Ray Bradbury's Adaptation Of Themes In Film

Theme is the true definition of writing. Theme can tell a story and teach a lesson. It is what is meant to take from the story. Doesn't have to be told and understood right away. Theme is not a summary, it's not explaining the characters or setting. It is the most important thing because it is the lesson. Bigger than the story on its own. It is meant to make the reader continue to infer: make them think about the story much longer after they finish reading. When adapting a novel to a film some complications may arise. The theme can change, you can’t have as much creative control and even the stories ending. In a film we are giving exactly what the director want to see we don’t have much to fill in on our own. Stories leave us some room to make out some of our own ideas. “Sometimes filmmakers make changes to highlight new themes, emphasize different traits in a character, or even try to solve problems they perceive in the original work”(Adaptation). The filmmaker will change things to fit their outlook sometimes they don’t even care if it ruins what the writer of the novel had created before him. It is very difficult to keep the theme between the two.

The theme for the story that was written by Ray Bradbury is that technology can run our lives and distract us from what is important. “The car moved down the empty riverbed streets and off away leaving the streets empty.”(Bradbury, Ray) At the end of the short story we are left to infer what happened to Mead. Was he eventually let go, or was he forced to live out the rest of his days in prison maybe worse an institution? In this universe the norm is to be followed and never broken. There is very little crime and the fact that Mead is walking at night is too much for them to