Is there any more irritating phrase in the English language?
“The book is soooo much better.”
We’ve all heard it countless times and we’ve probably let those very words flow from our lips as well.
The fact is…most movies are based on books.
The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Die Hard, Stand By Me, Psycho, The Princess Bride…. The list goes on and on. The majority of Hollywood screenplays are adapted from pieces of literature.
But while art in the written form is revered and held aloft as the epitome of intellectual integrity, the same story put on film is reviled and despised for its commercial aspirations.
It seems very difficult to adapt any source material into a visual medium without hardcore fans picking apart every aspect for inconsistencies or inaccuracies.
But why are books always better than the movie version?
For the most part, it’s impossible to include every aspect of a book into 120 minutes of film. TV shows and mini-series can do a better job, thus hearkening in our current “Golden Age of Television.”
Books are more detailed…they allow you to paint a picture in your mind…and sometimes the reality of seeing that picture on screen never lives up to expectations. And even in the age of CGI, it remains difficult to tap into the expectations of the human imagination.
But should we discard movies as low brow entertainment for the plebs, while the rest of us intellectuals look down our noses?
Not only are movies art…but movies are probably the most influential and accessible form of art that we have today. And although I find it inherently odd to compare two different mediums representing the same story, it seems we feel the need to do so.
So are there any examples of a movie being better than the book it was based on?
For me, I have great praise for commercial aspirations pulled off very successfully.
I had seen bits of The Godfather on TV before reading the book but not enough to grasp that much. I read the book and loved it. Soon after I wanted to see the entire Godfather epic. I really thought they did a superior job with the original first two Godfather movies.
Sure some great aspects of the book got left out but that is to be expected or the movie which was already very long would've been too long. I'd of course, still rate the book as better but give the highest marks possible for the movie.
I read Stand By me after seeing the movie in its entirety. The movie was really good but the old adage, the book is better is true for sure.
I've seen other movies made from books I've read but I haven't seen a movie that I could rate as better than the book.
Bladerunner. The book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick) is good, don't get me wrong, but Bladerunner kind of takes the idea and runs with it in a more interesting direction plot-wise. The book does flesh out the world more, and hopefully some of that makes its way into the upcoming sequel.
The Hobbit movies were significantly more extensive/ambitious/grandiose than the book actually was. And ironically, this is the one book adaptation that I'm most inclined to despise and to accuse of what's described in the OP (ie. perverting a literary work for commercial purposes).
To put things into perspective, the original The Hobbit book contained 95,000 words, while The Lord of the Rings contained 450,000 words. The latter was nearly 5 times the magnitude of the former, and yet Peter Jackson managed to produce two trilogies of equal length out of each. And whereas The Lord of the Rings trilogy was admirably congruent with what's featured in the books (ie. no major omissions/additions), The Hobbit felt like the producers simply magnified one of Tolkien's lesser novels to recreate the commercial success that The Lord of the Rings movies previously had.
For those not familiar with Tolkien's work, The Hobbit book essentially was a children's tale narrated in an innovative/eloquent way, while The Lord of the Rings (published 17 years later) took the exact same fantasy world and elevated it to something that's quite a bit more mature and elaborate. That pretty much summarizes Tolkien's legacy actually: taking a genre that was traditionally intended for kids (ie. fantasy) and giving it epic proportions to captivate adult readers.
I truly wish that they'd have respected that contrast/evolution with the movies, but instead they used the material of The Hobbit to present a monumental cinematic saga, which the book really wasn't (and never aspired to be). Plenty of superfluous characters/storylines were added, the original ones were completely aggrandized/denatured, the overall trilogy felt unnecessarily long and tedious. As someone who enthusiastically read Tolkien in his youth, I just couldn't get any sense of familiarity; and consequently, I developed virtually no interest whatsoever in the movies. The Hobbit should have been a lighthearted 2-hours movie, in my honest opinion. Proof that more isn't always better.
