Any sci-fi film that's as good as the book?

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I second The Martian and Annihilation. Looking forward to what they do with Project Hail Mary too.



I know the best Sci-fi series, not a movie, a web-series name DARK on Netflix. I watched it, and it was mind-blowing. The concept they have used is so hard to understand. I loved it.



I know the best Sci-fi series, not a movie, a web-series name DARK on Netflix. I watched it, and it was mind-blowing. The concept they have used is so hard to understand. I loved it.
Dark is great but I'm pretty sure it's not based on a book.
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I'll posit that this is a moot point. There's no good way to compare a novel to a movie. I hope to spend a whole bunch of hours with a novel, may re-read parts of and will have to imagine how things look based on verbal descriptions and will hear no sound at all, not to mention having no theme music or musical accompaniment.

In a movie, it's going to be over in a couple hours, everything I "need" (at least according to the movie maker) to see is right on the screen, sound FX abound and words are kept to a minimum because movies are visually oriented. I don't need long, florid descriptions of something I can see on a screen and, even when the words are profound, I'm probably going to miss them because of the action and imagery. The music often is the emotional barometer of the plot line and the book doesn't have that either.

I can see Hamlet trying to do his soliloquy. The director says to cut it short because we only have 15 seconds for that scene before we move on to a sword fight or a horseback chase. God only knows what you'd need to do with any 19th century Russian novel. Imagine trying to make a movie out of the Brothers Karamazov. Oh yeah, someone did and it stunk.

Books and movies as different as wood and water. If you can show me a novel that is as visually stunning as a well shot movie, we might have a better debate. I'm not actually saying that movies are better than novels, just that they are profoundly different.



Books and movies as different as wood and water. If you can show me a novel that is as visually stunning as a well shot movie, we might have a better debate. I'm not actually saying that movies are better than novels, just that they are profoundly different.
They are very different mediums, but comparing books and films allows us to compare two really different ways to tell the same story. It's something special when the same story moves you or thrills you when done two different ways.

I've seen numerous iterations of Hamlet, from reading the play, to seeing it performed in a theater, to watching direct adaptations, to watching time-shifted adaptations. To say that one is "as good as" the other isn't to say that they map literally onto one another, it's to say that the quality of the experience was equal. Yes, I've imagined the characters saying those lines, heard them in my head. But the way that a certain actor put an emphasis on one of the words gave me a different feeling about the scene.



They are very different mediums, but comparing books and films allows us to compare two really different ways to tell the same story. It's something special when the same story moves you or thrills you when done two different ways.

I've seen numerous iterations of Hamlet, from reading the play, to seeing it performed in a theater, to watching direct adaptations, to watching time-shifted adaptations. To say that one is "as good as" the other isn't to say that they map literally onto one another, it's to say that the quality of the experience was equal. Yes, I've imagined the characters saying those lines, heard them in my head. But the way that a certain actor put an emphasis on one of the words gave me a different feeling about the scene.
I've seen movie versions of The Bard and some have been quite good, although they lack the physical immediacy of a real theater. The weakness I see in a book to movie translation is both time compression and the fact that so much about the book depends on how I see it in my own brain. In one, you are left partly to your own imagination, in the other, it's all right out there on a screen. I love both, but can't help but think that they are almost too different to compare.

I can see a similar shift between live theater and a movie version of same. Live theater has its own kind of intensity coupled with a certain uncertainty (lost lines, mistakes, small improvisations to cover both) that won't happen on film, not to mention being close enough to the actors to see spittle and sweat. You have zero FX, minimal sets, but maximum intensity.



I've seen movie versions of The Bard and some have been quite good, although they lack the physical immediacy of a real theater. The weakness I see in a book to movie translation is both time compression and the fact that so much about the book depends on how I see it in my own brain. In one, you are left partly to your own imagination, in the other, it's all right out there on a screen. I love both, but can't help but think that they are almost too different to compare.
I get what you mean, but there's something really magical about watching a book you love get turned into a movie you also think is awesome. Or watching a movie and then checking out the book to find that as written word the story has some different dimension.

For example, I really enjoyed listening to Far From the Madding Crowd as an audiobook. But I also absolutely loved the most recent film adaptation. Part of the enjoyment of comparing them is seeing how they accomplish the same goals, but with slightly different methods. For example, to show that one character is falling in love with another, the book describes what they are doing and even maybe some inner monologue. In the film, we see the way that he glances at her and how she later glances back. Neither would work well if done the same way in the other medium: a book trying to describe his loving look couldn't so compactly convey what the actors were able to put into their facial expression. And by the same token, inner monologue has to be done as voice over narration in a film, which can be a mixed bag.

Each medium has its own strengths, and it's neat seeing how those different strengths are applied to the same story.

I agree that it seems silly to compare them in the sense of asking "is this book as good as this movie?". I think the conversation here is more about if each does a good job of capitalizing on telling the story its own way.



Not a book, but a short story that became a movie . . .

The short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang is excellent and the screenplay for the movie Arrival, based on this short story, is also excellent. The movie does change some things and adds quite a bit but even Ted Chiang stated that he was very happy with the movie. Ted Chiang interviews are numerous on YouTube.
Side note, Chiang has a couple of short story collections, and both of them are absolutely tremendous. Cannot recommend either of them enough.
Thank you both for this recommendation. I'd made a note of Chiang's name but forgot why, and happened to buy the audiobook of Stories of Your Life and Others and am absolutely loving it. I gasped in my car when I realized I was listening to a short story that was the basis for Arrival. The subtle use of the grammatical syntax in the story is masterful. "I remember when you will be a year old."



Thank you both for this recommendation. I'd made a note of Chiang's name but forgot why, and happened to buy the audiobook of Stories of Your Life and Others and am absolutely loving it. I gasped in my car when I realized I was listening to a short story that was the basis for Arrival. The subtle use of the grammatical syntax in the story is masterful. "I remember when you will be a year old."
Excellent, so glad you like it.

If you like that there's something approaching a 100% chance you'll like his more recent short story collection (which I read before the earlier one), Exhalation. I'm not even sure which is better. Thinking of rereading a few of the stories from both collections.

He's one of just a few authors I'll be making a point to read immediately the next time he releases something.



Excellent, so glad you like it.

If you like that there's something approaching a 100% chance you'll like his more recent short story collection (which I read before the earlier one), Exhalation. I'm not even sure which is better. Thinking of rereading a few of the stories from both collections.

He's one of just a few authors I'll be making a point to read immediately the next time he releases something.
Exhalation was a fair chunk more expensive, but I may just spring for it.



Yeah, makes sense, it's newer. If I had a hard copy I'd just mail it to you (when it comes to books I love I'm basically a street evangelist), but unfortunately that's the one I bought on Kindle. Definitely would've gone hard copy if I'd known how much I was going to love it.



Yeah, makes sense, it's newer. If I had a hard copy I'd just mail it to you (when it comes to books I love I'm basically a street evangelist), but unfortunately that's the one I bought on Kindle. Definitely would've gone hard copy if I'd known how much I was going to love it.
I bet I can order it through my library.