The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the Movie

Plot
The plot of the movie is exactly the same as the book. The movie opens up with a scene of Benjamin's mother on her deathbed giving birth. Then it goes to his father coming into the room and is embarrased that he has a son that looks like he could be his father. Both of the stories go into the woman talking about a clockmaker's son who goes to war in WWI and dies, and how the father keeps making clocks, and surpisingly the clock goes counterclockwise. And the clockmaker wishes that time would go backwords so that the events of the war can be reversed and that all the soldiers who died can return to their families.

Point of View
The movie and the book both tell the story from the same point of view. The movie tells it from a first person view from somebody else, and you get the same thing in the movie from somebody who was there the whole life of Benjamin Button. Usually the movie will have its own narrator but this time the director decided to make the point of view the same as the story. There are not too many major differences between the book and the movie, you get a sense of the story from somebody else. It is as if somebody is there and is reading something that somebody has written for them to read.

Characterization
In the movie you can see how each character interacts with each other. With the book, one would have to make up the interactions on their own, but in the movie one can see how the director takes it and how he puts it into a movie. The movie depicts how Mr. Button must have acted when he saw his newly born elderly looking baby. One can see how much he is frustrated and how embarrassed he is. The movie also shows how hard Benjamin's life was while he was interacting with everyone.

Setting
While the book does not exactly say that the setting is during the Civil War, the movie does a better job of showing it. In the movie the viewers are able to see how everybody dressed and how everybody acted around that time. In the book, the readers have to infer on their own about what time it exactly is. The movie allows the person to also get the setting of each scene. They can feel the atmosphere that must have been prestent when each of the things occured in Benjamin's life.

Theme
Identity: The movie shows how much identity is important to Benjamin. He is a man who has to travel through his life backwords and grow young as everybody ages. He must make his own identity in the world. He must show that age and looks does not make a person but how the person acts and how they treat somebody is the real identity.

Transformation: The movie depicts the theme of transformation better than book does. Here the viewers get to see how each character evolves from either an old man to a young boy or from a young boy to an old man. Here the audience can visually see how each of the ages are different only because of how they look.

Family: The movie makes it easier for the viewers to see how family is very important to Benjamin and how it affects his life. With his life the way it was in the begining, it now affects his life when he has his own family, and his own son. In the movie, the director created an easy way for the viewers to experience how difficult it really was for Benjamin to interact with his own family and how hard it was for his family to interact with him.