Six Films Better Than the Books They're Based On
Welcome back to The Daily's Sunday culture edition.
Announcements of yet another book-to-film adaptation are usually met with groans by fans of the source material. But sometimes a new movie can be a chance to lift the best elements of a story. We asked The Atlantic 's writers and editors: What's a film adaptation that's better than the book?
Jurassic Park (streaming on Peacock)
I am not saying that the Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park isn't great, because it is. The folly of man, the chaos of progress, the forking around, the finding out, the dinosaurs—God, the dinosaurs. But in 1993, Steven Spielberg took this promising genetic code, selected the fittest elements, spliced them with Hitchcock, and adapted them to the cool dark of the multiplex. The result is not just a great movie. It is a perfect movie.
The story is tighter; the characters are given foils, mirrors, and stronger arcs. On the page, Dr. Alan Grant is a widower and the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler his student; Dr. Ian Malcolm, chaos mathematician, is a balding know-it-all. On the screen, our dear Dr. Sattler feasts on Dr. Grant's restrained, tonic masculinity and Dr. Malcolm's camp erotic magnetism (as do we). The dialogue is punchier too. 'You're alive when they start to eat you,' 'Woman inherits the Earth,' 'Clever girl,' 'Hold on to your butts'—none of that poetry appears in the paperback.
Spielberg and his crew used CGI techniques to make the inhabitants of Isla Nublar come to life, but the real magic came from practical effects, including a 9,000-pound, bus-size animatronic T. rex. This ferocious predator deserves to live on-screen, chomping on velociraptors and snatching a lawyer off of the toilet. Thirty years later, I am still not sure man deserves to watch.
— Annie Lowrey, staff writer
The Talented Mr. Ripley (streaming on Paramount+ and the Criterion Channel)
Patricia Highsmith wrote eminently filmable novels, none more so than her oft-adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley. The 1999 movie is the most famous and successful take, transforming the source material into a faster-paced and more suspenseful version of the story. The novel's crime-to-punishment ratio is Dostoyevskian; for each misdeed Tom Ripley commits, he spends twice as long regretting it or worrying that he'll get caught. Anthony Minghella's adaptation diverges from this claustrophobic narration and limits viewers' access into Ripley's mind, making his deceitful and violent actions all the more unexpected.
The final scenes contain the largest plot deviation—a shocking twist that manages to both show Ripley at his worst and invite sympathy for him. The film also clarifies his tortured sexuality, an element of his character that remains more ambiguous in the novel. What Highsmith hints at, Minghella more boldly asks: When someone is already ostracized, even criminalized, by society, what's to stop him from taking the leap into actual depravity?
— Dan Goff, copy editor
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)
I'm going to make some people mad, but the 2011 adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is even better than the superb novel. It's a rare instance of a spy movie that transcends genre and stands on its own. Gary Oldman's portrayal of the intelligence officer George Smiley is one of the great performances of the 21st century—and it probably paved the way for Oldman to eventually play Jackson Lamb in the addictive Slow Horses series, also an adaptation. The treatment of the field agent Ricki Tarr (played by Tom Hardy) is both more intense and to the point than in the novel. The scenery—the shots of Budapest alone—brings le Carré's writing to life in a way that few adaptations ever do. And the film has easily one of the most gripping, poignant, and creative final scenes I've ever seen. (Julio Iglesias's rendition of 'La Mer' is on my dinner-party playlist. If you know, you know.)
— Shane Harris, staff writer
The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on Disney+)
At first glance, the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada seems to make only cosmetic changes to Lauren Weisberger's fizzy novel about a young woman trying to break into New York's publishing industry. In the movie, the protagonist, Andy, is a graduate of Northwestern, instead of Brown. Her boyfriend is a chef, not a teacher. And Miranda Priestly, the imposing editor of a fashion magazine—a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour—who hires Andy as an assistant, isn't always seen wearing a white Hermès scarf.
But the movie's sharp screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna elevated the material past its breezy, chick-lit-y origins. Anchored by a top-notch cast (Anne Hathaway as Andy, Meryl Streep as Miranda, and a breakout Emily Blunt as Andy's workplace rival), the film is the rare rom-com focused more on professional relationships than romantic ones: between mentors and mentees, bosses and employees, colleagues and competitors. Even amid its glossy setting, The Devil Wears Prada captured the reality of work, showing how finding career fulfillment can be a blessing and a curse. For me, the film is a modern classic, endlessly rewatchable for its insights—and, of course, its fashion. I certainly have never looked at the color cerulean the same way again.
— Shirley Li, staff writer
The Social Network (available to rent on Prime Video and YouTube)
Did Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend really break up with him by calling him an asshole in the middle of a date? Did he actually spend the moments after a disastrous legal deposition refreshing a Facebook page, again and again, to see if she'd accepted his friend request? Well, probably not—Erica Albright, Rooney Mara's character in David Fincher's film The Social Network, is admittedly fictional. But her opening scene establishes Fincher's version of Mark Zuckerberg as a smug, patronizing jerk who can't imagine other people's feelings being as important as his own, and sets the movie off at a furious, thrilling pace that doesn't slow until the very end, when Mark has alienated everyone who once cared about him.
The Social Network is a biopic that doesn't hold itself to facts, to its absolute advantage. Ironically, this approach elevates the nonfiction book it's based on, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, which was written without even an interview with Zuckerberg and panned as shoddily reported. (In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin wrote that Mezrich's 'working method' seemed to be 'wild guessing.') The truth doesn't matter as much as telling a good story—as long as you keep control of the narrative, which Fincher's Mark struggles to do.
— Emma Sarappo, senior associate editor
Clear and Present Danger (streaming on MGM+)
Clear and Present Danger the book is the size, shape, and weight of a brick; Phillip Noyce's bureaucratic thriller slims Tom Clancy's nearly 1,000 pages into a svelte 141 minutes (though movies could always be shorter). The action takes place on the sea, in the jungle, at a drug lord's mansion, and in the streets of Bogotá—the latter setting the scene for an ambush sequence so memorable that the Jack Ryan series restaged it. But the film is most gripping in hallways and offices, culminating in Henry Czerny and Harrison Ford brandishing dueling memos at each other like light sabers. ('You broke the law!') And although the character of Jack Ryan can sometimes blur into a cipher in Clancy's novels, Ford embodies him with a Beltway Dad gravitas—never more so than when he announces to the lawbreaking president of the United States, 'It is my duty to report this matter to the Senate Oversight Committee!' Such a Boy Scout.
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
The Week Ahead
The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a Marvel movie about a group of superheroes who face off with Galactus and Silver Surfer (in theaters Friday)
Veronica Electronica, a new remix album by Madonna (out Friday)
Girl, 1983, a novel by Linn Ullmann about the power of forgetting (out Tuesday)
Essay
What Pixar Should Learn From Its Elio Disaster
By David Sims
Early last year, Pixar appeared to be on the brink of an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had thrown the business of kids' movies into particular turmoil: Many theatrical features were pushed to streaming, and their success on those platforms left studios wondering whether the appeal of at-home convenience would be impossible to reverse … Discussing the studio's next film, Inside Out 2, the company's chief creative officer, Pete Docter, acknowledged the concerns: 'If this doesn't do well at the theater, I think it just means we're going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.'
He had nothing to worry about: Inside Out 2 was a financial sensation —by far the biggest hit of 2024. Yet here we are, one year later, and the question is bubbling back up: Is Pixar cooked?
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Catch Up on The Atlantic
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