#neverlettingo

Okay guys, for what I've seen most of you are upset about Tom Holland and Daisey Ridley portraying 14 year olds (or 12 whatev) Todd Hewitt and Viola Eade from the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, but please don't get me wrong, I also get upset when the screen adaptation of a book/series of books isn't loyal to it's main source (for example, the age of Percy Jackson and friends on the two movies the book series had) but after thinking about this for a little while I've come to accept this as the only way they could have done this movie. So here i'm gonna talk about why this was necessary on some points:

1. Marketing

Okay, actually this is the most lame one but still. These books aren't child books (like Harry Potter were and had actual kids portraying the main characters), these were directed for young adults and still they talk about some harsh topics in a little more dept (remember this guy Patrick Ness also wrote A Monster Calls which is effing deep), so when you make a movie for a little more mature audience what you need are actors that these audiences will more likely accept as main heroes in a story and there are no more likable actors for this generation of young adults than Tom Holland (Spider-man) and Daisey Ridley (Ray from Star Wars). So yeah, basically if the movie makers wanted to have a successful film that could look atractive to the public, remember they are trying to sell this as the new Hunger Games, then they had to have older actors (which by the way I obviously doubt will portray 14 year olds, but instead 17 or something).

2. Violence

If you read the books you know this. There is some heavy violence directed towards both Todd and Viola, so in a Hollywood film when you use violence against a character that is a minor it is limited (nothing more than some punches and little fight scenes in which they are usually against another young character, not fully grown adults unless it's a horror film in which also violence is limited for minors), you can't just go and explicitly torture a 14 year old character on your film, you just can't. So if they had kept the original age of Todd and Viola they would have had to somehow decrease the violence and make the film a little more family friendly which I think it's not what they want.

3. Sexuality

Todd and Viola are never actually involved in any sexual activity but still the books manage to have many sexual themes/situations in them.

Todd sees sexual thoughts all the time in the noise of the men of Prentisstown, Davy Prentiss wants Todd to join him on having probably non consensual sexual activities with the women of New Prentisstown, Viola has to walk the streets surrounded by men who think she's about to be the victim of a rape and do nothing but wish luck to the man they think is going to do it, Lee gets to have sexual fantasies with Viola and also imagine her and Todd having some sexual intercourse in the middle of his jealousy, Viola sees explicitly in the noise of Bradley Trench his fantasies of having sex with Simone. No studio will put the weight of such situations on such young characters, unless they censor all these things from the books which again, I don't think is what they want to do.

I believe and also wish that they want to make these movies as deep and rough as the books are, and for that they made the decision of having older main characters, because only then they would be able to deal with any topic and so I think this was necessary, for the good of the movies and for not having to censor anything from these amazing books. I just hope I'm right and that they're not just messing with everything the books have tried to tell us so far since Patrick Ness is involved in the making of the movie there's hope for me that this thing is going to turn out good.