The Chocolate War

by Robert Cormier

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Compare and contrast the novel and film versions of "The Chocolate War".

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The film adaptation of "The Chocolate War" stays largely faithful to Robert Cormier's novel, maintaining many characters and dialogues. However, it adds fantasy scenes involving Jerry's mother and significantly alters the ending. In the film, Jerry fights Archie instead of Emile, wins, and feels remorse, whereas the book ends with Jerry's defeat and a bleak message about resisting authority. This change affects the portrayal of power dynamics and the story's original intent.

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For the most part, the 1988 film directed by Keith Gordon is a faithful screen adaptation of Robert Cormier's book. Many of the characters are the same, and dialogue sequences in the movie are frequently lifted straight from Cormier's excellent young adult book. It should be obvious that the movie does not use every dialogue sequence from the book, and the book does give us much more insight and background into the thoughts of various characters. The movie added some fantasy scenes that involve Jerry's dead mother, and those sequences are not present in the book. The biggest change, and one that I think didn't need to be made, is the ending. The book has Jerry fighting Emile. Jerry loses the fight and tells Goubert never to fight the system. Archie and the Vigils come out of everything just fine. The end is quite depressing. The movie has Jerry fighting Archie. Jerry wins the fight, and Jerry feels terrible about his actions. Jerry tells Goubert that he should have just sold the chocolates. The Vigils come out just fine as in the book, but Archie is now a subordinate.

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Likely the biggest change from the book to the movie is in the outcome of the final fight and the participants in it.  Jerry fights Archie, instead of Emile, and instead of losing the fight in rather spectacular fashion, he wins it and feels bad afterwards.

This is a rather large deviation from the ending of the book and suggests some very different things.  Instead of Archie remaining the leader of the Vigils and them remaining in power, there is some breakup and loss of their power in the movie version.  Some argue that this completely perverts the author's intent in terms of the story.  Perhaps it was karma that then made the film rather unsuccessful!

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