If a novel is any good it seems like it's really hard to do justice with a film adaptation. Maybe it's just really hard to make a good film. I almost always prefer the book. Speaking to people I meet I find this isn't that common.
Am I just a geeky book-lover? A literary snob? Or am I speaking to the wrong people?
That's just the nature of books. That's why I don't really compare books and movies, it's apples and oranges. Books have a greater opportunity for exposition and introspection that is just impractical to the point of being impossible with movies. You just can't do in two hours, as far as character and story development, what you can do in 300+ pages.
If a novel is any good it seems like it's really hard to do justice with a film adaptation. Maybe it's just really hard to make a good film. I almost always prefer the book. Speaking to people I meet I find this isn't that common.
Am I just a geeky book-lover? A literary snob? Or am I speaking to the wrong people?
Believe me, every other book lover would choose the book first. Only movie that i know was better than the book is Primal Fear.. The book had too much cursing and obsured the plot. If you like Richard Gere, thats a must see.
Scheinllers List the movie was good. The book gave me nightmares for a whole two or so weeks. Book is better.
I actually preferred the film version of I Am Legend (the one with Will Smith in it) to the novel. I read the novel and didn't see what the big deal was about it. Of course, the novel and the movie are also very different.
I actually preferred the film version of I Am Legend (the one with Will Smith in it) to the novel. I read the novel and didn't see what the big deal was about it. Of course, the novel and the movie are also very different.
I actually preferred the film version of I Am Legend (the one with Will Smith in it) to the novel. I read the novel and didn't see what the big deal was about it. Of course, the novel and the movie are also very different.
The idea that "the book is inherently better than the movie" tends to come from a simple fact: Hollywood has more corporate creative control over the final product than book publishers do. As a result, more often than not, changes are made from the book in order to appeal to certain focus groups and maximize profits, rather than complementing the story for a visual medium.
I LOVE Jurassic Park, the movie. It's my earliest theater experience, as I saw it when I was 5 at a local MASSIVE screen (that sadly recently got torn down. ) I also love the book; I read it over and over again in Junior High and its philosophies did shape a lot of what I came to believe for a lot of my life. Both, however, are different in dozens of fundamental ways, and thus aren't really comparable except that they have the same general plot and characters who share the same names and occupations. Spielberg was very smart about the changes he made from the book, in order to fit the ~2-hour visual medium that is Hollywood film. Michael Crichton spent entire chapters of the book expressing his own worldviews through the character of Ian Malcolm, using scientific and logical deductions, in particular citing Chaos Theory quite often. The movie cuts the vast bulk of these out, and is stronger for that; it chose to show the overall "message" of the book, in addition to distilling it down to the phrase "life finds a way". One particular scene in the book that's always stuck with me is when Malcolm is declaring that destroying life on Earth is the last thing he'd worry about; even when the idea of a nuclear disaster is brought up, he points out that even if it's so bad that virtually all life as we know it dies, there'd still be some life perhaps frozen in arctic ice (that apparently didn't melt from the inhospitable heat, but whatever, I'll allow his point since extremophiles exist) that would repopulate the planet with complex organisms again once conditions improved.
Another notable difference in this book is the character of John Hammond. In the film he lives, but in the book he dies. This works out great, ultimately, because Hammond is a different character in both mediums. In the film he's a starry-eyed idealist who wants "everyone in the world to enjoy these creatures", while in the book he's a starry-eyed businessman who says, "all kids in the world will enjoy these creatures, or at least, the rich ones". Hubris is present in both characters, but the one is lovable while the other is... not. Both start out, and spend most of the story, blind to the problems even as dinosaurs are running loose and killing people. In the movie, Hammond ultimately accepts that he was being an idiot and gives up on his dream, thus enabling himself to get everyone who's still alive out safely. In the book, however, he spends his last hour or so contemplating "next time", where he'd correct everything that's gone wrong. This entire time, he's crawling through the park's jungles, injured, malnourished, and dehydrated, and ultimately falls victim to a pack of compies. He never gets over his hubris, and pays that price.
...also, the movie has the most glorious deus ex machina ever, when the t-rex shows up out of nowhere to save the main characters from some raptors. That wasn't in the book, and it would have hurt the book. But in the movie, it's the only example I can think of where I actually cheer this otherwise terrible trope.
These changes from the book successfully adapt the story to complement the visual medium, such that neither one is "definitive" over the other, in my opinion.
On the other hand, consider the film adaptation of the sequel, The Lost World. This was a much poorer adaptation, for a number of reasons (not the least of which being it just wasn't that great a film.) The book, IMO, is just as enjoyable as the first, despite being... preachier, somehow. The changes from the book were far greater this time, by removing several characters, changing the relationships between others, and completely reworking the plot. They basically share nothing in common except the setting, a few names, and Ian Malcolm as the main protagonist (...and the bit where the parent rexes push a trailer over a cliff after getting their injury-treated baby back). The climax of the movie, where a t-rex stomps around San Diego (which, to the movie's credit, is a nice change of pace from the usual Hollywood victims of New York and Los Angeles), is not in the book at all, and while certainly a lot of fun (and by far the movie's highlight), doesn't really do anything noteworthy in terms of theme, since it's just another guy's hubris causing trouble. If the moral of the first movie is "life finds a way", the moral of the second movie is, "uh... if there are any dinosaurs alive on some remote island... don't bring them to the mainland?" The book, on the other hand, more or less continues the theme of "life finds a way", by showing (more successfully than the movie) an entire ecosystem of dinosaurs living as naturally as they can given their environment. (It's also admittedly been a long time since I've read the book, so I don't remember the themes as well).
I don't know how much of that was New Line interfering, since I don't know much about the film's production. However... Jurassic Park III. This film had studio mandate written all over it, as it wasn't based on anything Crichton wrote. It was made mostly to please the popular demand for it, and while I'm sure the filmmakers were happy to make it, it's clear to me that there was a severe thematic void. While these films have typically striven to be spectacle-based thrillers before anything else(and thus have been plagued with inaccuracies from the beginning), this film had all the thematic substance and scientific accuracy of a 50s B-movie. There's no evidence, for example, that any raptoid (or troodontid, for that matter, but the film doesn't even address that) had any kind of intelligence comparable to mammals, let alone being "smarter than primates" as Grant laughably states early in the film based on... a (AFAIK fictional) fossil find that would not be in any way indicative of intelligence since it was some kind of throat-casing, or something, that you could blow into and make raptor sounds. This film was made solely as a Hollywood cash-grab, and as a result, failed.
