Movies that Are Better Than the Book

Every once in a while the unexpected happens and a film adaptation of a book ends up being better than the book itself.

Usually, a book possesses greater detail and nuance, conveys a sharper, more informed idea of its characters than a film can. This is true, at least in part, because books can be hundreds of pages long and take days to read.

Movies are two-hour affairs, give or take thirty minutes, and even those that are slow-paced move more quickly than the breeziest of novels. This brevity of film is one of its virtues just as a book's depth and breadth are its virtues.

In these aspects of type and dynamics, we can see the mediums are different animals all together so it is not a surprise than when an translation is made from book to film, the result is often flawed and fails to communicate the real power of the written word.

The Norm

There is an occasional tendency in Hollywood to select classic pieces of literature as the basis of film adaptations. The notion is admirable, yet these are often the biggest failures of book adaptations. Steinbeck's East of Eden is a sprawling novel (500+ pages) about two generations of an American family.

The story purposefully mimics certain historical aspects of the Old Testament so that the action is spread out and interspersed between lists of names and laws of proper living (ok, small exaggeration). Suffice it to say that the novel is quite opposite in intention and in dynamic to the intentions and dynamics of film.

A great director and a great cast (Elia Kazan- director, James Dean and Raymond Massey - actors) set out to make a film adaptation that was essentially a series of episodes from the second half of the novel.

Though East of Eden is hailed as a classic piece of cinema, it does not do justice to the scope of the book, nor does it realize the underlying conflict of the novel. These failures in translation do not make the movie a bad movie. The melodrama (of a weak screenplay) and the regrettably poor acting do.

Though some may disagree with a generally negative assessement of the film, the consensus opinion will always be that the book is better than the movie, even considering the novel's flaws. The film East of Eden is not a good adaptation. Viewed with scientific objectivity, we have to agree that the film version of this sprawling and so-so novel lacks the book's epic and intentionally historic qualities.

Moby Dick, in its many film variations, gives us further painful examples of failed adaptations of literature to film.

The Middle Ground

There are writers who specialize in books that are turned into movies. Stephen King and Michael Crichton have both had numerous books picked up by film studios and turned into movies. Carrie, Cujo, The Green Mile, Misery are just a few titles of Stephen King novels that have been turned into films that are fairly "true to the book".

Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park series produced huge hits as books and as film adaptations.

As great as Jurassic Park(original) was as a film, the book holds its own against the movie version. If you read the book then watch the movie, you'll see this is true.

Another Crichton thriller adapted to film that proves the general book-to-film rule is Congo, a novel about a trained gorilla with a voice modulator that allows it to speak English. The talking gorilla goes into the jungles of Africa with a scientific research team, encountering a mysterious ancient culture that is not kind to visitors.

Congo, the book, is a captivating and exciting read.

Congo, the movie, is a terrible mistake of a film with special effects (central to the film) that are so poorly done they ruin the viewing experience within the first few minutes.

Where Stephen King's books have been turned into good movies that match the qualities of his books and Crichton's novel adaptations have gone both ways, there are yet other novels whose film adaptations surpass them in story-telling, in adherence to theme, and in entertainment value.

Exceptions to the Rule

Last of the Mohicans and Dune are great films that bring foreign worlds to life, complete with atmosphere, well-drawn secondary characters, detailed manners and over-all specificity.

James Fennimore Cooper is hailed as a marquee name in American letters, yet his novel of Natty Bumpo does not match up to the power of the 1992 film starring Daniel Day Lewis.

The Last of the Mohicans film maintains the gauntlet scene from the novel, with a twist of course, and the battle at the cave, with another twist, and manages to add a straightforward political conflict on top of it with a romance as a cherry on top.

Packed with battles, sharp-shooting, and wit, Last of the Mohicans (1992) gets five out of five stars where the novel only gets three stars out of five.

The same thing goes for Dune. This epic science-fiction novel was adapted into a film directed by David Lynch and became something less pedantic and self-involved than the novel.

Self-reference is a convention used well in this novel, a tool where author Frank Herbert precedes each chapter with a quote from a set of books that are ostensibly written about the people and the action in the story of Dune, after the events of the novel have taken place.

This helps to reinforce a sense of reality inside the fantasy world of Dune. However, the insistence on treating the story as a history ends up dragging the story down into a repetitive muck, whereas the film adaptation manages to render this repetition of "prophecy" and history as a helpful and powerful refrain, adding importance and inevitability to the events at the film's climax.

Resources:
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