Item — HN Reader

This is the sort of article (long, detailed, written by a high-level expert) which reassures me that NO, I really shouldn't bother to watch movies (or TV, etc.). Once you're past the visual spectacle, and "everybody else is watching"...movies, TV, etc. are generally inferior to books. And consistent competence is far easier to find in authors than in studios + producers + writers + directors + ...

(Article is from 2020...OTOH, the article is hardly about 2020 situations or events.)

3 comments

The author goes into problems caused by the inherent differences between writing a book and making a movie.

>I think there’s one question left to be answered here, and that’s why Peter Jackson? Why? And I think we can answer this question, because while Jackson’s arrangement makes about no military sense at all, in terms of film construction, it makes a lot of sense.

< problems listed and explained here >

>So while mashing the operational context of this sequence into unrecognizable mush saddens me, I have to say I honestly cannot see a better way to do it while still resolving these problems, keeping in mind the strict restrictions on screentime (which makes adding an Edoras-Éowyn B-plot – technically a C-plot, since this is the B-plot to Frodo’s A-plot – effectively impossible). Alas that it came at the cost of my beloved logistics studies, but as far as sins of adaptation go, this one is a reasonable and necessary evil.

Yes. And the (excellent, IMO) author said many more such things (about movie-making requiring that reality be carted off to the rubbish tip) in the rest of the series. Though there are also fair number of places where the author concluded that Peter Jackson has no excuse but "ignorant, and didn't care".

Hence my "stick to books" (and certain magazines, and web sites like HN, and ...) conclusion.

If your definition of worthwhile entertainment is accurate medieval military operations... most books wouldn't make the cut either. LOTR is pretty unique in terms of the depth of its world building.

With the number of books, articles, movies, videos, etc. available these days...quickly ruling out most of them can be pretty darn useful. :)

(LOTR-style world building seems orthogonal to plausible portrayals of military operations. If a kitchen scene in a TV sitcom showed a stuffed turkey getting cooked faster than some breakfast cereal got mushy in milk...would you need any backstory to say "a stupid mistake, or a running gag, or satire"?)

There are exceptions. I found The Martian's movie much more entertaining than the book (I've read the book before the movie came out). The book felt like a shore most of the time.

The book felt almost like a screenplay to me; I suspected when I read it that it would make a solid movie.

Also you can go into more technical detail in a book than you can in a film, and maybe detail wasn't important to the plot of the Martian, but I felt book-Mark's desperation a lot more clearly because of how difficult it would be for me to be clear-headed enough to think through everything that was necessary to stay alive.

I felt the opposite. The movie was like a Cliffs Notes for the book.

I thoroughly enjoyed both, each for what it is.

Curious, did you read the book or watch the movie first?

I watched the movie, then I read the book.

people usually prioritize entertainment over information density when it comes to movies