> I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole.

The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.

Those are great, but The Godfather is my favorite example. The book is, honestly, terrible. The prose is bad. It focuses almost exclusively on the salacious - does it need to tell us that many times about the size of Sonny's cock? - and enjoys the violence a bit too much. None of the minor characters leave any impression at all. The movie, though, is... The Godfather. It transcends it's source, without transposing or changing anything - in fact, I suspect it's far more faithful to its historical setting than the novel - more fully than any adaptation I'm aware of.

That’s true, your comment reminded me of The Electric State which maybe 50 pages of drawings with descriptions and the trailer for the movie was unintentionally funny to me like it was a parody and World War Z where I loved the short action packed book which seemed like an easy translation but I was so wrong.

Nerdsniped by Starship Troopers, I think it's important to make the distinction there between a direct book adaptation versus "a movie inspired by".

Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.

> [Re: Starship Troopers] The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.

One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.

The number of bad book adaptations makes me believe this is harder than you'd think. It's really an act of translation; you have to figure out if a book "works" without being able to just say what a character is thinking, without using descriptive lanfuage to imply something, etc.

Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.

I'd imagine you have to read for a particular framework to assess viability. Translating from a literary medium to a visual one is very challenging. Much of the detail in the former will be lost in the latter, like inner monologue, narrative time compression, etc.

There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.

You will feel more judged when you score 67% like me.

Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.

It hurts, doesn't it? I also thought a few measly questions would be a piece of cake, and mainly focused on speed.

In high school, there was an academic event for reading comprehension. I tried it one time and was humiliated. They read aloud to you a story, and then they ask you questions about it after. I have no idea where my head was, as I didn't do well at all. I never tried the event again. It wasn't until that experience before I realized that I'm the type that needs to read things multiple times for it to stick.