Book vs movie (or TV show)

When books get made into movies, there's often at least something lost in translation, but sometimes, things get dramatically changed.

Dexter, for instance, is said to be an In Name Only adaptation of the source material, especially with the books going in more supernatural directions, and the TV show staying grounded in the real world. (As a fan of the show, I'm glad they changed it)

The book Jumper was said to have totally lost the point when it was made into a movie. The book was about a guy who had the ability to teleport at will. He'd sometimes teleport into a bank, steal some money that he needed, and use it, but he had morals. But it was basically the story of the life of a guy who could teleport. The movie, on the other hand, made it all about action and threw in some obligatory bad guys, and made it all about them.

Those 2 are examples of outright blatant Adaptation Decay. Sometimes, though, only a few things are changed and the general spirit of the work is kept, or at least attempted.

Have you seen any works that were originally books before changing mediums? Did they survive the transition, or did the transition totally lose the point of the original?

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The way Hollywood is recycling everything nowadays, it's probably difficult to not have come across something adapted into a movie from another medium.

Anyway, with very few exceptions, I generally tend to find books better than the movies supposedly based off of them. Partly because novel writers generally have more room to set things up than one does in a show or movie, but mostly because the movie adaptations tend towards varying degrees of suck.

Two of the exceptions I can think of, off the top of my head, are The Andromeda Strain and The Bourne Identity. With the former, I found the visualizations of the medical stuff more plausible than Crichton's original writing, and with the latter I thought the excision of the Jackal plot tightened up a story whose original version I thought could have stood some extra editorial oversight.

edited 26th Oct '10 11:33:12 AM by Nohbody

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You mean like they've been doing since pretty much since the early days and Golden Age of Hollywood?

This topic probably re-opened an age old can of worms. :P I try to see the merit of adaptations of stories since things will get changed along the way; sometimes it's very minor and doesn't hurt the story. Sometimes the changes are so big they'll either completely help the story or mangle it.

One adaptation thought did a fairly good job of doing minor changes but still keeping fairly faithful to the book is Requiem For A Dream. To me, it seemed like Aronofsky went an extra mile trying to find what was needed to help the story fit the film medium. Princess Bride did a good job with it's adaptation. It actually took out quite a few things from the book, but I think it made the overall story much more streamlined in its focus and narrative.

Ella Enchanted I think is a perfect example of the story getting changed unnecessarily and mangling the purpose of the original book.

Well, yeah, it is older than my post would make some believe, but it seems more blatant now than in the past, at least to me.

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I actually thought that the Perc Jackson and the Olympians movie was not bad.

In fact, if some visual plot holes had been tweaked, script pruned for some duds, the original camp character dynamics were kept and the romance was not played up so much, I'd go so far as to say it was better than the book.

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^^Eh, I'd probably disagree there, since I've feel, even though there was a good amount of creativity, the film industry has retained some levels of unoriginality. Hollywood's always been sort of a business that's pretty much "make money any way you can, no matter how unoriginal your ideas." Admittedly, it probably seems worse, because, as the years go on, you have people trying different ways to cash in on things.

Hell, my favorite example of film makers trying to ride on the popularity of something is The Big Sleep with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Watching that, knowing at the time they were a big time and people were clamoring for more after To Have and Have Not, it makes the whole convoluted and confusing mess of a story  ^*

that much funnier. Especially when you can see the blatant fanservice scenes shoved in there. Umm, but yeah, I digress.

edited 26th Oct '10 2:15:22 PM by Jumpingzombie

The Hellsing OVA is not as good as the manga.

Then again, both are about boobs, so what the fuck do I know?

*sigh* Timeline the book was fun and just good enough that the stupid parts could be ignored. Timeline the movie was a hot mess. >_<

edited 26th Oct '10 2:22:39 PM by FurikoMaru

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The Godfather was a really good book, but the movie stank; it left all the characters boring and (for me at least) impossible to relate to.

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nb4 Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter.

Despite having strong feelings on the former I will not discuss it (yet). Instead I'll point to James Bond, probably the biggest case of Adaptation Displacement in the world (come on, how many off-liners actually knew there were books?)

The transition can be summed up as thus: Dr. No and From Russia With Love are pretty close to their source novels, making only minor divergences (mostly in that the villains of both movies are retconned into being SPECTRE operatives). Goldfinger also remained somewhat true, at least in that it has the same plot as the novel, though it was the movie where major divergences started creeping in. Thunderball widened the gap while also retaining the same general plot as the book (the weird thing is that Thunderball the book is actually a novelization of an earlier screenplay draft—it was the only book planned from the outset to be a movie).

You Only Live Twice was the first movie to be an In Name Only adaptation. Afterwards On Her Majesty's Secret Service briefly brought the series back to book adaptations (with its accuracy level somewhat comparable to Goldfinger's) but Diamonds Are Forever was an In Name Only adaptation and the movies stayed there from then on.

So are the movies better, or worse, than the books? Are they Adaptation Distillation or Adaptation Decay? Well... if I were alive in the fifties and sixties I probably would've said the latter (I actually discovered Bond through the books first—shocking I know—and this was precisely the attitude I held at first). However, the truth is both versions have gone on to basically have lives of their own, independent of each other, so they truly can not even be compared. James Bond himself is hardly the same man between the two mediums—someone familiar with the film version would be surprised, for example, to see the novel Bond's almost naive attitude towards romance, and especially how a lot of the early novels have him winding up hurt or heartbroken when the relationship doesn't go how he expects.

