4. Life Of Pi
The Book: The award winning 2001 novel was the typical unfilmable story. Dealing heavily in spirituality, its the story of Pi Patel, who loses his family in a shipwreck and must survive for 227 days on a lifeboat with a Bengal Tiger. Yann Martels fourth (and most well known) novel sold incredibly well and appetite for a film was high, but as you can guess from the synopsis it wasn't going to be an easy job.
Why It Shouldn't Have Been Adapted: Ang Lee certainly gave a good attempt at it in last years hit, but if I'm being honest, it was rather dull. If you ignore knowing how it is done in the novel, theres not all that much to praise. We essentially get some setup typical of a film with a pretentious message, followed by too long in a lifeboat, finally giving us a twist whose delivery M. Night Shyamalan would be ashamed of (and was already done better in Atonement years before). Like Avatar previously, people seemed to forget that pretty pictures mean nothing if theres no real substance behind it. What we have he is very much the same problem as with The Road; we've had an adaptation that tried hard, but they cant get round the problem of the novels brilliance being in the text.