Jessie's thoughts on the Ruins

So my reason for picking this was I had just read the novel which is a deceptively sick psychological thriller. The film was adapated by the author, Scott Smith, which kind of surprised me that he would stick in different pieces of the story that made it so great and kept me on the edge of my seat reading it, with the film they seemed kind of slapped together just to have them happen on screen. Still that being said, for a horror type film, i liked it's pace (which kind of drags in the book) and it reveals things nicely to kind of build up to the end, which in the film was all about the vines, while in the book it's all about the realization that they were never leaving that place, it was their tomb.

One example of what I was referring to earlier with plot points thrown in for no apparent reason, there's a scene on their first night where Stacy jerks off her boyfriend for a comforting sense of normalcy, well in the book, it is the example of the first salvo from the vines, as they find his secretion and ingest it, for lack of better word, but also creep inside his dickhole; in the film, she jerks him off just for the hell of it. Matthias was such a strong, mysterious character in the novel and here he's relegated to empty victim with barely any characterization.

It's so cliched but the book is always better than the film because of length issues but I think film has a unique way of being able to take the same stories and mold them into different versions of the same tale, with perhaps a unique viewpoint. This realy didn't fit the mold. The characters all were slightly altered from the book, and what happens to who, but one of the most telling parts from the book is when Eric and the girls get drunk and start discussing if they survive this, who would play who in a film, and what archetypes would fit what; well they followed it to a tee here which was even more cliched. Still, the movie's strengths were it's constant action with the vines and the eeriness and originality of the vines themselves which I was hoping they would show all the tricks and whistles of but they pretty much got them all in.