There are, however, a couple of odd times where the two paths cross:

Two of the books—For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy & The Living Daylights—are actually short story collections (despite its name, Octopussy actually includes four stories in modern editions), and the movies that borrow their titles tend to contain sequences and plot points inspired by the short stories. Probably the weirdest thing is that Octopussy the movie is actually presented in-story as being somewhat of a sequel to the short story, and there's a conversation midway through that is hard to follow if you haven't read that story.

Another odd case is the movie A View to a Kill, which, though the title comes from one of the short stories, actually seems more inspired by John Gardner's novel License Renewed. (You can find out more about John Gardner here, but the laconic version is he was a small-time spy-fiction author who Fleming's publishers approached to continue the Bond novel series. A lot of people questioned his approach, but he does have his fans. After his death he was replaced by Raymond Benson).

But I repeat: The novels and the movies each pretty much established their own identity, and thus can not meaningfully be compared.

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Well apart from Star Wars, the few that I've seen tend to skip bits of the plot, often in nonsensical places.

Ignore this post. I edited it and for some eason the edit showed up as a new post.

edited 29th Oct '10 12:11:29 AM by ArlaGrey

The worst book to movie transformation of books I like has got to be the Stormbreaker movie. I watched it for the first time with my dad and I was cringing all the way through. For some reason though, I keep rewatching it... I'm not sure why.

Wait, Star Wars is based on a book?

(I mean I knew there were novelizations, but...)

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No, he is saying all of those EXCEPT star wars miss a lot of plot from the book.

Because Star wars never had a book to miss the plot.

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Queen of the Damned was a godawful adaptation.

On the opposite side of things, Interview with the Vampire is one of the best adaptations I've ever seen.

Let's be fair: Queen Of The Damned was a pretty lousy book.

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I think the worst movie adaptation (as in it's supposed to be the same story) was Watership Down, not only did they miss out on a good chunk of the plot (and several characters), they did so in a way that completely warped the whole terrain. Plus they actually made it 'darker' than the book, which was dark enough already.

edited 29th Oct '10 1:49:17 PM by MattII

Warped the terrain? You mean the moral? Or the terrain as in the setting? I'd heard that Watership Down got an animated adaptation that subverted a lot of the morals of the original work.

I guess kinda like Starship Troopers. What was originally an anti-war story instead turned into a "cool war against giant bugs".

edited 29th Oct '10 1:57:00 PM by BonsaiForest

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It seriously warped the terrain, it had Holly coming through Efrafa (in the story this would have meant travelling like three times as far). If they'd wanted to cut a bit out of the movie they could have cut out the whole of the Cowslip section.

Starship Troopers being an anti-war story? Human soldiers in what were essentially walking tanks, battling ravenous hive-mind aliens for survival, sound more like pro-war to me.

In regards to the original novel SST, the war wasn't the focus of the book, it was just the setting. What the novel was, on the other hand, was an examination of citizenship, loyalty, and sacrificing for something greater than the individual.

The movie was a train wreck  ^*

that I'd rather not think about, if you don't mind.

edited 29th Oct '10 2:15:38 PM by Nohbody

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Well then if the book was bad, the movie was awful.

Let's be honest: Fight Club improved the story by disgracing the source material. There's nowhere near such a happy ending in the book...but that doesn't mean that the book is better.

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I haven't read the book or seen the movie, but my brother swears that Rogue Male (by my great uncle actually) and Manhunt, the (1941) Hollywood adaptation are about equal in quality. Which is kind of surprising.

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Honestly, the Harry Potter movies had no chance in hell to capture the complexity of the world JKR created. It certainly didn't help that the writers didn't know what was important and what not, but I think from the fifth movie onward they totally missed the mark what the books actually were about.

I actually liked the Lot R movies better than the books (especially the first one), mostly due to the unfortunate tendency of them to narrate too much in hindsight. There isn't a lot of suspense if you already know that the person in question is just fine.

When it comes down to it, I think the best adaptation is not necessarily the closest. For example Sherlock Holmes. If someone would ask me which adaptation is the most faithful, the answer would definitely be the Granada one. And I would never dispute that it is really well done. But the best Victorian Holmes adaptation is for me the Russian one - which was a surprise. But I think it has a better understanding of the fact that TV is a different medium and that it might be a good idea to skip over certain parts of the original and rewrite one or two aspects.

One thing to remember about the Bond novels are that they are a lot shorter than new books today generally are. An old rule of thumb is that a good movie script is about equivalent to a novella of about 35-50k words. A marketable novel today is about 90-120k words.

I don't have a breakdown of Fleming's Bond novels, but at a guess they'd be 50% thicker if they were published today.

That said, there are plenty of good movies made from novels, that both manage to become good movies and stay faithful to the source. The thing they have in common is that they are very focused on what they are faithful to, and skip the rest.

One example:

The Emigrants is either four average-length novels, or two huge doorstoppers, with lots of characterisation, huge amounts of Shown Their Work, and an enormous scope in cast, time, and geography. Yet the movie version is quite good as well, and manages to catch both the grand scale and many of the personal issues in the books. Part of it is because director Troell leave a lot to subtext, and pruned the events of the books to the bare minimum necessary.