I’m a reader. I completely understand how “the book” provides more nearly a singular vision and has room to explore characters and their interior lives pretty extensively and explicitly, and the lower cost means you can target niche audiences. I often find I like the book (LOTR, Dune, any Twain adaptation ever) better than the movie or show, but not always. At some point aren’t you just saying that the things books do well are more important to you than seeing the collective efforts of a filmmaking team and what film as a medium does well?

Some personal examples where I think the movie/show is a better example of filmmaking than the books are of literature:

• The Shawshank Redemption. I actually just read this novella today. It’s a pleasant little thing, sturdily written and with a bit of commentary and a melancholy reflection on hope and resilience and time. It’s also sort of stylistically derivative, which means that anything setting tone and mood is unremarkably presented, and Red is so far from an omniscient narrator that I actually feel a disconnect. It also sort of rambles along in the interest of (I think) reminding us of how much time is passing. I get what was King was going for, and it works, it really does, but I don’t know how special it is. The movie was all of what was good in the book, distilled and heightened to damn near the exact right amount, and everything that the book labors over, Darabont and Robbins and Freeman make look easy. It’s a brilliant film, based on a nice book. Also, 500 yards is not almost a mile, Red. It’s just not.

• The Martian. Weir was a first time author, and it shows. He actually remains one with a limited skillset, though he’s honed it over the years (Hail Mary is really solid). In the book, every single scene not involving Watney is tedious and either mechanically pushing the plot forward, or if not it’s bordering on juvenile. Just some dialogue doctoring and professional actors helps those scenes a ton. For Watney, Damon kills it; perfect casting and the run time of movie keeps the author-insert gimmick from wearing out its welcome, which is a risk with Weir. Completely losing the rover trek is a miss I think, as was the plan to get to space, but overall I like the movie just a touch more than the book, though again, I like both.

• Revenge of the Sith. Both of them suck. The book sucks worse, because it’s trying to polish somebody else’s turd, and doing so by way of a hack who thinks he’s Hemingway. In fact, this goes for a lot of licensed tie-in writing. Halo is not top-tier TV, but I can just about bet the books I haven’t read are only “better” to people who are invested in them or, to circle back to my original phrasing, who think the book is always better.

• The Last of the Mohicans. Not that the 1992 movie is special, but to quote the aforementioned Twain, “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”

• Honorable mention to the Expanse, where I think the one is just about even with the other.