Describing the aftermath of a post-coitus scene as “his dick disrupted symmetry,” Rumaan Alam’s clever writing makes the book superior to the movie. 

Alam’s descriptive writing transports the inner workings of the character’s thoughts. One such line with Amanda, “amid the head nodding, she forgot to listen,” reveals a human behavior we can all relate to. There are numerous examples of this style in the book, making for an entertaining read. 

This is not demonstrated anywhere in the movie, which makes for a solid, but run of the mill dystopian movie that doesn’t set itself apart from other movies in the genre. 

What we also get with the book is what other people are going through amidst the chaos. Sure, there are scenes such as the victims from the airplane crash, but we as an audience don’t get the luxury of what is going on in the world outside the vantage point of the main characters. 

In the book, Alam provides a dire example: “She did not know that the Chinese man who ran it was inside the elevator that carried passengers between the turnstiles and the platform at the R train station in Brooklyn Heights, and he’d been there for hours, and he’d die there, though that was many hours in the future yet.”

We don’t get this in the movie, and we are left to only care about the main characters. In a story where the world is ending, I like to see what other people are going through, but the movie doesn’t provide that luxury. 

There is a subplot in the movie where the daughter, Rose Sandford, is trying her damndest to watch the series finale of Friends. What got me interested in the movie in the first place was how Friends was interwoven in the story. I was curious, so it led me to check it out. However, there wasn’t anything substantial to this subplot. It looks like they used the popularity of Friends to advertise the movie, and they took advantage of my fandom. It is a solid movie, but the mention of Friends wasn’t even in the book, and it was unnecessary. 

I will say it is a dated book, with Alam mentioning current events from the past few years, with acknowledgments of Obama and Trump. I’m not a big fan of taking specific real-world events and inserting them in a work of fiction, simply because it caters to the audience who experienced the current era. It doesn’t make the story timeless. If I instead read this book ten years later, I would feel a sense of nostalgia about what went on at that point in time, but I would be reading it in the present tense. It just wouldn’t seem relevant. 

The cast, which includes Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke, does a superb job, despite the subpar writing. I wasn’t a big fan of Myha’la, who plays the daughter of Ali’s character. In the book, Ali’s character, G.H. Scott was accompanied by his wife instead of his daughter. I didn’t feel this change was necessary. Also, Scott was much older in the book. I’m assuming they made him younger to showcase the sexual tension between him and Roberts’ character Amanda, which I was also not a fan of. 

The movie fails in telling an interesting story, which Alam succeeds in his book.

https://screenrant.com/leave-the-world-behind-netflix-movie-book-changes-differences