12 Common Movie Criticisms That Make No Sense

9. "It's Different From The Book"

Read a handful of reviews of any movie based on a book, comic or graphic novel and you'll inevitably find someone whining that it wasn't faithful enough to the source material.

Congratulations, you can read, but your critique fundamentally misunderstands what the point of a film adaptation is.

A film is markedly different to a novel, and while there are certainly circumstances where a filmmaker fails to fully understand the tone or themes of a book, it is also impossible to comprehensively translate hundreds of pages of detail to the big screen.

Take Watchmen, which was torn asunder by comic fans for excluding the gigantic, apocalyptic squid from its finale, but given that this would be a) extremely difficult for a casual audience to take seriously and b) a tough technical challenge, shifting the world-ending threat to Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup) was actually pretty smart.

The point is that change isn't inherently a bad thing, no matter what your lizard brain might tell you. Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Jaws and Fight Club are just a few instances of films which actually bettered the source material, elevating the written word and making something truly iconic in the process.

If you love the book so much, the film does nothing to change that, and as such screen adaptations are best thought of as spiritual companion pieces to the source. With cinema unable to compete with the expansive power of the human imagination, do you really want films that just dispassionately regurgitate a novel as close to verbatim as possible?

Movies are interpretations of books, not some definitive authority that retroactively changes the original.