Compare and Contrast the 1963 and 1990 film versions of Lord of the Flies. Which was the most helpful for students of the text?

Authors Avatar

Compare and Contrast the 1963 and 1990 film versions of Lord of the Flies. Which was the most helpful for students of the text?

The coloured 1990 film is mainly aimed at an American audience. The Actors are all American meaning that the language was different to the book. It was also based in a modern period that also effects how the characters talk and act. They make it appealing to the American audience by showing the good characters as perfect American citizens, so none of the characters have a good or a bad side to them; they either have one or the other and no in-between. They also have the American Navy saving the boys at the end to make the audience feel proud of their country. Another thing that makes it appealing to the audience is that the Russians are portrayed as the enemy, like they are in real life.

The black and white 1963 film is aimed at English, upper/middle class viewers. The time period isn’t so clear in this film, and so like the book the moral applies to anytime. It would appeal to these viewers because of the upper/middle class language used, and the fact that it was the less posh working class boy, Piggy, that was the outcast. This film sticks closely to the novels story line and the characters in it.

The main characters in the book are still present in both films (Ralph, Piggy, Jack, Simon, Rodger, Sam’n’Eric). The 1963 film stayed faithful to the amount of boys in the story and their characters personality. There is no extra characters added on; but the physical appearance to some had changed. The characters are represented like they are in the book; Ralph is the leader and who brought them all together by blowing the conch. His main aim is to create a civilised society and to get rescued as quickly as possible. Jack is the leader of the choirboys, he’s bossy and is a bully and all he is interested is hunting. Piggy is an outcast who thinks the conch and what it represents is important. Simon is quite and shy. He likes nature and feels he’s at home on the island. This film would help the student because it’s practically the same as the book throughout.

 In the American film San’n’Eric, and the younger children don’t play as such an important part as in the book. There are also not as many characters as in the novel. In the 1990 film Jack wasn’t shown as the bossy and nasty character he was in the book, but seemed quite friendly at the beginning. Ralph was perfect and was never even tempted to do anything wrong. Piggy was very weak and relayed a lot more on Ralph the he did in the book. The author put together these characters very carefully to represent different things and by changing this student wouldn’t get the right idea about the novel.

The 1990 film had a lot of changes. In the book the children are alone with no adults but this film shows them arriving with an injured man so they didn’t arrive totally alone. All the boys already know each other because they are all cadets. Ralph already had authority and Jack only has the fact that he’s the oldest. There is less conflict between Jack and Ralph at the beginning because Jack didn’t have any power to be taken away from him. Another change was instead of the whole forest going up when the fire goes out of control it just damages one tree and they manage to put it out, were as in the book they failed to put the fire out. The whole point of the whole forest catching fire was to show that things could easily get out of their control and how the humans have destroyed this beautiful island.  This shows that the film was made for an American audience because they don’t like to see their people failing. In the book Ralph tells everyone the nickname he was called at school. The whole point of this was to show that Piggy has always been an outcast but in the film Jack makes up the nickname Piggy because Piggy started a fight with him. In the book the beast was meant to be a made up thing but in this film the beast was an Adult who was presumed to be dead. This missed the point of that they were starting to think the island had a bad side to it. Another thing that changed in the American film was the way that Piggy died. In the book Piggy was meant to fall into the sea and disappears quickly, but in the film he just falls to the ground. The 1963 film matches the book and shows him helpless and blind on the rocks and the falling into the sea before being dragged under, and it showed the conch breaking as he died. The only differences in the story in this film was that no one died in the first fire, and the fruit they ate didn’t make them ill.        

Join now!

In the book the beast is an imaginary thing that symbolises evil that is on the island. The 1963 film stuck to this point, but the 1990 film had the beast as a human adult so they had a real thing to focus on. The parachutist was meant to symbolise that the outside world may be just as bad. The whole idea of the beast and the messages behind it stay the same, but the 1990 film didn’t have this and therefore missed the whole point of showing that the outside world might be just as bad as the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay