Why movies are better than books!
A common phrase I often hear people mutter is, "The book is better than the movie." However, people rarely explain why this is so and in fact generally the conversation ends there. Why is the book better than the movie adaptation? Is it because the book came first? Is it because books are more detailed? No one is ever interested in explaining why a novel is better than its movie counterpart. It often annoys people that movie adaptations are very different from the novels they are based on. They either complain about how the casting was wrong, how the film left out a certain character, etc. People never comprehend why these changes happen, instead the think of them as blasphemous and disrespectful to the source material.
Let me get one thing clear, there is no such thing as a faithful film adaptation of a novel. A film could have everything scene from the novel intact, every line of dialogue, etc., but it would be an entirely different experience. Books are words, films are images. Reading a story and watching a story are two entirely different things. Which is why most books that try to remain true to their original text tend to be dull, lifeless films. When a film tries to recreate the novel, it doesn't have it's a life of its own and will only appeal to people who are familiar with the novel, which is why the first two
Harry Potter films are extremely boring to people who have not read the books. No matter how faithful a film tries to be, people will always have their own ideas as to who should have been cast in the lead role, how certain scenes should have been handled, etc, hence no film is a faithful adaptation, only poor imitations trying to appease fans.
Secondly, there are many ideas that work well on paper, yet would look absolutely ridiculous on film. In Stephen King's
The Shining, there is a chapter in which the character Hallorann is chased by possessed hedge animals. This is an exciting sequence to read about, but it would look absolutely ridiculous on film, Stanley Kubrick knew this when he adapted King's novel in 1980 and changed the hedge animals to a sinister hedge maze. It's a departure from King's novel, but it works in its own right and extremely well in the context of the film. Kubrick's version of
The Shining has a life of its own, because one does not need to read King's novel to understand what is happening in the film. A movie adaptation first and foremost must have a life of its own in order to be considered a success. When Steven Spielberg made
Jaws he tossed out all the melodramatic subplots in Peter Benchley's novel and focused on the shark, making one of the greatest films of all time in the process. The film
Jaws was such a success that many people have no idea it is an adaptation. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein has been adapted so many times, in so many different ways that no one even bothers to compare the film adaptations to the original source, because they all have their own life.
When people watch an adaptation of a novel, instead of whining about what was left out of the film, they should instead question whether or not it works on its own terms. Was it a well done film? Did it move you? Did you care about what was unfolding onscreen? If the answer is yes, then the filmmakers have done their jobs and no one should care whether or not that Tom Bombadil wasn't in the film. In short, movies are better than novels, because it is far more exciting to see events happening, than to read about them.