Regarding the overall discussion, I believe that two scenarios can occur: on one hand we have immensely illustrious literary works that are adapted into movies (eg. The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, etc.), on the other we have movie producers who use unknown/average books as source material (eg. Million Dollar Baby, Full Metal Jacket, etc.). As was expressed in the OP, it'd be pretty damn hard to ever equate the greatness of the former through cinema, especially since the particular literary style of the author is totally lost in the process. However (and I don't have any specific example to present), I'm confident that plenty of mediocre books also inspired exceptional movies. The film industry doesn't receive much credit for that though, because... well practically no one ever bothers to read those obscure books, right?
And I'd tend to disagree that the majority of adaptations are disparaged anyway. Even the movies mentioned in the OP received quite a lot more praise than otherwise, and you could add plenty of other successful titles to the list (eg. Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Scarface, etc.). Really, I think that the line "the book is so much better" is mostly intended as "the movie doesn't exactly capture everything that the book was about" in a lot of cases. Which is fair enough. And which mostly gives literature its own merit/respect, more than it truly denigrates the art of cinema.
About the whole 'literature vs cinema' debate, call me an illiterate moron but I actually much prefer movies to contemplate works of fiction. I read plenty of French classics in my youth (eg. Balzac, Dumas, Maupassant, Hugo, Camus), but nowadays the majority of what I read is mostly factual/historical/encyclopedic stuff. Movies allow me to plunge into a vivid story and then reach a certain interrogation/realization/whatever in under 2 hours; books hardly provide me anything additional but are considerably more time-consuming. Some people love to lose themselves in detailed descriptions or stylistic literary efforts, and that's great, but I rarely have the patience for that myself. So yeah, I'm part of the crowd of simpletons who often has to wait for movie adaptions to appreciate certain literary works. Sue me, haha.
I feel that 'Goodfellas' is so much better than the book 'Wiseguy' by Nicholas Pileggi, which was a very good read, but not even in the same class as the film.
I agree that the Godfather, which was an excellent novel, was absolutely over-shadowed by the movie.
Honorable mention to 'The World According to Garp'. Steve Tesich took author John Irving's book and masterfully adapted all the sprawling elements into a film that I feel is the book's equal. I learned a lot about adaptation from it.
The Hobbit movies sucked. A novel that was half the size of ONE of the LOTR books becomes as long as the three LOTR films, filled with 'Hollywood-ized' bullshit
(at least in my opinion).
The African Queen. Even though I do admire the author.
"insensitive prick!" – Danielle Algo
I sure prefer Life of Brian over the Bible ;)
=== Not ALL LIVES MATTER until BLACK LIVES MATTER ===
The Running Man was originally written by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) in the 1970s. It was made into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in the 80s. The book was 'meh,' but movie diverts quite a lot from the book, and features so much ridiculous 80s action cheesiness (including Arnie himself) that you can't help but enjoy it.
Post-avant-retro-demelodicized-electro-yodel-core is my jam.
Misery, staring Kathy Bates and originally written by Stephen King is better as a movie. And I think that's because Kathy Bates just made Annie terrifying. I don't think that was one of King's strongest books but it was a tremendous movie.
If we're talking about King adaptations, I found the original adaptation of Carrie to be at least as good, if not better than, the book it was based on.
When 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'was advertised, I elected to read the book first.
Whilst I thought that the concept was very interesting, I didn't actually enjoy reading it. My first impression was that it was written by an adult who was trying to write like a child and it didn't work.
Then I saw the movie and loved it. It was so well done that it now rates as one of my all time favourite movies.
The author, John Boyne admitted that he wished he had connected the story together in the way that the movie did.
Good question. Film adaptations are rarely better than the books. I've read millions and I can honestly say there's been one.
Fight Club, staring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, was better than the book written by Chuck Palahniuk.
Someone referenced Full Metal Jacket already, but I'll comment specifically about it. The author was, I think, much more impressed with himself that was needed. His novel was interesting but frustrating, and his narrative not well crafted. Kubrick took that short novel and reworked it into a fantastic film. I consider it to be one of the best films about Vietnam ever made, and would also rank it very high in the Kubrick catalog overall. And perhaps some part of my feeling stems from the incredibly gratuitous manner in which Hasford killed off Rafterman in the book, as he was one of the more interesting characters in the novel, and was really well done in the film.
