By Sam Graham
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the book is always better than the film” – Snobs
The sad fact is that this brand of snobbery tends to be true, but in the same way that Ozzy Osborne’s solo career surprised everyone by not being complete rubbish, there are always exceptions to the rule.
Films and their book counterparts have always had this strange contention towards each other; just ask Alan Moore what he thinks of his best works’ celluloid counterparts. No matter what year you read this, you can guarantee he’s still pissed.
It’s a safe bet that snobbery debates like this eventually descend into grasping for originality; not that either side has much claim to it, if you ask me. Take the two biggest franchises at the moment: Harry Potter and the MCU films. They are basically the same thing. They both made such a huge profit that they led their industries into shaping everything else to be just like them (most books are YA now/there are tacky quips in every new film), and both fanbases hark on about how original they are, when they really aren’t (Harry is the monomyth (look it up)/shared cinematic universes were done in the 1940’s. Shared universes also happened in books long before the MCU too (I’ll see your Avengers and raise you one Eternal Champion.))
I’m here today to talk about some of the films that are superior to their original books, and why. Sometimes the differences are massive, some are subtle directional choices.
And please remember, this is only my opinion. Feel free to disagree, but don’t expect me to change my mind just to appease you.
Yes, you read that right. No, I am not trolling. The Lord of the Rings films are better than the books. I’m talking the extended versions only here.
Both are great tales of high fantasy adventure with loveab- err, likeable characters that refuse to die no matter how much the odds are stacked against them. They have a gay old time, singing songs and being merry any time they aren’t mired in filth.
The element that tips the films over the books is one simple fact: pacing.
Have you ever read a book that bores you with reams of text about unnecessary bollocks and not the story at hand? That’s usually because the pacing is off.
The Lord of the Rings is less of a novel and more a genealogy book/encyclopaedia at times. Paragraph after paragraph opens and closes with a weather report and you get to learn the backstory for nearly all of Bilbo’s relatives that -sans Frodo- doesn’t have any relevance to the story later on.
Bombadil, for example, is the epitome of pointlessness. He shows up, he goes away. That’s it. I’m fully aware that he is some OP superbeing that could slap the shit out of Sauron if he wanted to (and I only know this because of fanboys defending him and the LOTR Wiki), but that isn’t mentioned in the book, it bears no relevance to the story, and it does nothing to build the world. The book is obese with these kinds of moments.
In short, the book is boring. The film has better pacing, because it trims the fat.
And by the time Tolkien gets round to the scourging of The Shire, the big evil of the story is already defeated. Everything after that is part of the wind-down.
I was surprised when I learned it was a book first. Apparently Chuck Palahniuk, the author, liked to surprise people with that factoid also. At the time of reading that fact, it never ceased to amaze him. He’s probably sick of it now.
This one is probably the closest adaptations along with the next entry below, as large swathes are lifted directly from the book onto screen with only 3 notable exceptions:
● In the book, after having sex, Marla says ‘I want your abortion’ rather than ‘I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school’
● In the book they acquire human fat by fattening Marla’s mother. In the book they steal it from a liposuction clinic.
● The ending.
The ending is what makes the biggest difference for me. The book ends with the hero in a nut-house, resting assured that Project Mayhem is over until one of the orderlies gives him a proverbial wink and a nod, hinting that it isn’t.
In the film, Edward Norton’s final line to Marla - “You met me at a very strange time in my life” - while the headquarters of major credit card companies blow up around them, is the perfect banal response in an attempt to justify the chaos.
And then there’s a picture of a cock.
The other reason David Fincher’s film is superior is that the core feature of Fight Club is physical violence. And no matter how good the writing is, it can’t demonstrate the simultaneous anguish and catharsis of that like film can. Violence is a visceral act. You need to see it without your imagination diluting it.
The Road
Again, similar to Fight Club, The Road’s movie is almost identical. A man and his son trek the American wasteland to reach the coast. The reason for this isn’t directly specified, but it will mean they have access to water (once they filter it) and it gives them something to do/hope for.
What tips the film as better though is that it ignores much of the theology that pervades the book. Long monologues about God, if the son is God then what does that make the man, etc. This is a common thing with Cormac McCarthy and I suppose that now he has his Pulitzer, people will pass it off as being part of his oeuvre, but that doesn’t make it good, or thought-provoking. While it doesn’t derail the story in The Road like author's opinion inserts sometimes do, it doesn’t hurt the story to get rid of it all either.
It’s hard to imagine that back in ’82, John Carpenter’s The Thing was panned by critics. Nowadays it tops almost every one of YouTube’s ‘Top 10 horror movies’ and is my favourite horror - with Alien being a very close second. The recognition is gets today must feel like two fingers up at the critics that doubted Carpenter back in the Eighties. After all, there is no sweeter feeling than showing the naysayers that they were wrong.
