The Princess Bride is a great book and a great movie. I recently read Cary Elwes’ book As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride and learned a lot about the making of the movie. Normally the book is better than the movie, but in the case of The Princess Bride I think the movie is just as good as the book and arguably better because it has had a wider influence. Reading Elwes’ book caused me to think a lot about why The Princess Bride movie is so great.
I like a good story, but even a good story needs to be told properly. When verbalizing a story, I use different words and sentence structures than when I am writing the same story. There are many ways and mediums to tell the same story and many of those have been used to tell the story of The Hitchhiker’ Guide to the Galaxy. Some stories, or at least some narratives, tend to work better for certain mediums and I think often when a good book is adapted for screen that the movies isn’t as good because the medium isn’t as right for the story. But this is not the case for The Princess Bride.
William Goldman, a gifted author, wrote The Princess Bride book in 1973. But Goldman is also a gifted screenwriter, and I think in the years between writing the book and then crafting the screenplay he thought a lot about how to tell the same story in a different way. This means that the movie, while not 100% faithful to the book, is still faithful to the story.
Both the book and the movie tell the story of a six-fingered man, iocane powder, rodents of unusual size, true love and more. The book can provide a depth of details that couldn’t effectively be conveyed in movie format, but the movie is incredibly quotable. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim the movie is better than the book, but I think it is just as great because it is the same story told by a creator skilled in telling a story in two different mediums.
