It is a well worn truism: The book is better than the movie. Almost always.

As a graduate student, I enrolled in a seminar that examined selected prose works and their film adaptations, and learned that “better” isn’t exactly the right word. The book is always different than the movie. A truly “faithful” adaptation is, to some extent, impossible because books and film are two very different mediums. There are some things books can do extremely well and some things that the visual medium of film can do extremely well; each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses.

That having been said, books usually are better than the movies. I am glad that a whole generation went gaga over the Harry Potter books at a young age, because they have experienced this early on and are thus less likely to grow into the sort of person who would say, “I don’t need to read the book; there’s a movie.” Maybe eight out of ten (this is not based on hard data, just anecdotal evidence) Harry Potter fans will admit that while they love the movies, the movies are not as good as the books. They would not trade their reading experience of those books for any film.

I will share a personal experience to illustrate just one way that books, by collaborating with the imagination of the reader, can achieve an effect that movies almost never can approach.

When I was eight years old, my favorite books were the Narnia chronicles by C.S. Lewis. I stayed up late at night, curled up with a reading flashlight on the top bunk of my bed (I did not share my room with a sibling, but I liked sleeping up high in the bunk bed—it was like having my own tree house). To this day, nearly thirty years later, I vividly recall the night I read a scene in The Horse and His Boy. The protagonist (whose name does slip my mind after three decades), a young boy on the run, is outside the city at night. Because the city gates are closed at sunset, he cannot get back into the city, and ends up spending the night out among the tombs. He sits there on the sand, cold and alone and in the dark, surrounded by hundreds of these stone tombs—like rounded stucco huts, each with a single opening in the front. He is overcome with fear—each of those open doors is like a darker hole in the darkness, from any one of which something might silently emerge, especially when his back is to it. Each way he turns, there are always other inky-black openings at his back.

Reading this, I felt chills, my skin crawled, and all the other pleasantly unpleasant physiological sensations brought on by a good ghost story. I had a hard time falling asleep that night.

The protagonist’s salvation was a small, black cat that slinked out of the desert and curled up to his back. For the rest of the night, he was okay—even, I think, managed to fall asleep—because he had company now, another set of eyes, someone watching his back. The reader inferred that the cat was the good lion Aslan in disguise. My solution was the same—I snuck out of bed, hunted down our pet cat, and locked her in the room with me. Our family pet was not Aslan, but for me she was, that night.

Disney and Walden Media are now in the process of making the film adaptations of the Narnia books. I can confidently predict that when they get around to The Horse and His Boy, and if they faithfully recreate that scene, it will pale in comparison to my reading experience.

Had I never read the book, I can imagine seeing that scene for the first time on the big screen. Even if it were well-done, I cannot imagine it being one of the most memorable scenes in the film. It would be interesting and compelling while it was happening—the audience wonders, along with the protagonist, if anything will come slinking or slithering from one of those tombs. When nothing does, and the only thing that shows up is a cat, we will be relieved (or disappointed) and forget about it as the narrative sweeps us along. It would certainly not be a scene we would isolate and remember days or weeks or years later.

Personally I'd say very often the books wins, but not always. There are loads of movies I love to bits.

First off

        Jaws was the first thing that came to my mind too Darkbow. One small thing that should be mentioned is the educational value of reading over movies. Sure you can learn from TV and movies, but the meduim itself is not teaching you...just the facts or emotions it conveys.

        This is a dorky story, but I was born with profound dyslexia and really did not learn to even read until maybe 3rd grade. Even then I had so much difficultly doing so that I only did it when I had to.

        Several years later I discovered Dungeons and Dragons. I loved that game and I wanted to be as good at it as I could. In the back of the original  Dungeon's Master's Guide there is a small section of authors that good ole GG said helped inspire the game. So I set out to read them all. Michael Mockcock. JRRT, Jack Vance, etc. (And some people said D +D was bad for kids)

       Through all this I not only learned to read, but also learned to enjoy doing so. With my current job I need to read a lot. If all I had learned to do was watch movies, my current employment would be much more difficult for me.

       Sorry for being long winded, but reading itself will always be an important skill and reading books will help this skill improve.

Robert, Your bringing up of the Balrog scene is another good example for illustrative purposes here. While I love Jackson's LOTR films (have the extended editions of them all), they do highlight how certain elements that work in prose do not translate well to film and vice versa. The Balrog scene, for example--which was a centerpiece of the film--only comprises a few sentences in the book! Tolkien gives us just enough to let our own imagination create the picture, whereas with an action/adventure film, the makers must fully realize and highlight those scenes for the audience.

This, in fact, changes the very tone of the films vs. the books. Even with the extended editions (at over TEN hours!), so much must be cut, while turning very brief pieces of prose into big centerpiece battles that take up big chunks of screen time, that the passages of respite and mirth--the periods of rest--are quickly passed over or cut. The filmmakers (perhaps wisely) realized that they had not the time nor their audience the patience for listening to hobbits sit around reciting nonsense songs to each other. And so some of the pleasures of the book are lost to the film--perhaps they are pleasures that the film could not have recreated anyway.