The Stars of Page & Screen: Leaping From Book to Movie

Part of the reason that I do a blog at all is to share the things I find worthwhile. I don't see myself reviewing or analyzing something I don't care for, and part of that is me trying to walk the walk against the spread of negativity, but a bigger part is that I simply enjoy sharing good experiences with people.
It's fairly easy to strike up a conversation with friends about the more readily consumable media like movies, tv, and music, but many of my friends don't have the time to read books anymore and that's a damned shame.
In the near future, I intend to do a few blog entries on books that I enjoy, in the hopes that I can entice people to make the leap back into written media, even if it's via audiobook (which I firmly endorse, especially for those people who do lots of busy-work, chores, and traveling.)

For today, I'm going to stick to a few key observations I've made regarding the translation of intellectual properties (IP's) from print to screen, and point at a few that have done it really well.

Obviously, some spoilers ahead, though I'll try to keep specifics as ambiguous as I can. If you hate spoilers in all forms, just skip past the numbered parts, past the second line, and pick up reading there.

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1. Ready Player One

As a fan of the book, I thought that the Ready Player One movie was good.
Yes, they changed a lot of the scenes from the book, especially the key trials. In the book, there were separate trials for finding the keys and finding the doors, and there were sometimes months between each. Doing this identically in movie form would have been really boring.
One big thing to think about from a production standpoint is the giant amount of money required to do anything close to what the book presented. Since movie investors are really only concerned about returns, the only way to get that much money was to change the story's pacing to appeal to a wider audience full of younger kids with super short attention spans. Thus, the focus has to become about "internet escapism" instead of "a retreat to the 80's, specifically."
This means there were lots of modern references, which is fine, since they probably got a ton of cash from modern companies to have their characters repped in the movie (I'm looking at you, Tracer). Also, only the "gunters" really steeped themselves in the 80's culture thing anyway, and the whole Oasis would never be made of 100% 'Gunters, so the inclusion of modern characters doesn't bother me at all.
Probably the most fictional thing about this movie, in fact, is that there weren't a ton of offensive and degrading troll avatars filming themselves jumping around and teabagging people, to have something to post on whatever the Oasis' version of 4-chan would be, "4 the lulz".

2. Annihilation

So this was one of those books that everyone swore up and down could never be made into a movie, but I stopped listening to those people after Watchmen.
Turns out they were right on this one.
When you read the book, you're reading the first-person account in journal form of one of the members of the expedition (the Natalie Portman character).
Because of this, you get a very narrow perspective of the events going on in Area X, specifically as they apply to that character. Things happen around her that are strange and otherworldly, but luckily we have a handy biologist-mind to interpret some of that in an understandable way.
The things that are weird to her become even stranger to us, since we quickly become used to living in the mind of an expert, so when even the expert is baffled, the creepy factor grows exponentially. What's masterful about the book is that we are told fairly quickly that "The Biologist" (none of the characters have names, just job titles) has been affected by Area X, and so her perspective isn't entirely trustworthy. Further, they are affected by events from multiple sources all through the story, and since the story is told in retrospect, when you reach the ending you must think about the entire story having been told by a narrator who was never quite themselves. Your only perspective on what happened has been through several imperfect lenses.
Picture being blind, led through a room full of alien danger by someone whom you find out later has taken multiple hits of LSD. It's too late...you can't turn back...you're just going to have to trust them to get you out of this.

Now...try to do that in movie form, where the visuals aren't first-person subjective. Things that are fascinating when studied through the Biologist's eyes are far less so when we don't have that informed perspective, and so several of the key events and locations quickly become irrelevant.
The choice they made was a good one. They sacrificed the majority of the book's plot, in order to present a similar story in the same spirit, and it works out to be a separate-but-also-good story from a parallel world.

