Film Adaptations

[thestrangewinston]

I think the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie adaptation was done really really well(Swedish version). 99% of the time the book will be better than the movie. There are some exceptions though(girl with dragon tat is NOT one of those though. Book was way better).

[cyanea]

Probably the only time I ever watched a movie, then read the book and was disappointed with the latter was Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal. I...just really didn't like the way either book was written. Plus, the books didn't have Hopkins and Levine as Lecter and Buffalo Bill. So creepy...and awesome.

It's been nearly a decade since I've read them though. I might go back and see if my opinion changes.

[Mary Sandals]

Fight Club, anyone? I felt the film was just as good as the book, even with the changes they made to it.

That being said, I'm not really a fan of the HP adaptations, though I find the LOTR movies to be easier to get through than the books (there I said it, it doesn't mean that I love the series any less, it is only rather dense at some parts).

[Deleted]

I'm gonna be controversial and say that film adaptations aren't necessarily worse than the books, it's just that most directors have no idea how to make a good film from a book. I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings films far more than the book because Tolkein is a great creative mind, but a pretty rubbish storyteller. There are entire chapters of The Return of the King where absolutely nothing happens, even though the characters are in THE MIDDLE OF A BATTLE, because Tolkein just had to describe in minute detail some piece of furniture and how it came to be in this particular place and how Aragorn was leaning on it at such-and-such an angle and looking moody... you get the picture.

A good film adaptation doesn't have to be about being a better storyteller, though. Stanley Kubrick's films are consistently brilliant and just as good as the source texts, because he knows that the visual medium and the textual medium are completely different. 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining are great films because they act as a visual counterpart to the books they're based on. Both films are enriched by knowing the book, and both books are enriched by watching the film. Someone mentioned The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy earlier. I think that's a perfect example of a well-done adaptation, and that's because it was created with the expectation of being just one of many different versions of the same story across a multitude of media, each complementing rather than attempting to reproduce or replace the others.

This also explains why films which on their own would be pretty good (e.g. Harry Potter, The Golden Compass) are disappointing. They might be great stories, and they might be great films, but for an adaptation to be great requires more, and that's to complement the books they're drawn from.

Tl;dr most adaptations are bad because they have bad directors. Also Tolkein is a bad narrator. Bring the hate