wow...sad...they should have stuck to the book in my opinion...If you haven't YOU MUST READ the book! It is an excellent read. I know i may seem stranger than most 14 yr olds...I love reading long complicated books...Pride and Prejudice, Last of the Mohican, Wuthering Heights, Sense and sensibility, all of those types..

Thank you!!

Spare me the whole should have stuck to the book crap... the characterizations in the book are just awful, you never get a chance to really feel the characters, there was no description to sink your teeth into or to even like them that much. For one thing in the book, Alice is just fainting and crying all the time, no change from beginning to end. You can't tell me someone doesn't change after being lost in the woods, escaping death so many times, being in the middle of a war, and watching people die. They get captured and recaptured a few more times than in the film. The book goes to great lengths to convince the reader of exactly how helpless these two are, including at one point how their caretakers had to be sure to get them well indoors at night because the slightest trace of dew would certainly kill them.

The Daniel Day-Lewis incarnation of Hawkeye as a taciturn man of action rather than the voluble, slightly cocky scout we find with the book, who keeps banging on about being a man without a cross, and is constantly at pains to point out that he is white... yeah, we get it. The book version of Hawkeye was about as romantic as a block of stale cheese and let's not forget his pathetic disguises pretending to be a bear and everyone believes him to be one or Chingachgook being a beaver... and everyone buys it...

The American Indians in the book are largely portrayed as either foolish, weak, cowardly, or far too bestial to ever be redeemed. There dialogue is limited to the occasional exclamation of a "Hugh". The writer Cooper tries to write nice things about the Indians, but he is so condescending toward them that he nullifies anything positive that he intended to say. Also, the British are shown in a more positive light in the book despite the fact the way they really treated the Indians and the early Americans. There's a never-ending description of every rock, twig, river, and there is no vivid description to translate the action taking place. I could go on... but I'll be here all day.

Mark Twain was right about Cooper.
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The filmmakers did the right thing by not following the book.