Me Before You: A Movie Where Daenerys Targaryen and Tywin Lannister Are Actually in the Same Scene!

*Disclaimer*

No major spoilers here.

Sorry, couldn't help slipping in that Game of Thrones reference in the title there. 

So what did I think after watching the movie compared to the book? I guess it’s fair to say you can’t really expect much from a movie adaptation of a 140,000 (possibly more) word count novel. First of all, I love the book. I couldn’t put it down right from the beginning. The storyline wasn’t draggy, the characters were beautifully written, the scenes were almost so realistic you kind of forget you’re reading a book, there were lots of humor and wit, and also a lot of gentle and emotional moments at the right places. It’s really difficult to write a book with all that and Jojo Moyes did it. No wonder it sold over 4 million copies.

Taken from Goodreads

Taken from Wikipedia

Now, for the movie, I love Emilia Clarke as an actress. I wouldn’t have known her if it wasn’t for Game of Thrones. I mean, I did watch Terminator Genisys, but I didn’t start watching GOT yet at that time, even though my boyfriend did, but he wasn’t the type to get all excited and jump up and down pointing to the screen and shouting, “Sarah Conner is Daenerys Targaryen!”

No, no. He definitely does not do that. So yeah, Emilia Clarke never did stood out for me before I started seeing her as Daenerys.

As for Sam Claflin, I didn’t know who he was but he did justice protraying Will Traynor.

One thing that annoys me when my favorite books get adapted into films is how much they change the plot. Think The DUFF by Kody Keplinger (they just took the characters! Changed practically 99% of the plot. They even casted Bella Thorne as the mean girl where in the book, there were no mean girls at all, and made the whole movie seem so superficial when actually the book was not), and Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen (okay, fine, in all fairness How To Deal was a merger of Someone Like You and That Summer, but still, the movie kind of sucked). But Me Before You was pleasantly a surprise. It didn’t run far from the original storyline, just a few small changes and some plots never made it to the big screen, but the script and characters was everything like in the book. And that’s most likely because Jojo Moyes wrote the screenplay herself.

BUT it was all a little too rushing for me. It was like they were trying to put everything in only under 2 hours and it developed just way too fast that you didn’t have time to feel any real emotions and before you know it, Lou is already crying on the bed beside Will, and you’re thinking, wait, they alredy fell in love?

This is just my personal opinion and maybe it’s because I read the book before watching the movie and because of all the emotions I felt from the book, I was having high expectations from the movie. I didn’t feel this way with A Walk To Remember by Nicholas Sparks though, because maybe  I saw the movie first before reading the book, and I felt a lot of emotions from the movie.

Would I recommend watching the movie? Sure, because Emilia Clarke is a delight to watch. But I would also highly recommend to read the book instead because it’s too good to pass up.

And I’m still thinking if I should read After You or not, because after Lou and Will’s love story, it just feels so wrong to have a sequel and should just have ended there with a bang. I read that Jojo Moyes wasn’t even thinking of a sequel when she wrote Me Before You, so I think when the writer writes a story without the intention of it having a sequel, then if later a sequel happens, the sequel won’t be as good, if not better, as the first one.