the really irritating thing is when people go on about film adaptations of novels and how ‘they left too much out!’ ugh. please. a film is a different medium than a novel is. what is great about both of them is that they can do specific things that other forms of media can’t. 

with a novel you can get the nuanced back story, the explanations that float into other memories and streams of consciousness, you get word play and analogies that are poetic and interesting. ‘she had blisters from sighing’ is a line that perfectly captures what a novel can do that a film cannot.

with a film, you can be shown things rather than explicitly told, it gives you the option of being subtle and clever in a different way. you can create images and situations that squeeze the true essence and meaning of a novel without doing a literal translation, which can be lengthy and not interesting to watch. simplifying text is necessary for a successful film adaptation. for a film to just be a literal play by play of a book would be convoluted, interrupted, boring, and also terrible. a film cannot ever put you into someone’s head the same way text can, it cannot deliver the same things. film has to use its own strengths to interpret text in a suiting way.

can you imagine if a harry potter novel had been reproduced in a literal manner? even pretending that in some unbelievable way it was within normal running time, it’s written in first person. so, do you use voiceover for nearly the entire thing? no, that’s ridiculous. and film narration is shit anyway. so now you have the task of showing everything from harry’s perspective without the narration, which is impossible to do without condensing, shifting, and adding to the original storyline. look, there’s a reason that jo rowling didn’t write anything about harry waking up in the middle of the night to stomach cramping diarrhea. obviously no one wants to read about that, let alone in the middle of an ongoing storyline. it stops the flow, is unnecessary, boring, gross. small details of a novel become that way when translated to film. if you cannot enjoy an adaptation that thinks broadly, you are missing the point.

i think the hunger games was an incredibly good adaptation. no, it didnt take too many artistic risks, but the ones it did fit well. nothing about it felt forced or disloyal to the fiction, and it was particularly clever at what it chose to add to the story- the asides between the president and the head gamesmaker, the games ‘lab’, the condensed caves arc, the district 11 riot. all of these additions were very good at getting across the main points at the heart of the story. pithy summarization in the right places and with the right themes is more valuable than getting every detail right.