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Best and WORST Book to Film Adaptations
  • As someone who used to read a lot, I'd be so excited when a favorite book would be adapted into a movie, but that excitement would soon turn to bitter disapointment when the movie was released. Examples of the worst:

    Forrest Gump. The movie is legitimately great, but isn't remotely like the book. Part of what makes a good adaptation is how close they stay to the original source material. The novel Forrest Gump is basically a pure wacky comedy with little to no drama or pathos or the heart of the movie. Stick to the source material or GTFO! :P

    The biggest offender is Jurassic Park. Hands down, the worst adaptations of ALL TIME. Massive changes from the book to screen. Biggest change was in the book, the lawyer character was one of the good guys, while in the movie he was the typical sleazy lawyer. I guess, in a movie with DINOSAURS, having a lawyer that's actually a hero was too fantastical for Spielberg. This was officially when I started to turn away from Spielberg.

    Other bad adaptations: Any Tom Clancy novel, minus Hunt for Red October. Most Steven King books, with the exception of Shawshank Redemption and Misery.

    Now some good adaptations. First Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Despite changing the main characters race from white to black, and adding his own spin on the dialogue, it's a very mature adaptation for such a young director. Especially when you compare it to Steven Soderbergs adaptation of another novel from the same author released in the same year with one of the same actors playing the same role in a unique cross studio crossover. You almost never see the same actor from one studio's film play the same character in another studio's film, even a cameo, but since it was in the book, Tarantino said go for it, and did it free.

    And the best adaptation to date...Sin City. Rodriquez's main weakness has been his writing. When you do as many jobs as he does, something has to suffer, and in his case, it's his writing. So when you start with something that's already well written and you decide to film it AS WRITTEN...that's as good as it gets. The dialogue in the movie is nearly word for word from the comic. The comic panels are storyboards for the film with many looking almost exactly the same. He even shot all the comics in full and then released the full edit later. The more faithful you are to the source material, the better a movie you will make, and this is as faithful as it could possibly get.

    Your favorite and least favorite adaptations? And of course I haven't read "The Orchid Thief" or I would of said something. :P

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  • Part of what makes a good adaptation is how close they stay to the original source material.

    I'm not sure I agree. I remember reading an interview of an author who's work had been adapted into a film (alas, I've forgotten the name of the film and the author). The interviewer asked him if he was disappointed that the film was so different from the book. And he said he no, on the contrary he'd been very closely consulted and most of the changes were his ideas. Why? Because he felt that the original story was great for a novel, but not the best for a film. In his view both the book and the film should make the best use of their mediums and be good pieces of art in their own right, and he didn't want to make a mediocre film just for the sake of sticking to the source material.

    He said, and I'm paraphrasing "If you liked the book, read the book. It's still there." :)

  • @sam_stickland I've read and heard stuff like that before. Either that's, "Yeah, I didn't like it, but I want my other books bought or I want to write or direct movies myself, so I have to say that and keep working in film."

    Or because the lie of books need to be changed, they don't have the confidence, experience or POWER to make sure it's done right. And while I hold Sin City as a benchmark, you don't have to adapt it all 100% the same. There are usually 3-4 critical scenes or parts of a book that if you nail those right, it doesn't matter if it's not totally faithful. Shawshank nailed the rooftop scene, they nailed the escape, nailed the sisters, and especially nailed "Brooks was here".

    Walking Dead didn't nail most key scenes, most especially the final scenes of Shane. Nail the spirit, the the few critical scenes, and that's more than 90% of adaptations.

  • The film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo was beyond disappointing. But the biggest offender to me is Dune. The book is, to me, on the same level as Tolkien's work - the film on the other hand - ugh.

  • You had me until I saw Sin City and the word "best" in the same sentence. But I get what your saying, it is a faithful adaptation.

    A quite good adaptation from a book is the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Much is changed, but the spirit is correct.

  • Stick to the source material or GTFO!

    Yeah I have to take issue with you here. The relationship an adaptation has with its source material ends the moment it's released for consumption. From there a viewer's perception of it may change based on his knowledge or opinion of the source material, but that's completely subjective and can't be part of a serious critique. That's like saying you don't like the Mona Lisa because the woman was better looking in reality.

  • @jweeke Keeping the dialogue the same isn't subjective, that's quantifiable. Now obviously some people liked chapter "x" opening dialogue and didn't like the fact they used chapter "y", etc..., but the fact they used exact dialogue makes something better than if they made it up.

