Junghyun 1,

Junghyun Lee

Mr. dayton

American literature

June 6, 2022

The Final Paper

The movie “Monster” and the book “Monster'' are complementing each other for readers

to understand the theme and the story of the Monster. Movie has more realistic emotions that

come out from the characters much better than in the book. Even though there are many people

who are not used to the English language or Languages that are used in trial, better understood by

actors’ emotional acting. When characters said objection, your honor, testify, innocent, guilty,

convicted, I didn’t know the meaning of words but could make a logical guess by their tone and

accent. However, it was very confusing to read the trial book for the first time as an English

language second learner. The book contains more detail in the story and gives realistic feelings to

the reader with each word. But not being able to understand those words only brought confusion

to me. For me, even though the book “Monster” contains more details in the story, because I was

struggling to understand single words from the book, the movie helped me better understand the

full story; theme for the book.

The story details from the book and the movie contain a little difference. In the movie Steve's

relationship with his father looked stronger than in the book. His father was losing his complete

trust in his son while he was forcely arrested by police. Steve’s parents were trusting him very

much in the movie. I think books and movies complement each other by presenting the story

with different techniques. Both of them contained two different individual details in the book
 and the film. The role of lawyer Kathy O’brien in the film was less than in the book. It

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could change the perspective of the reader but also help them to be able to watch films with a

variety of perspectives on steve. Steve is a average teenager who just study at school with good

working habit but got into the jail by false testification by real felony murder and people who

were in the jail after being convicted by judge. In this storyline, readers’ perspective would be

different depending on who is watching the movie and who is reading the book. In the book

readers are more confident that Steve is innocent and not guilty by its cover and storyline but the

movie watcher is deciding whether Steve is guilty or not by the testimony from witnesses.

Reading and watching both book and movie would help better readers to understand the

significance of the story than people who experienced only one of them.