Review – Under the Skin

I watched a couple of interesting movies this weekend. Two of them happened to both have Scarlett Johansen in them, “Lucy” and “Under the Skin”. Lucy was more or less what I was expecting. It was entertaining and seemed to have pretty good production value for an indie-film. “Under the Skin” was pretty trippy but the cinematography was nice. There were a lot of great visuals which were used almost exclusively to tell the story, how a film should be. “Show don’t tell”.

I found the story compelling enough to look into the book. A lot of the reviews that I came across were mostly favorable. Most of the negative reviews were from people who have read other books by the same author and were disappointed by the genre shift and others were by people who saw the movie before reading the book (like myself) and apparently did like the narrative of the book as much as the visual story telling of the movie.

Not being sold on the book I took a look at the Wikiedia entries for both the movie and the book to compare. As it turns out the movie is quite different from the book. The movie leaves it up to the viewer to make their own decisions about what exactly is going on, while the book is more straight forward and pretty much tells you about everything that is happening. Without having read the book, I find myself agreeing with the people who feel the visual story telling is more effective than the narrative presented in the book.