The novella, Who Goes There, by John W. Campbell is a great story, but it is a little light on the paranoia side of things, which is the main selling point of the movie (along with the body horror, of course). Instead Campbell doubles down on the biology of the creature, theorising in great detail about how the alien works, what it does, how it does it, and then it makes a jetpack to launch itself into space. The story ends with the survivors mentioning how the Thing is from a solar system with a blue sun. It does strike me as strange that the team know this.
The story does a lot of posturing and theorising, but glosses over a lot of the action and interactions that are shown in the film. It mentions these things off-hand as they have happened in between the written scenes. The movie has a more even blend of the two.
Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? Is chalk and cheese to its movie counterpart. Sure, it follows Deckard as he hunts rogue replicants/androids and learns about the nature of humanity in the process.
But the way it’s done in the book is inferior to the film.
In the novel, Deckard wants to own a real sheep, because owning real and android animals is a symbol of status. He loathes his android one. He meets Rachel, an android, who later in the book kills his sheep. They have almost no interaction other than that. Deckard’s empathy towards androids comes from him performing his android-exposing test on himself and a fellow detective who teamed up with him to kill some of his bounty. He then flies out to the wasteland and has a religious epiphany akin to that of society’s current religion, Mercerism. These two events somehow imbue him with empathy for the androids.
In the movie, Deckard’s empathy for the replicants stems from his attraction to Rachel. This builds into sympathy for her plight, which turns into love. He then chooses life on the run with her rather than just following orders blindly and putting a bullet in her. That empathy grown from Rachel then extends towards Roy Batty when he watches him die. Deckard realises that all they want to do is live, the same as humans, but their life has been deemed a crime by their creators, and now he sees no justification for that.
Blade Runner’s method of creating Deckard’s empathy stems from the character development. It grows both Deckard and Rachel as three-dimensional characters, whereas religious posturing and supernatural precognition does not create a sustainable bedrock for it.
I’m fully expecting Kim Newman to come round and kick the shit out of me for this. If he signs my copy of Anno Dracula though, he’s welcome to.
If you’ve ever read Bram Stoker’s novel, you’ll know that about 25% in, the story shifts from Harker’s time in Dracula's castle - being shit up by everything and raped half to death by three hot vampire women - and the rest tells the story of Mina, the walking, talking metaphor for female empowerment being crushed under the thumb of stuffy, coitophobic men, and Lucy, who is not nearly as slutty in the book as she is in the film.
From there, the men (Seward, Morris, Holmwood and Van Helsing) doddle around all day, trying in vain to suss out why Lucy is dying. Even Van Helsing hasn’t got a clue. This goes on for about 300 pages and takes away all sense of horror and suspense, because we, who read 5 chapters of Harker being in a vampire’s castle before he fled to England, know full well that it's Dracula.
It’s Dracula. Of course it is. It’s fucking Dracula. And for all the men’s posturing about how they all love Lucy oh-so dearly and give their blood willingly (which in scientific retrospect, probably speeded up her death, but Newman touched on that one, thankfully), and how they’re all such great mates with each other and how Seward loves his morphine and is enraptured by Renfield and, and-
Christ, it’s all so boring.
Coppola’s film is like Pride and Prejudice if Mr Darcy was a vampire and not just a posh shithead. It follows the main beats as the book, develops the characters better and gives the women something to do other than ‘be present’.
Firstly, the movie doesn’t try to hide the fact that Dracula is behind Lucy’s slow death. We watch him do it. It makes no sense to hide facts we already know.
The addition of the tragic love story between Mina and Dracula is perfect for keeping the audience interested in the goings on in England while Harker is laid up in Romania getting sucked dry by Monica Bellucci. Dracula’s charm over Mina is so engrossing that we, the audience get drawn in by it too, to the point that Harker would be forgotten completely if Mina didn’t feel so guilty about it all the time.
Book Mina has always been in dire need of some fleshing out. She only really becomes a character towards the end. Before that she’s just ‘Mina Murray - woman’ She essentially gives the men their plan to defeat Dracula, then lets them take all the credit.
Film Mina has character from her first scene. She’s a conflicted woman, first when she confides to Lucy about Harker’s unwillingness to put out (they’re not married, so they couldn’t possibly have sex before hand. It wouldn’t be proper), then her affair of the heart with this charismatic foreign noble with a sexy accent, swanky threads, and a massive castle above a forest. Her worrying about Harker seems less out of love and more out of conforming to social expectations, i.e. she is engaged to Harker, therefore she has to put him first. Dracula, not conforming to Victorian expectation, is her escape from this socio-dogmatic prison.
Plus the film gives Dracula some motivation too, because in the book he’s got nothing. He lives in a castle. He goes to England. He kills Lucy and turns Mina. He flees back to castle. He is killed. He is nothing but a monster. It is never stated why he buys a property in England. Do you know why? I do now. And that will be the subject of my next review.
You are correct with LOTR, Dracula, Watchmen and Frankenstein particularly. The purpose of an adaption in my view is to caputure the spirit of the original work not a scene-by-scene retelling of the source material as that never works.
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