this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Trippin' Through Time
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I hate this stupid take. Books and movies are very different mediums, with very different rules for storytelling. The chance that a director captures what you see in your head is so abysmally small, that you will always be disappointed. Just see the stories as abstract things, with books and movies being different interpretations of it. There are cases where I prefer the book over the movie, and cases where it's the other way around. It's all fine.
Yeah moviemakers are artists aswell. It’s impossible for an artist like a director and screenwriter to not leave their own artistic fingerprint on the work.
I see it like this. Books are the work of a single individual. That one person will have broad authority to write their story however they please. So range of book quality is very large. There are great books and there are truly awful books. And in fact, the vast majority of books are total rubbish. But the dregs get forgotten and the good stuff rises to the top.
Movies are made by committee. This reduces the spread of quality. Many hands tends to move things towards the average. So you have a much lower portion of total crap, but you also don't have as many true masterpieces. The quality of most movies tends to be pretty mid.
But because books don't go through as much of an averaging out of quality through being created by many hands, when they go well. They go WELL. Sometimes a master author will sit down, truly be in their element, and create their greatest work. And their vision will carry through and arrive to the reader undiluted. But movies? You can be the greatest director or screen writer on the planet; you're still not going to be able to make a movie without the help of hundreds of other people. You could write the world's greatest movie, but your vision will inevitably be worn down quite a bit before it reaches the audiences in theaters.
Or, expressed graphically:
Yeah that’s true and also movies are expensive as hell. Many in that production line of producers and artists have to make concessions on their artistic vision simply to keep the movie within budget.
Exceptions are the few successful auteur directors like Tarantino and Miyazaki or even Christopher Nolan who probably just gets a blank check to do whatever he wants.
Yes. And let's not forget that making a movie is infinitely more complex than writing a book. For a book there's usually a single author. Sure, they might get feedback from editors and friends, but ultimately it's just the author. A movie requires a load of talented people and their artistic vision and abilities need to align. Script, director, photography, editor and so many other departments need to come together to create something good or sometimes even great.
Film made from books tend to not even tell exactly the same story and that's my main issue with why movies are commonly not as good as the book. The movie tells a different god damn story than the one it was based on. Or at least significantly change things that didn't need to be changed just because of the medium.
Ready Player One, for example. The movie is absolutely terrible compared to the book and one of the things that really sucked about the movie was the lackluster way it did every single visual reference made in the book. The protagonist's avatar in the game of the book was basically an amalgamation of like 10 different popular fictional characters. They had a fucking additional race scene in the movie but didn't even use the car he was described to have had in the book (a mix of the ecto1 and back to the future delorian).
It should be pretty easy to match what people imagine reading the book here, since everything was just a clearly described video game or movie reference. Hollywood still managed to fuck up the visuals in their visual medium version of the story, while also changing the story in a lot of places in ways that didn't need to be changed.
See, that's the great thing about art. Different people like different things. I found the book for RPO terrible, really awful. The movie however was quite entertaining. Spielberg knows his stuff and can polish a turd. For The Martian, I really enjoyed both the book and the movie.
Often its not about what you had in your head (like how you pictured the character, etc) but the premise and obviously depth of the book is lost.
But, that's my whole point. How are you supposed to put the depth of a book into a runtime that people actually want to watch? Even LotR, which has a runtime of 12 hours for the extended cut had to leave things out. It's not feasible to expect to see everything that was important to you in the book brought directly into the movie. I'd argue that a lot of the movie adaptations that people hate tried too hard to stick to the source material.
Well that's part of Hollywood schlockbusters, just cater to the masses. Anything slower than continuous action and majority of movie goers can't stay focused. So the film becomes a garbage Coles notes version. You don't need full on time frame to capture the essence, and if it really does then it should have been a series not a film.