10 movies better than their books

“Yeah, but the book was better.” It’s almost like a mantra, a sort of badge of honour to tell your friends that sure, the movie was OK but you read the book first and the book just happened to be better. Conventional wisdom dictates that anything once removed from its source material is inevitably going to be worse. A photograph of the Mona Lisa is no Mona Lisa, after all.

But there are times when the movie is better than the book. It’s rare, but it happens. This is a celebration of those instances when you can thumb your nose at your friends and say “Guess what guys. The movie’s better than the book.”

10. Forrest Gump

It’s not that Forrest Gump is a great film unless you happen to like pandering to Middle American sensibilities and choosing simple emotional responses to complex psychological situations. It’s just that the book it’s based on is so phenomenally bad that you could probably make a movie with eight-year-olds providing voices for claymation puppets and it would be better than Winston Groom’s literary mess. Fair point: it’s also far more saccharine than the book, but the novel is so sub-par that it’s a wonder that anyone ever optioned it in the first place. If there’s a positive message here it’s that budding writers should take heart: they can crap out terrible dreck and still have it turned into a massive motion picture deal.

9. The Shining (1980)

Stephen King’s first four novels are arguably some of his best in terms of characterization and plot, but he was still developing his chops as a writer. As brilliant as The Shining is in places, it is one of King’s most uneven books. Kubrick’s interpretation of the novel, although it took a few liberties, ends up a far more satisfying experience, maintaining the best of King’s descent-into-insanity horror supplemented with supernatural scares while ironing out most of the rougher areas. It also added ‘HEEERE’S JOHNNY!’ to the horror lexicon, for which we are eternally grateful.

8. Starship Troopers

As I type this I can hear the anguished howls of thousands of libertarians and Heinlein fans and fully expect my inbox to be full of emails that start ‘Dear Moron.’ So what: Starship Troopers the book was less a libertarian screed than some of Heinlein’s other work; it was more of a clever science fiction look at the ways in which wars might be fought in the future, and if anything how there would still be grunts fighting, even if they were equipped with massive battle suits. The movie lost the suits and turned the libertarian aspects of the book on their heads – by taking them to their obvious and repugnant conclusions (namely, that the principles would lead to a different kind of thinly-disguised jingoistic fascism.) Libertarians and Heinlein fans who don’t like the movie Starship Troopers are like Objectivists who thought the video game BioShock was unfair: when you take a philosophy and push it so far as to become a parody of itself, by displaying what it’s like at its absolute worst, you’re going to piss someone off. That Paul Verhooven’s film accomplishes this is a testament to its brilliance.

7. The Princess Bride

Screenwriter William Goldman had the pleasure of adapting his own novel with Rob Reiner, so it may be a little unfair to include this film on the list, but everything the book does the movie does better. This can probably be attributed to the fact that Goldman was already an established screenwriter by the time he wrote the book, responsible for a sizable body of fine work including The Stepford Wives, All the President’s Men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He could therefore write it with an eventual screen adaptation in mind, and the movie delivers on all the book’s promise and then some.

The book itself is great but it’s clearly influenced by Goldman’s screenwriting technique and simply works better as a movie. The jokes are movie jokes, the one-liners are movie one-liners and the characters just need to be seen. I can only imagine that when they asked Goldman to turn it into a movie, his immediate reply was ‘as you wish.’

6. The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff tells the story of a series of American test pilots who begin pushing the boundaries of what machines and people could do together; pilots like Chuck Yeager, the first person to travel faster than the speed of sound. The book is a slightly plodding piece of military history; the film manages to take the history, only slightly Hollywood-ize it, and produce instead a slick look at test pilots through the American space programme, capturing both a spirit of personal accomplishment and innovation that shows America at its finest, but set against the somewhat more sinister backdrop of the Cold War Space Race. It avoids being overly-jingoistic (something that could be said of the book), and manages instead to focus on stories of personal conflict and accomplishment. It’s by no means a perfect film but is a brilliant example of how to adapt nonfiction to the screen.

5. Smoke Signals

Sherman Alexie is one of the leading voices in Native American (or ‘Indian,’ as he likes to be called) literature today. Smoke Signals is an adaptation of a handful of elements from his short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, for which Alexie himself wrote the screenplay, and it holds the distinction of being the first film completely written, produced and directed entirely by American Indians. It did the arthouse circuit in the late 1990s but isn’t well-known beyond that, which is a crying shame because it’s a fine coming-of-age tale and offers a glimpse into a little-known and often unfairly-caricatured aspect of American life. As noted, the film borrows elements from several short stories and weaves them into a coherent whole as two young men do a bit of growing up on a roadtrip as they discover the truth behind one’s absent father. It works on many levels and while it’s not ‘deep,’ it’s boldly genuine in a way other films are often cynical about this classic story model.

4. Trainspotting

I’m just going to say this calmly and bluntly: I’d much rather watch the iconic film, full of iconic music, iconic one-liners, with its iconic poster and iconic dead baby scene, than read Welsh’s self-consciously-hip prose any day. There, I said it.

3. Apocalypse Now

Based on Heart of Darkness, a literary classic rife with the inherent racism of the colonial era. The film takes all the good parts of the novel and modernizes them by changing the setting to the Vietnam War (colonialism remains firmly in place, if less explicit.) It manages to drop the tedious parts and add enough explosions and napalm in the morning to make an amazing film that surpasses the novel in accessibility if not necessarily literary merit. Stow your pretensions at the door and the Director’s Cut of the film becomes even better than Conrad’s book.

2. Dracula (1992)

Dracula’s a classic, which is funny because the book itself is a plodding, dull and fairly pointless. I’d say the same about the Gary Oldman / Winona Ryder film as well except suddenly a whole new generation has discovered vampires thanks to Twilight and – let’s face it – at least Dracula’s better than that dreck. Which is marginally better than Stoker’s original novel.

1. Fight Club

Fight Club is the fois gras of books-to-film: something so rich and refined from its original state that it’s simply sublime on the tongue, eye, ear, and brain. Some of the shine may be off the anarchistic look at resetting capitalism through violence but the film is, if anything, more relevant than ever as a new generation of people slip into the cookie-cutter unhappiness of the workplace to slave away for their khakis. The novel itself is fine, but the movie – thanks in no small part to Fincher’s fantastic direction and postmodern take on storytelling – is such an astonishing improvement that the source material simply pales in comparison. In fact, there’s no need to ruin your memories of the film by reading the book. Take it from us, you can skip it altogether.