The genre facts of life are:
* Movies are different from books. VERY different.The mediums/genre differences are so stark that it’s almost impossible to adapt a book to film and be “true” to the book.
* Movie makers tell stories in pictures. Not everything in a novel can or should be represented that way.
* Movie makers try to stay close to the story intent of a novel and translate that intent in actions we can see. (Internal monologues, for example, are hard to show visually.)
* I when I go see a movie based on a book, I don’t go with expectations that the movie will “closely follow” the book. That’s because I’m familiar with filmmaking and know what a challenge that presents.
* I liken this to mapmakers trying to acurately represent the 3D Earth on 1D paper. The result is a distortion. When people see the actual size of continents (as opposed to what they are used to seeing on common maps and atlases), they are shocked—especially Americans. They can’t believe how small the US is as compared to other countries.