The Heartbreak of Adaptation Syndrome

My review for the English language remake of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" resulted in several comments detailing my failure to appreciate it. I was chastised for criticizing scenes, characters, and motifs that were taken directly from the pages of Stieg Larsson's original novel. The implication was that, because the remake was more faithful to its source, it was by default better than the 2010 Swedish film adaptation. It was then directly stated that I would have understood this had I actually read the novel - which, they freely informed me, I obviously had not.

And they're right. I hadn't read it. I still haven't. And in all likelihood, I never will read it. I fail to see why this disqualifies me from having an opinion about the films it has spawned. My job is to analyze only what I'm seeing on the screen, and then decide whether or not it achieved what it set out to achieve. Nowhere does it say that I'm required to make comparisons between films and novels, which are innately different storytelling mediums. Any reasonable literature or film buff will be the first to tell you that what works in a book will not always work in a movie, and vice versa.

Having gone through the process of majoring in English, I have firsthand experience with people who have a condition I call Adaptation Syndrome - that is, the inability to recognize how altering a novel or short story can sometimes make for a better film adaptation. If you judge a movie solely on the basis of source material that has been both retained and removed, and if you're unwilling to consider the possibility that some of that material is not suitable for the big screen, you officially suffer from it.

What I hope all audiences someday realize is that movies are not now and have never been comparable with the written word. There's more to it than mere visualization; cinematic plotlines, which typically occupy a time allotment of less than two hours, require edits and alterations for the sake of advancement. Without these edits, the movie would be unbearably long, overloaded with characters and events, needlessly difficult to follow, and terribly unfocused. I'm not saying we should blindly accept all film adaptations of novels or short stories. I am saying we should never dismiss them simply because an extraneous detail or two has been omitted.