Was 'The Rum Diary' movie better than HST's original novel?

Just the other day, I finally got the chance to watch the recent motion picture adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1961 novel, “The Rum Diary.” I read the original novel several years ago, so I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie.

Released last Oct. 28, “The Rum Diary” was directed by Bruce Robinson and starred Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins and Giovanni Ribisi.

Depp, who also played the lead role in the 1998 film adaptation of Thompson’s famous book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” appears in “The Rum Diary” as Paul Kemp, a new reporter at The San Juan Star. The Star was a real-life English language newspaper located in San Juan, Puerto Rico that went out of business in 2008.

In the movie, Kemp joins the newspaper and finds that it is struggling to stay afloat. It’s losing money, struggling against poor readership and is staffed by a weird and lazy assortment of characters. Kemp is paired with a well-meaning photographer named Sala, and they have a number of adventures and close calls together. Kemp eventually finds himself in the middle of a land-seizure scheme and in a love triangle with a beautiful woman and the island’s top shyster.

If anything, this movie is definitely a “newspaper movie,” and I think that my colleagues in that profession will get a kick out of it. One of the movie’s most colorful characters is Moberg, who is played by Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi has been in a ton of movies, and is arguably best known his roles in “Saving Private Ryan” and “Avatar.” Moberg is The Star’s chronically absent and drunk crime reporter. He’s also Sala’s roommate and among other oddities, he maintains a collection of Adolph Hitler speech records and a full Nazi uniform.

For me, this movie was one of those rare instances where the movie is more entertaining than the book. That’s not to say that the novel was bad. I just liked the movie version more. The movie did make me want to dust off my copy of the novel and re-read it a second time.

Thompson wrote the novel in 1961, but it wasn’t published until 1998, which should tell you what book publishers thought of the book, especially when you consider the popularity of Thompson’s other books. Like many of Thompson’s other books, “The Rum Diary” is partially based on his true-life experiences. In the early 1960s, he worked for a sports-themed newspaper in San Juan that eventually went out of business. Thompson became friends with a number of reporters who worked for The Star, and he applied for a job there, but was never hired.

In the end, I really enjoyed watching “The Rum Diary.” I would recommend it to anyone in the audience old enough to vote and especially to my newspaper friends. If you haven’t read the novel, I recommend that too.

How many of you have watched “The Rum Diary”? What did you think about it? Did you think it was better than the novel? Why? Let us know in the comments section below.