Lost in Translation

Today I had an interesting interaction with a woman who was in Target holding a copy of the movie, The Hobbit. I noticed it and told her how wonderful the movie was. She seemed shocked, even though she was in the process of purchasing said film, because she was buying it sight unseen. I asked her if she had read the book, and she said yes, she loved it. That’s when I understood her trepidation. She was concerned that the movie might just wreck the story that she loved so much, and it reminded me of one of the biggest questions I have always asked myself? Why are books always so much better than their movie counterparts?

The book tells the whole story.

One of the biggest reasons a book is better is that it has more time to fully explain the story. For a movie to even remotely come close it would have to have endless time, and the problem with that is why people watch films. They want it all given to them in just over two hours, and unless your book is less than one hundred pages you’re not going to capture the whole tale. Many people tell me that the movie based on their favorite book doesn’t work because it leaves out their favorite part, which is inevitable with the time crunch.

A solution to this problem is what HBO has done with their Game of Thrones series, to create an entire season of a show dedicated to one whole book. That way you can get 14 episodes of one hour’s time each, making it 14 hours instead of just over two, more than enough time to capture an entire 800-page book. AND you won’t get the issue of the boredom because waiting a week between episodes only builds the suspense.

The director inserts him/herself into the story.

Another huge issue is the changing of the storyline and the character types by the director for whatever reason. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s not being true to the characters as outlined in the book. If you want to create a movie based on One For the Money, the film based on the book by Janet Evanovich, for example, with a protagonist who is firmly Italian, why choose Katherine Heigl when there are many actual Italian actresses out there who could easily fit the part and do a phenomenal job? Instead of listening to her botch dialogue with her horrible accent, why not go for reality? And then there are the endings of these movies. So often a director will change the ending, I guess in an attempt to make it a surprise for the moviegoer. However, a huge percentage of people who go to see a film based on a book are fans of that book and its ending. Why change that on them?

The glory of the reader’s imagination.

There is no way to solve this problem, not really. Each individual reader has an active imagination, and they come up with what characters look like, what they sound like, and how they are. I recall when Interview With a Vampire came out in theaters, and a lot of readers were upset that Tom Cruise was cast as the vampire Lestat. Or how some readers were disappointed with the visualization of the cloak of invisibility in the Harry Potter movies. I believe that reader imagination is one of the best things about reading books, and it cannot be duplicated in films. Instead, we see the imagination of others instead of ourselves, and that doesn’t sit well with readers for the most part. The way the scenes are laid out, the actors who play characters, and the way dialogue is read, it can all detract from our experience because it takes away our power of imagination that made our interactions with the book so interesting in the first place.

The money factor.

Movies are all about making money, so your quiet, casual book like Silver Linings Playbook becomes so much larger and grander scale than it maybe should have been. This is also the case for casting. A lot of times when actors are cast in the title roles it is because of name recognition, in order to make more money at the box office, than because they actually fit the characters. Tyler Perry most certainly would not have been my choice to play Alex Cross in the film of the same name. He is not known to be a serious actor and the books are decidedly serious, but he has a big name, and the producers of the movie utilized him for his name, not because he would have been the best Alex Cross. This happens more often than not with huge Hollywood movies based on books. And money permeates the movie in other ways too, when we talk about merchandise. You can sell more t-shirts with Halle Berry on it as Catwoman, even though in the comic books Catwoman looked nothing remotely like Halle Berry. It’s dollars and sense.

Exceptions.

While I maintain that movies made from books are never as good as those books, there are some that are done particularly well, and don’t make me want to turn them off straightaway, and most of those come from book series. Movies like the Lord of the Rings series, the Harry Potter series, and the film version of The Hunger Games stick closely to the book dialogue, the description of setting, and the description of characters. Other notable exceptions are the books that are produced after the movies, created from their screenplays. Obviously they are almost identical to the film since they were created from the film’s own script, but usually these books are not worth a reader’s time anyway. This is because as scripts they work, but to try and stretch them out into book form they are lacking. Also, usually it is a rush job to get these books out to coincide with the movie release.

I hope to see The Host this week, and I’m sure I’ll be disappointed. But then again, you never know. Now, if they made that into an HBO series, I would certainly watch.

Sam