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.
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.
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.
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.
People who like both
“Where the Wild Things Are” is a cute little children book about being wild sounds good at first but gets boring over time and it’s fine but the 2009 movie was so much more depth, go watch it!
I put recreational readers up with vegans and cross fit.
reading is great. i don’t know how to put it, but if you compare the dune novel and the new dennis villeneuve movies you’ll see major differences, and in my opinion to the detriment of the movies. the dune novel is very focused on character’s thoughts and ideas. those thoughts and ideas can’t really easily be expressed in a movie, not with explicit verbalization (because the novel’s audiobook is 24 hours long) and not with best-effort facial expressions either. in dune’s case the movie is also very interested in spectacle and explosions and murder and visual drama, and while the novel is of course also very dramatic it’s a very different kind of dramatic. frank herbert’s novel is very interested in the world and its mechanics and its citizens in a way the movies don’t want to or can’t be.
there are definitely accessibility issues with some novels, and some novels that have critical acclaim only really become interesting with a lot of prior reading, but i do really like it. in my case i also take public transit daily, and it’s great to be able to just whip out an ereader and read something for twenty minutes.
and if you’re fed up with streaming services offering a worse selection of movies and tv shows every year, or with seemingly the general state of movies and tv worsening every year, novels don’t really have that issue. there are definitely still differences in quality, but you can read top 100 series in whatever genre you like for decades, and by the time you’re done you’ll find there are another twenty or more new series in that list. personal recommendations are also more interesting, because there are just so many novels to discover. someone whose reading opinion you might appreciate may have read hundreds of completely different novels than you. with movies and tv you probably won’t get recommendations for anything you weren’t really aware of before.
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Do you also use Arch Linux?
no, bazzite. nice joke though.
That was great.
There are a few exceptions where the movie was far better (Jaws comes to mind). And a few instances where both, while different, stand on their own quite well (How To Train Your Dragon).
But mostly, yes.
I watched and loved the movies before reading the books so my opinion may be biased, but I think Lord of the Rings movies were more enjoyable than books.
I see how the books were great in their time and the worldbuilding of the books is amazing - but the movies do great job at streamlining the story and making it fun.
The battle of helm’s deep is way better in the movies at least. Battle of gondor… some parts are better in the books, the whole “ghosts killing everyone” in the movies was a bit cheap. But either way both are great.
Oh and frodo in book > frodo in movie
Hot take, the battles in the book aren’t great because Tolkien doesn’t want to glorify violence. Half of the fights are like two pages in the books before the point of view character passes out. After realizing that I was kind of disappointed in how “campy early 2000s action movie” the battles in the films are.
There certainly are things I liked better in the books, I remember that much. But when judging entirety of books vs entirety of movies movies were better in my opinion.
(I’m only talking LotR itself ofc)
Yeah the movies have 1 extra thing that puts it way above the books: music
The Hobbit and LOTR books are actually fantastic to listen to as audiobooks. The narrator (at least in the version I had) sings all the songs.
Oh yeah I loved those too. Depends on the narrator I guess as well. But the music in the movies is on a different level.
i am usually the meme boy, but i fully agree with you
The film is helped with amazing casting and a lot of care over the script. However there are things that were changed that do not matter and done for the right reason, such as Arwen being given more screen time (not quite a sausage fest as it was before), Glorfindels role in the Black Rides bit, but also bits that I really didn’t like, such as messing with the power levels of Gandalf and Witch-king during their confrontation.
This lead to the abomination that is the Hobbit adaptation, partly because the film studio wanted to add an Aragorn to it, despite Thorin being nothing like Aragorn, and adding the three way love triangle because people liked the expanded Arwen story from LotR.
Yes, I very distinctly talk LotR only.
As for Hobbit, the Maple films edit made it quite ok and cuts most of the questionable stuff. Still too much Alfrid though. I hated Alfrid more than the love triangle if you’d believe it.
Yeah Alfrid was awful, I didn’t like anything about that characterization.
I haven’t tried the Maple films edit, the M4 edit was my favorite of the ones I have tried, its super aggressive with what it cuts out and tweaks the film grading
The LOTR movies need a lots of hand waving to work. Which is why you get questions like “why didn’t they take the eagles to mordor?”.
Eh. It is a popular meme but I think even with the info the movie gives it is pretty clear why. They need to go in secret and Sauron and Saruman have spies/scouts about (like the Sarumans birds).
And even if they flew to near Mordor undetected, the giant freaking Eye would spot them - if the patroling Nazgul wouldn’t spot them first.
And then what?
What would they be able to do against a couple of giant eagles flying 300m above them?
Saruman could possibly magic them, but everyone else couldn’t do a damn thing;
Ypu mean the Nazgul on their dragons would just shrug? I’d imagine they have balistas or other warmachines that could make the traveling above Mordor uncomfortable.
Sauron never thought they would want to destroy it. If they did the most obvious beeline towards Mt. Doom, he would realize this and would make it impossible.
No, books generally give more information, but that doesn’t make them better.
They are different media with completely different aspects that shouldn’t be looked at in the same way. The only similarity is that they both tell a story.
I’m always in favour of watching the movie. Since you get the story in 1.5 hours instead of spending multiple evenings to essentially get the same information. And I like visual media in general.
Of course, if no movie exists then reading the book is also a good option. Looking at you Terry Pratchett.
Ready Player One being the exception for this rule
Yeah, but it had its own awfulness, like the Iron Giant used completely inappropriately.
I really liked the book! I really like the film too though
I think they’re too different to compare, really. Kind of like World War Z.
and forest gump.
The book told a better story
It just wouldn’t have made for a very compelling movie, as a lot of it is in Wade’s head
So they ended up changing it drastically
So, which one you like better will depend a lot on whether that ^ bothers you
Unpopular opinion: The Hunger Games movies were better than the books.
I could barely get through the books with Katniss being so insufferable.
Oh, your hard drive has the whole movie series on it? Well I got the whole series right here!
Wow that’s a really cool installation. Is it supposed to be a display of some sort or does it have something to do with the word press in the background?
The Mist
Yep film is way better
Even King says so. They fixed the ending in the film.
Agreed wholeheartedly
Can we not establish an anti-intellectual tradition here on lemmy like the rest of the fucking world? Can we just have one place?
Can we just appreciate art regardless of the medium?