    The "Brooks Was Here" dialogue was very close if not exactly the same as the book. The "last inch" letter in V for Vendetta was very close, about 70%. Sin City about 99%. Jurassic Park, I think "Spared no expense" was the only thing from the book.

    Your knowledge and opinion of the source material is pretty much all you can use to critique and yes, if I knew the real Mona Lisa and Da Vinci did a cappy pic of her, I'd give him some shit for it. "What did the canvas add 20lb there Leo?" :P

  • but the fact they used exact dialogue makes something better than if they made it up.

    That's subjective. I would say false, too, but definitely subjective.

    I'm a fan of this guy's method: http://joeposnanski.blogspot.kr/p/movie-plus-minus.html

    You don't expect "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" to be a good movie, and so when it's not, you don't care. On the other hand, "The Road" was an incredible book, and I expected the film to be great as well. It was not. Which adaptation was worse? To me "The Road" was, by far.

    By the way, I agree with you about the Jurassic Park adaptation being oversimplified. Its special effects hold up much better than its plot and dialog. However, it's also probably the movie that got me into filmmaking. I saw it in a sold-out movie theater when I was six -- and I've been chasing the dragon (raptor?) ever since. Seriously, there's no greater movie-going experience. So, despite that there are a hundred movies I like better, in a sense it's the best movie there is.

  • @tcarretti

    From GoT thread-- Agree with you there about the Reacher casting. But then I heard Herzog plays the villain, so I'm back on board!

  • @jweeke I LOVED Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but then I've never read the book. I agree about expectations. EVERYTHING we take into the theater factors in, and in honest criticism you should give full disclosure for why you think something or why it affected you in certain ways.

    Enders Game is one of my all time favorite books, and I am dreading the film adaptation. I'm expecting it to suck, so hopefully if it doesn't suck I won't be devastated.

  • best : the naked lunch worst : perfume

    I chose these two books because they were considered as unadaptable.

  • Polanski's adaptation of The Ghost Writer ("The Ghost" in the UK) is almost exactly the same as the book. I watched the movie first and then read the book and it is almost scene for scene. Freaky. I thought it was an excellent movie (beautiful camera movement-good acting) and a pretty good book.

    I will have to think more about the worst as there are a lot more to choose from.

  • Filmmakers don't have much obligation to stay faithful to source material. If anything, I think their obligation is to riff. Many books simply aren't cinematic and demand change if they're ever make a watchable film. HP Lovercraft's stories aren't cinematic and that's why they make lousy movies.

  • @CRFilms: Part of what makes a good adaptation is how close they stay to the original source material.

    Not always. I think a good adaptation is an adaptation that knows what works and what doesn't. Film and literature are two different media. Something might work great on paper, but not at all on film. As @brianluce said, Lovecraft is an amazing writer (my favorite) but can make rather lousy for movies. The best adaptation of a Lovecraft story is Herbert West: Re-Animator, which strays from the material, but as the story is one of Lovecraft's weaker ones, I found it superior to the story. But there are two films that capture the spirit of Lovecraft (the second one being a mythos film-proper, but not adapted from his stories) and those are John Carpenter's The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness.

    And take something like Jurassic Park. The film does change a lot from the book, but in many ways for the better. Michael Crichton co-wrote the film and his first draft was a word-for-word adaptation of the book and he himself agreed that it was no way it would make a good film. After all, it's his story and if he agrees with the changes, are we the ones to complain? And Spielberg has made an adaptation that definitely improved the book and that is Jaws. He made all the characters way more sympathetic (especially Hooper, who in the book is a complete asshole, while becoming a great, lovable character in the film). Possibly the greatest film of all time is itself an adaptation: The Godfather. It removes two main characters (Johnny Fontaine getting a few scenes at the start and Connie's mistress showing up without lines in a quick shot) and puts the focus on Michael. Yet most people agree that it is a superior adaptation, with the book being a bestseller, but the film regarded as a (or the) masterpiece of cinema.

    In both cases it shown where the filmmakers knew what was good in the story, but also bad or unsuitable. They stuck with what worked and removed what didn't. In these cases they improved on the books, but what about adaptations of great books?

    Take L.A. Confidential. James Ellroy is often called unfilmable, with long books taking place over a long time periods and with lots of different characters. The film L.A. Confidential manages in some weird way to make a great film, without ruining the book. While it made quite a few changes, the most obvious putting focus on Ed Exley, Bud White and Jack Vincennes, removing a lot of subplots and compressing the narrative a lot, it still stayed true to the main story, characters and feel of the novel. Even Ellroy himself was impressed by how well they had made it. Same thing with Lord of the Rings. Major changes are made, both to compress the time and also to make the films watchable. The books are very heavy on exposition and explanations of the world, with very little action. The film does shift focus, but manages to still be faithful to Tolkien's world to a big degree.

