Lord of the Flies by William Golding was first adapted into a movie in 1963 and again in 1990. The movie was moderately successful but has not enjoyed the same classic status as the novel. The first notable difference between the book and the 1990 movie is that in the novel the boys are English schoolboys whereas in the movie they are Americans. Furthermore, Ralph appears to have a broken arm in the movie.
The novel opens with a vision of the scar "smashed into the jungle" giving a real sense of its destruction against Ralph's features and the beauty that surrounds him. This sets the tone for the book, foreshadowing the hopelessness of the boys despite the best efforts of Ralph, Piggy and Simon. The movie does not place the same emphasis on the unforgiving landscape, but reveals an endlessly beautiful, if not eerie, setting with an adult survivor, the captain, seriously injured and unconscious, and quite a contrast to the book's island with absolutely no "grown ups."
In the novel, the boys are not traveling as one group and the only "group" is the choir, of which Jack is "chapter chorister." In the movie, the boys are all military cadets and, unlike the book where Ralph is voted in as chief based on his demeanor and the fact that he blows the conch, in the movie it is his cadet rank being higher than Jack's that decides his position as leader, which Jack, in contrast to the book, graciously agrees to. In the book, Ralph's having blown the conch first makes him "set apart," and this creates a clear association between the order that Ralph represents and the power of the conch. As Jack has little respect for the conch and it loses its power as the novel progresses, so Ralph loses his ability to keep order. There is less emphasis on this in the movie and the conch plays a far less significant role. Ralph's dependence on Piggy's intellect is also downplayed in the movie.
In the book, the relationship between Jack and Piggy is always tenuous and it is Jack who notices Piggy's glasses and suggests using them to start the signal fire. In the movie, Ralph has the idea, not Jack, and takes Piggy's glasses and so, although there is tension between Jack and Piggy, the significance of the glasses is not as strong at this point.
Another sharp contrast is in the identification of the beast and the developments surrounding it. In the movie, the boys start to feel uneasy while sitting around the fire as Jack tells a scary story of a "thing," but in the book the beast progresses from a "beastie," a snake-like thing in the imaginations of the littleuns. The captain does not feature in the book at all but in the movie he almost becomes the personification of the beast after running away, disoriented. A littlun now part of Jack's tribe mistakes him for the beast in a cave and stabs him with a hand-crafted sharp stick, whereas in the book the beast becomes tangible when, on glimpsing the dead man caught on some branches of a tree by his parachute, the boys finally conceptualize it and Ralph says it "had teeth...and big, black eyes." Simon's dreams and visions in the book are far more intense, less physical and more spiritual than portrayed in the movie.
In the movie, a helicopter flies low and close to the island but in the book, it is a ship that passes. The fire has gone out and so the boys' presence goes unnoticed. There are various other occurrences that shift the emphasis although the essence remains the same.
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