3. The Magicians

Based on a trilogy of novels, the Scy-Fy Original Series has just completed its third season, kind of wrapping up most of the events of those three books with no sign of slowing down.
This series has never really concerned itself with doing things exactly like the books did them, instead opting for a picassoesque rearrangement of those events in an increasingly surprising and pleasing fashion. Season one of the show runs the main story of book one in parallel with half of book two (the Julia storyline). Most of the show's second season happened in book three, and the non-Julia half of book two forms the backbone of season three.
YET SOMEHOW, this show manages to truly capture the spirit of the books in a pure and seamless way. Stories created purely for the show not only blend into and compliment the book events, they sometimes end up being some of the IP's best moments. This is done through some truly inspired writing and casting, and must be the work of true fans.
I highly recommend both the show and the books, if you keep an open mind about the arrangement of events. It's sorta the same story, but not really. Both versions are enjoyable, especially if you've already experienced one and think you know what's going to happen next.

4. The Expanse

There are eight books in The Expanse series so far, and it's not over yet. Scy-Fy is about to launch season 3, and so far it's been my favorite space-based show since Firefly...and I say that with all due reverence.
The series premise is "Whether we're living in caves or spaceships, humans are humans." The problems in this show are societal: civil unrest, injustice, oppression, and expansionism. Empire-builders and pioneers, freedom-seekers and criminals. Greedy corporations, conniving governments, daring settlements, and the very real humans with familiar goals and ambitions who make them up.
There are no force fields to let ships take multiple hits in space battles, and even basic accelerated projectiles are serious business. One of the greatest fears in the Earth-Mars conflict is that someone will get it in their heads to throw asteroids at one planet or the other. Sudden decompression from a thousand sources is a constant fear, as both the books and the series try to remain as scientifically plausible (read: terrifying) as space life would be, if we discovered cold fusion and then a few generations passed.

The TV series portrays both the events and spirit of the books surprisingly accurately. Though events are compressed a bit, not much is lost in translation.
Props go to the show for recognizing one distinct advantage: knowing the future. The writers are many books ahead of the game, and cannily establish lots of characters and events into the show much earlier than they appeared in the books. They would have logically been there, after all, if the authors of the books had known back in book one what they'd eventually write in book five.

An example of this is the character Chrisjen Avasarala played by Shohreh Aghdashloo. A major player in the Earth government, this character doesn't show up in the books until book 2, but she definitely would have been involved behind the scenes during the events of book 1. When the show was being written, they fixed this by including the character from the beginning. They didn't give her someone else's role, they just wrote entirely new Earth-based scenes, showing her influence on things that did happen in the books. I sorely miss the hilarious, shockingly profane book version (seriously, scroll through some of these quotes, she gets several of the books' best lines) but I understand that TV has to watch its language.

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What I've learned by watching the different processes that studios used to translate the book medium to screen is that you can't keep it all. On some level we all agree about that, but we tend to disagree over which parts of our favorite tales are not included.
Occasionally, an IP will get so caught up in the management of "what will sell tickets, and to which target audience" that it gets mangled beyond recognition.

It varies from story to story, but I've made peace with lots of movies which stray from the plotlines of the books they are based on, provided they keep the spirit of the story.
The Ender's Game movie was faithful to the plot of the book, but cut out several of the humanizing inter-character scenes and reduced the story to its action sequences. It always felt cold and spiritless to me, next to the book with which I connected so deeply in my youth.

Spirit is a complicated thing to grasp, but if you want a good example, compare the Marvel Cinematic Universe to its comic book origins. At this point, the storylines are almost entirely different in the details, yet each character in infused with the spirit of its long history of adventure - a distilled version of the character taken from hundreds of authors, artists, and events which have refined the character's personality over the years. Even diehard comic book readers acknowledge this entirely new series of events with love and admiration because of the attention to spirit that Marvel Studios pays to its properties. Thor is Thor. Hulk is Hulk. In part, they know how to construct the movies because they know the characters so well that they know how they'd all react to a change in events. 

I have a feeling that as I continue to compare books to their on-screen children, I'll continue to see this trend. The ones that work don't have to be identical in format as long as they retain a deep understanding of the spark which made the original story wonderful in the first place.

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TL;DR - A movie born from a book shouldn't have to keep working in the family store its whole life if it doesn't want to, but it'd better Remember the Face of its Father.