Movies based on your favorite novels.

[Dazrin]

I tend to lower my expectations a lot but there have been a few that stand out to me as good movies based on good books.

The Martian was an excellent take on the book, yes they trimmed it down a lot but that's ok.

The Bourne Identity (and the two follow-up movies) are very good and the books are too. They are only nominally the same story though. Glad I saw the movie first actually for these.

And for Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams) I actually prefer the movie.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by drjd

...does someone know of any movie which is a verbatim transformation of a book in terms of dialogues and details? Is that ever possible?

It depends a bit on your definition of "book". To be at all possible, it would need to be a very short book. Perhaps a chap book containing one short story could be replicated word for word and scene for scene, but nothing longer could.

It is possible to "condense" descriptions of a local, etc. when converting text to images, but it is unlikely that any book whose unabridged audiobook is longer than 3hrs could be successfully translated into a movie without some abridgement.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by drjd

Thanks everyone for sharing your views. While visual representation have their own limitations (and benefits too), does someone know of any movie which is a verbatim transformation of a book in terms of dialogues and details? Is that ever possible?

One screen adaptation that I thought came pretty close to this was the Granada Television production of Brideshead Revisited, but what was that, 12 episodes? And Brideshead wasn't a very long novel.

[Angst]

I loved Arrival, the movie based on Ted Chiang's short story Story of Your Life. The movie visually expanded the original story. A rare exception for movies. It didn't hurt that I am a huge Ted Chiang fan as well.

[Catlady]

Psycho, Jaws, and The Princess Bride were all better movies than books.

[drjd]

Interesting thoughts, thanks everyone! So, some facts are evident in everybody's views.: movies based on short novellas, say around 100 odd pages are more effectively converted into visual media due to time limitations of resultant reproduction leaving enough room for creative moderations by the film directors. Also, a literal transformation of larger books like LOTR needs more space eventually being created as a series of movies, thus requiring lots of resources and patience to create. The poll is also indicating a hefty majority of views that attempts to create successful and satisfactory movies based on popular novels rarely meet the expectations of people who have already read the books. I'm sure someone related with movie production, reading these views will be benefitted in many ways.

Now another question pops up in my mind, similar to the other thread being discussed in the forums, do you prefer to watch an individual movie or a series of movies like Lord of the Rings, The Pirates of Caribbean, The Mummy or Star Wars? It is evident that people who watch these, or any other series of films do anxiously wait for the upcoming release of next movie.

[crich70]

I'm not sure that LOTR fits in that list drdj. It is essentially all one story split into three feature length films. For that matter the Star Wars saga is in essence one continuous story starting with Anakin and (so far) going up through Luke's older years. It's a multi-generational story in effect.

[drjd]

I agree with you, crich70, that list comprises of many different notions of presentation, and the minimum common agenda among them is that they all are series of movies produced with either same characters or themes or ecosystem. But they all have been appreciated and viewed by a large number of viewers around the globe, and their fans eagerly wait for their next releases.

[Richwood]

I think that the movies that came closest to matching the books were LOTR with 3 movies and the Harry Potter movie series. Another that came close was the SF Channel's adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel "Dune". All took far longer than the 1.5 to 2 hours of the average movie to do a close to adequate job.