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Another interesting thought-piece that I stumbled on in my Middle-earth wanderings across the internet. In this article, Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez tackles the eternally vexing question of textual fidelity and why he feels that the divergences between novel and film are beneficial.<\/p>\n
THERE is a certain amount of creative license that enters into any film adaptation of a book. And history teaches us that no matter how faithful (or unfaithful) a film adaptation is with respect to its original source, someone will complain about the movie\u2019s (un)faithfulness to the books.<\/p>\n
For example, I loved the first two \u201cHarry Potter\u201d movies, which I felt were extremely imaginative and creative. I had never seen children\u2019s movies before where the actors were actually called upon to ACT. Compare the lively, engaged performances of the adults in \u201cHarry Potter and the Sorceror\u2019s Stone\u201d with the wooden performances of otherwise perfectly good actors in classic children\u2019s films like \u201cMio in the Land of Faraway\u201d, \u201cThe Witches\u201d, \u201cThe Neverending Story\u201d, and so on. You almost have to go back to Edmund Guinn in \u201cMiracle on 34th Street\u201d to see anything like an adult actor taking a children\u2019s story seriously enough to treat it with respect (well, \u201cMary Poppins\u201d and \u201cChitty Chitty Bang Bang\u201d were pretty good).<\/p>\n
But I digress from the main point. Movies can be very faithful to the book, and one of the criticisms that my Harry Potter fan friends who had read the books before watching the movies complained about was that the movies were boring and predictable. They followed the books very closely (even while cutting out a bit of material).<\/p>\n
But then along came \u201cHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban\u201d, which Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n directed \u2014 totally changing the tone and character of the film franchise \u2014 and people complained that his film was too UNLIKE the book. Talk about injecting a Goldilocks Syndrome into a fanbase, you just cannot find people agreeing on when the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d movies are just right even up to the last film (which some people hate for all sorts of reasons \u2014 but I loved it).<\/p>\n