Story Killers - Characters Unwelcome (part 1)

It is almost always a great disappointment to watch a movie that is based on a book that you really like. I use the universal "you" rather than "I" because I have found a great deal of commonality with nearly everyone I have spoken to on the subject. It seems to be a pretty universal experience. Interestingly enough, though, I have found that my reasons for this disappointment differ from what others have told me of their own feelings a lot of the time. In what way can a movie be a bad adaptation? I think that there are at least three:

1. Changing the storyline or the characters in the story,
2. Changing the outcome or message of the story, or
3. Changing the character of the characters

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Changing the Storyline or the Characters

Obviously, the most frequent thing that happens is the first, and this is for a fairly simple reason. Books are usually either too short or two long for a two hour movie format. Many childrens' books are just too short (for instance Where The Wild Things Are or The Cat In The Hat) and are just a few short pages of rhymes with lots of pictures, and any screenplay must invent an entire storyline that will encapsulate or give the background story of the beloved book. The real question is - does the added part match the feeling of the original story? Is it a good story, or is it just a waste of time (for instance The Cat in the Hat - ugghhhh). In the case of more adult-length novels, the opposite is true. The screenwriter must chop out lots of detail and exposition from the book to make it 2-3 hours of action on a screen. Often this will call for carefully removing entire sub-plots and characters from the story. Sometimes the screenwriter will even combine a couple of minor characters into one character to streamline the story.

I think that this is what most people complain about. For instance, many people complained, saying "Where's Tom Bombadil?" after watching The Fellowship of the Ring. I did not mind that so much because I knew there was just no way to get even a 3 hour movie from that book if too much time was spent on the adventures that the hobbits had just getting out of the Shire (I had many other complaints against Peter Jackson, however, which I will give in later sections). While this is an understandable thing and just part of making a screenplay, some do it better than others, who seem to delight in ripping up the story in a quite shameless fashion, in ways that do not even make any sense. Some of the more annoying things that they do are

• take out entire sections of the story that explain why people are doing something,
• add extra scenes just so there will be some gore or sex in the story,
• take out sections because of time and then inexplicably add in entire other A-Plot items that weren't even in the book (the entire first invasion in "Prince Caspian", Aragorn getting lost on the way to Helm's Deep just to have his own battle scene, etc).

Sometimes I can forgive a director or screenwriter for altering a story. As an example, take "2001 A Space Odyssey" . Though Kubrick made the plot of a lot harder to understand (compared to the book), he made it his own art in a way that captured the 'feel' of the story (and it was very cool). The same goes for his "The Shining". In fact, this is an example of where this kind of thing may actually be good. In general, Stephen King novels don't transfer well to the screen, because the first part of the novel (where the suspense is) usually is easy to show, but the denouement is usually so overblown in the book it is hard to show it in the movie and maintain believability ("IT" is a good example of this). What Kubrick did to "The Shining" was to play with the viewer in a really creepy way up to the end. Who did not want to crawl out of their skin when the ball rolls up to the boy while playing alone in the hall. Eeek! (Actually I read that King did not like Kubrick's interpretation. I liked both the book and the movie. A later, more faithful tv version that King supervised, seemed a lot less scary to me than the Kubrick version, or the book).

There are certain genres, however, where the movie writer/director play with a story at their peril. This would include beloved young people's novels and historical or religious movies. Almost every Jesus movie leaves me yelling at the screen as they mangle a story that I believe is historical, and whose historical details are important. Note that the Harry Potter movies (especially the early ones) follow the books very closely indeed. I actually heard an interview with the first movie's director about how he knew that Harry Potter fans would kill him if he messed up the story, so he was being very careful to get that right.

For me, the worst plot changes are the ones that affect the message of the story or who the characters are as people, though. I will deal with these in the next part of this article.