Ellie Kutz

While watching The Book Thief, which takes place in Natzi Germany, 1939-1942 to be more specific. The genre of this movie is Historical Fiction. To summarize this movie it is about a young German girl whose parents got taken away by Hitler and her life experiences living with her new parents during the war with many other unexpected twists and turns. It was overall a great movie. That being said, I have a few problems with the conversion from book to movie. The book was very long, five hundred+ pages, so if they didn’t cut anything then it would have been longer than The Cure for Insomnia, a real movie that’s eighty-seven hours long. While watching I made a list of things they cut. The first big thing they cut was that there was no smoking in the whole movie, they probably cut this to keep it more PG-13, but at the same time it’s a movie about Natzi Germany so it’s already not very kid friendly. In the book it was also used to show kindness by sharing them and helped bond Liesel and Hans. They completely cut Tommy Müller and replaced him with Franz Deutscher, who unlike Tommy did not turn into a nice person and Liesel's friend. Liesel also never has any night terrors, nor does Max. cutting out even more bonding moments. Along with many other small details that I liked in the books but were not included in the movie. And one last thing that isn’t a cut but a huge change they made from book to movie is that they told Rudy who Max is, which just adds so much more unneeded tension. Now to talk about the actual movie, once again I loved the movie. The acting was amazing and everything looked fabulous from set design to costumes and makeup. I don’t love how they gave Liesel blue eyes and how they made Max look. In the book they repeatedly said that Max had feather-like hair and they gave him greasy looking flat hair, but that’s me being a nit picker. The set design I have absolutely no complaints about, looked just like how I imagined Natzi Germany to look, probably because it was filmed in Babelsberg, Germany. I feel as though they could have made everyone look a little bit more dirty but once again I'm getting nit picky. I would Give this movie five stars because it’s a very difficult book to convert into a movie and they did a very good job at doing so. I would recommend reading the book first, or just at some point. That way you can get every last detail.