Is there a movie for the book If I Stay?

Other things that are different: in the movie both Mom and Dad are DOA, in the book Dad dies later in the hospital; in the movie everyone is taken to the same hospital, in the book Teddy is at the local hospital and Mia is life-flighted to what I’ll assume is OHSU; Adam and Mia don’t go see Yo Yo Ma in the movie, but a different, less famous, cellist; for Halloween Adam dresses as Mozart in the book and Beethoven in the movie; Adam’s band name is changed from Shooting Star in the book to the Willamette Stone in the movie; in the movie Dad sells his drums to pay for Mia’s cello, in the book he has the drums in the basement and Teddy plays them; in the movie, Adam has a sexy shed for making moves and music, in the book these scenes either take place at Mia’s house or don’t happen at all. The movie removes: band camp, pretty much everything Gram does, several Kim scenes, Teddy’s birth, the funeral Mia, her parents, and Adam go to, Dad’s song, and the lead singer of Bikini. Also, the movie stalls the car crash scene for quite a while, and it takes place on, I believe, page fifteen of the book. And finally, the movie has the delightful ability to add actual music to this music story, and it does.

Chloe Moretz as Mia and Jamie Blackley as her boyfriend, Adam. The two share an out-of-body moment after Mia’s accident.

Books have been written, years have passed, and movies have been created, but the age old question still lives: which is better: the book or the movie?

“If I Stay” by Gayle Forman is the story of a gifted cello player named Mia whose whole life changes in a split second. “If I Stay”, directed by R.J. Cutler, is also the story of a gifted cello player named Mia whose whole life changes in a split second. Both stories follow Mia while she makes a life or death decision after her family got killed in a car accident. If she stays, she wakes up an orphan, but if she leaves, she won’t know if she got into Juilliard and won’t be with her boyfriend, Adam, anymore.

Both stories are equally compelling, however, the movie is never the same quality as the book.

The big differences for me that make the book better than the movie are the small details. Of course a movie could never capture the images running through your mind when you first read the book, but they could accurately use the writers’ descriptions to try.

Now the movie was great, don’t get me wrong, the way they started, ended, and everything in between was perfect. However, there were two details which I really thought could have been more accurate in regards to the book.

First off, Teddy, Mia’s brother, was perfectly fine in the movie and then had a rare brain problem and ended up passing away later. Whereas in the book, he dies at a different hospital and the readers are never really told what specifically happened. I personally like the book version better because I felt that killing him after being perceived as fine was a bit too harsh.

The next part I disliked about the movie was the ending. At the end of the movie Adam sings Mia a song, while in the book he tells her that as long as she stays he would do whatever she wanted him to do. I felt that the movie made it too cheesy as well as contradicting towards earlier information about what it would take for Adam to write Mia a song.

Despite my preference for the book, I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of whether or not Mia is accepted into Julliard. In the book, we never find out if Mia made into Julliard, but I’m the movie we do; Adam breaks into Mia’s house and gets her letter from Julliard.

In both plot lines, “If I Stay” is a compelling story that is sure to warm the heart of many. I encourage everyone to read the book before going to the movies, but if you absolutely despise reading then I would still recommend going to watch the movie to see this amazing book come to life. In addition to reading/watching “If I Stay”, I would also recommend reading Gayle Froman’s sequel “Where She Went.”

A terrible car crash leaves senior in high school Mia Hall (Chloe Grace Moretz) trapped somewhere between life and death.  Sometime after the crash, Mia follows her body in an out-of-body-experience to the hospital, while trying to listen to nurses and family members talk about the state of her parents, Kat (Mireille Enos) and Denny (Joshua Leonard) and her brother, Teddy (Jakob Davies).  During her out-of-body-experience, her ‘real’ body is in a comatose state in the ICU.  The Mia that’s wandering around the hospital can’t interact with anyone or anything.

Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Mia in “If I Stay,” a film adaptation of Gayle Forman’s novel.

Mia has flashbacks of her life, which I assume were supposed to bring interest and emotion to the story. I thought they were great at first, but I eventually found them boring and repetitive — Mia and her boyfriend, Adam (Jamie Blackley) fight, Mia and Adam get back together, Mia and her family are perfect and always get along.

Mia realizes that she has to choose whether she fights to live and stay with Adam or follow a white light she sees in the hospital halls and choose to die and be with her family.  I didn’t appreciate how this portrayed Mia as a girl who depended so much on her boyfriend — a teenage romance cliché. Mia struggles internally, unable to ask anyone for help to make the right decision.  She’s on her own.

Although I didn’t shed any tears, I still thought that the movie was more emotional than the book. I can’t say too much without giving spoilers, but I will say that Moretz was heartbreaking in her role as Mia.

In the book, Mia and her family are unrealistic.  They got along, never fought and Mia thought her parents were the coolest.  If this was supposed to make me any more emotionally attached to the characters, it didn’t work.  They seemed flat and unreal.  Mia didn’t have much of a personality in the first half of the book.  The movie was better at making the characters three-dimensional and lively.  It made Mia’s family unit a little less perfect.

The movie also cut out strange parts from the book that confused me, like when a rockstar came to the hospital to help Adam get past a nurse to see Mia.

Eventually, the movie started to show more of Mia’s flaws.  As she relived old memories with her family, Adam and her best friend Kim (Liana Liberato), her life began to seem less perfect.  Although I think that the memories were, again, placed to make the watcher feel more connected to the characters, I didn’t feel anymore related to the Halls.

Both the movie and the book seemed improbable at times, like how Mia and Adam’s relationship was sudden and intense from the start.  I got the impression from the movie that Adam bought Mia expensive tickets to a Yo Yo Ma concert before they even met.  They are also overly in tune to their emotions, so much so that I found it unbelievable.  At times they seemed to know exactly what they should say, like when Adam delivers the line, “but the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I’ll be in love with tomorrow.”

I liked both the book and the movie, but I thought that the movie was better.  The book was good at keeping the plot interesting and fast-paced, but the movie brought the story and the characters to life.  The movie made me feel for the characters.  It dove deeper into Mia’s memories, revealing the different aspects of her life- her family, her best friend, her boyfriend and her music.

What is the movie If I Stay about?

Is there a part 2 of If I Stay?

Where can I see the movie If I Stay?

Is there a 3rd book to If I Stay?