I read the book first. And even though the book wasn't that great, they managed to make the movie even worse. The book had a lot of flaws, but being cliche was not one of them. The movie was pretty much as cliche as a cliche dystopian scifi movie can be.
The acting was not great, the plot was totally predictable. The story was even simpler than in the book and nothing was explained well or at all (though the book had this issue, as well). It was so rushed and they tried to fit so much stuff to so little time. There was not one second of a breather, but action after action. They should have built up the world and the characters a lot more, like in the book. Instead, we jumped into an unknown world full of characters we knew or cared nothing about.
The world was a perfect example of a dystopian world, when you are told to imagine any generic dystopian world. It was literally the same "red is bad, so everything red is evil and blue is good" kind of authoritarian World Government stuff we have seen at least a million times already.
I don't understand why they had to change all the things, which were precisely the best things about the book. But no, and they even changed the bad bits, too, so we end up with a movie, that doesn't even resemble the book. Well, sure, some of the characters had same names, but that's about it.
I'm super sad to say that this is not worth a watch. I wanted to like this so much more, just like with the book, but I just can't. We need more Finnish scifi, and unfortunately this is not filling that gap.
The acting was not great, the plot was totally predictable. The story was even simpler than in the book and nothing was explained well or at all (though the book had this issue, as well). It was so rushed and they tried to fit so much stuff to so little time. There was not one second of a breather, but action after action. They should have built up the world and the characters a lot more, like in the book. Instead, we jumped into an unknown world full of characters we knew or cared nothing about.
The world was a perfect example of a dystopian world, when you are told to imagine any generic dystopian world. It was literally the same "red is bad, so everything red is evil and blue is good" kind of authoritarian World Government stuff we have seen at least a million times already.
I don't understand why they had to change all the things, which were precisely the best things about the book. But no, and they even changed the bad bits, too, so we end up with a movie, that doesn't even resemble the book. Well, sure, some of the characters had same names, but that's about it.
I'm super sad to say that this is not worth a watch. I wanted to like this so much more, just like with the book, but I just can't. We need more Finnish scifi, and unfortunately this is not filling that gap.