    After my long rant the conclusion I think is this: To make a good book into a good film, you need to understand it well, see what will work on a screen and what won't and not to be afraid to change that. They are two different medias, being suited to different things. What will work in one won't work in the other. Sometimes being too close can be bad too (while I loved the Watchmen film, it would in many ways have worked better had it changed it up a bit).

  • I guess that if you have decent source material you should at least make a decent movie even if it isn't a good adaptation.

  • I agree with Gabel. Movies generally work best when they closely adhere to 3 act structure. There are other elements as well that are common denominators in films -- such as the existence of a thruline or story spine. Novels and other forms of literature have no such rules so it's usually difficult to take a novel and make a tight and consistent screenplay that closely follows the beats and structure of the source material.

  • Not Really Films more TV Films/Series But The Terry Pratchett Books that they Turned in to Films/Series God Damn Terrible Hogfather, The Colour Of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Going Postal All Great Books But Not my Cup of Tea on the Screen They Should not have made these Films/Series

  • It gets a little more complicated these days, because novel-writing has changed: the writing is more "cinematic", sometimes in the hope of getting picked up as a movie, but also as an approach to conceiving and structuring the material.

    "Savages", out this week, actually slips into screenplay form (in the novel). It's meant to be ironic and all that, but even so.... The book itself pretty much reads like a movie, despite hyper-stylized prose.

    Or consider a mass-market author who apparently had literary pretensions -- Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.). These books are pretty clunky, the guy didn't have a developed literary technique or an accomplished style (at least, not in translation). But they make for good movies (check out the 3 Swedish films, don't know about the Fincher version), because their basis is more in cinema than the classic novel.

  • These books are pretty clunky, the guy didn't have a developed literary technique or an accomplished style (at least, not in translation).

    Okay but the books were all huge commercial successes and received critical praise as well.

  • David Lynch's Dune was pretty bad, though nice to look at. I thought the Sci-fi channel's mini-series were pretty good. They made some changes with the character's in Children of Dune, but it worked for me.

  • I can't wait to see The life of Pi

  • I have not often seen films that come close to the experience of reading the book, the one execption for me was "The Shining".

  • @dumile Dune was horrible for the director too. Lynch's bomb.

    @jrd all good points. I am a big fan of David Foster Wallace, and one of his essays targets the switch from film and tv borrowing from lit to lit borrowing from film and tv. If you would like to, http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf Wallace also wrote a lot about Lynch and the reason for dune's utter failure as well.

  • @tmcat

    It gets even stranger, when you consider that the classic cable TV series (Sopranos, Wire, Mad Men, etc.) are more "novelistic" than mass-market novels today.

  • @jrd ditto. I believe that the difference between quality literature and cinema is growing while lit's differences to tv are shrinking from a production stand-point. Some more avant-garde stuff that would have never been adapted to film could feasibly be made as a television series. This is not some inherent gift that novels have, but more the way that many modern novels use narrative fracturing. The Corrections (which is not avante-garde) will make a much better tv series than it would a movie. If you haven't read that essay I think you'll find it pretty interesting.

  • I actually like Dune a lot. The movie has so much style and great performances, great production design. I consider it a "Noble Failure", something with lots of talent going on, but it doesn't quite come together in the end. Though I didn't read the book til after I saw the movie.

    And there's a big difference between leaving stuff out because of time, budget, continuity or the adapter didn't like this subplot, etc...., vs creating new scenes to CHANGE the plot or story or character types or character motivations. Most of the time, changes are really the studo's "death of 1000 notes" or a high powered actor wanting something more suitable to his or her ego(or acting limitations), not the story.

    Get Shorty and it's sequel Be Cool, are perfect examples of the best and the worst. Get Shorty is one of the best adaptations of a Elmore Leonard book. Travolta even said at various times in production when they were having script or story problems, "What did they do in the book?" They checked the book and the book was, of course, better so they changed it back to the book and we got a great movie.

    Ironic then, how bad they screwed up it's sequel Be Cool. First the Linda Moon character in the book was white and as soon as I saw Beyonce, I knew the character was going to be nothing like the book, and she wasn't. Can't remember his name, but a black bad guy character who died in the book, as soon as 5 minutes went by in the movie, I knew he wasn't going to die because they were making him too funny, completely changing the character, and yep, he survived.

    These are perfect control cases to see what works and what doesn't.