Why Can't Movies Be Like Books?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

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But the movies are not as good as they could have been had they not tossed out a lot of what makes the books good. Your 'adaptation = carte blanche to rewrite' bromide is nonsense. You're trying to avoid comparison of the movies to the books (to the disadvantage of the former) by pretending they can't validly be compared. Tosh. The story is the same story, the characters the same characters. A different medium of storytelling, while requiring adaptation, cutting and compression, is nonetheless obligated not to distort what it does preserve of the original.

Your slogan also conveniently ducks the fact which is glaringly obvious from PJ's interviews: he didn't comprehend his source material, the sine qua non of a quality adaptation. "Tolkien's book was long and boring- I think I did better."