Book to Film: What's Your Opinion?

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It used to be that when I heard that a book I enjoyed was being made into a film, I would groan inwardly. However, after a few adaptations that have turned out quite well, I now take a “wait and see” attitude towards these films.
 
What makes a good adaptation as opposed to a bad one? This is something that is very subjective, and opinions vary from person to person. I’m going to throw a few ideas and opinions out here and will hopefully start an interesting discussion with others who have something to say on this matter.
 
I think that the most successful adaptations work because the people involved in making them care very much about the source material. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a perfect example of this; Mr. Jackson was interested in staying true to the spirit of the original work, and even though some characters were combined or left out completely, it is one of the best examples of a great adaptation.
 
Another good example is Jaws. Steven Spielberg was not only fairly faithful to his source material; he hired Peter Benchley to write the first three drafts of the screenplay. The film maintains all the menace and dread of the book, and then some! In fact, I feel that Jaws is that rarity wherein the film is better than the book. There are very few films that meet this criterion in my opinion, others being One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and the 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans.
 
Other excellent adaptations: The Silence of the Lambs, War of the Worlds (1953), A Clockwork Orange, The Shawshank Redemption, Holes, Princess Bride, No Country for Old Men, The Exorcist, and The Time Machine (1960).
 
There are also the very bad adaptations; movies like I Am Legend, Secret Window, Dune, The Scarlet Letter (1995), The Postman, Starship Troopers, Confessions of a Shopaholic, I Robot and The Shining.
 
What’s interesting is what makes them bad. Not following the source material is one reason these films were so bad, others are taking liberties that just don’t work. Although atmospherically creepy, in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick kills off a major character who was instrumental in the bittersweet ending of the story (I’m trying not to include spoilers here!). It changed the entire tone of the ending of the story. Also, some of the “haunts” in the film were so over the top that it ruined my sense of disbelief.
 
Yet, Full Metal Jacket was a great adaptation of the novel Short Timers by Gustav Hasford, also made by Stanley Kubrick. So, it isn’t always the director, perhaps just his vision of what he is adapting.
 
A major sticking point for me in I Am Legend is that the diseased in the book are still quite aware, and thinking. Each night they stand outside Robert Neville’s home and taunt him to come out, creating a claustrophobic, tense situation that is very different from anything portrayed in the film. These were a thinking enemy, not just a mindless eating machine.
 
For some reason, adaptations seem to fall mostly into two categories: excellent, or stinks. There isn’t much middle ground.
 
What do you think?

Comments

Interesting post!  The less

Submitted by Mark Smith on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 16:30.

Interesting post! 
The less said about the Will Smith version of "I Am Legend" the better.  But you could have an endlessly interesting which-is-better-the-book-or-the-movie discussion.  Some directors have been particularly good at screen adaptations--John Huston and Stanley Kubrick come to mind--and both of them were responsible for movies that in at least one case were better than the book. For Huston that was "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" which turned a pulp novel (though B. Traven's mysterious life made him a minor cult hero) into a nuanced study of human nature (and an interesting aside in that, his first film, Huston directed his father, Walter Huston and in his last movie, "The Dead" also a literary interpretation based on a James Joyce short story, he directed his daughter, Angelica).  For Kubrick, it was "Barry Lyndon," a boring but watchable movie based an even more boring and virtually unreadable victorian novel by Thackeray.
Another interesting exploration would be the recent phenomenon of film adaptation of graphic novels--there have been several good ones--"Art School Confidential," "Persepolis," "American Splendor" among them, and not to mention some really bad ones.