Reflection 4 - Film adaptions

Movie adaptions of books have always been subject to much scrutiny to fans of the original novel, as well as critics. The transition from a piece of work that relies largely upon an individual's own interpretation of the story to a piece of work that relies solely upon one person's interpretation is difficult to create, but there has been several note-worthy adaptions that are all deserving of much praise:

1) Fight Club
2) Jarhead
3) The Green Mile
4) Silence of the Lambs
5) The Shining

The reason these five movies have done so well has little to do with the content of the original book. We've seen books that are widely accepted as genius fail as they're turned into film, but the reason for this isn't because the material they were working with was sub-par, it's the fault of the director and the actors. A key component of the movie industry revolves around the originality of a film-- this is absent in adaptions. The plot, the characters, the setting, and key events have all already been imagined and published, but it's the job of the director and the actors to turn this into something else; this has, so to speak, spawned another movie industry, which revolves completely around the abilities of the actors, and the imagination of the director.

These five films did more than re-enact the book, they added another layer to it, something that was impossible to find in the original books. They played the scenes you're familiar with (and occasionally new ones), but they added emotion and new depth in that couldn't have been done without the aid of the director's own immagination and the talent of the actors involved. An old saying exists that says "a picture paints a thousand words", and this is a true statement; the challenge with making an adaption, though, is that these thousand words need to offer a unique and well-crafted prospective of the events that we read.