot, and used a lot of big words”. But While McCandless is seen as “intelligent” in the book, he is seen more as “saintly” and “wise” in the movie. To show that, we see Chris donating some money to an organization. When McCandless graduated from Emory, he had almost twenty-five thousand dollars left and he decided to give it all since he never really cared that much about money.

In truth, Chris McCandless was more like the person in the book, but the movie is good cinema and is really enjoyable watching. The movie romanticized Chris's life more than the novel. I think that the changes the movie director made were to appeal to a more diverse and wide audience.

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