Any sci-fi film that's as good as the book?

Between Starship Troopers not being an adaptation at all and War of the Worlds missing the little things that made the book what it was, I'm wondering if there really is any sci-fi film that completely did the book justice.


I ask that we forget about Solaris, since it was never its intention to do the book justice.

Not a book, but a short story that became a movie . . .

The short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang is excellent and the screenplay for the movie Arrival, based on this short story, is also excellent. The movie does change some things and adds quite a bit but even Ted Chiang stated that he was very happy with the movie. Ted Chiang interviews are numerous on YouTube.

Great answer, yeah, the story is very good but the movie is actually better. Probably because it was a short story; had he expanded it into a full novel, maybe it would've been tougher to improve upon. Not sure.

Side note, Chiang has a couple of short story collections, and both of them are absolutely tremendous. Cannot recommend either of them enough.

I agree. Ted Chiang is a wonderful author and I love seeing him interviewed -- he's so damn interesting, knowledgeable, and well-spoken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang

Some people who have read Roadside Picnic say the film 'Stalker' is better.

Sorry about using another short story . . . but Arthur C Clarke's short story The Sentinel became the fabulous 2001 Space Odyssey. But the movie does change a lot (story was written in 1951) and adds tons of new material not in the short story. The short story ends when the object/artifact is discovered on the Moon.

I think using short stories disproportionately is probably inevitable, since those are the ones the authors usually couldn't or didn't flesh out as much, which makes them a lot easier to improve on. Never thought about that before but it seems obvious in retrospect.

Obviously, I will list Blade Runner first off, as I greatly prefer the film over Dick's novel, even though both are good.

I would add Minority Report to the list as well.

I've not read The Martian, but that was a pretty great flick, also.

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Hmm, I will cautiously submit Villeneuve’s, not Lynch’s, Dune? Blasphemous, I know.

Read the book and saw the film (in that order), and...actually, it fits the thread title perfectly: it's "as good as the book." It's not better...or worse, really. I'm not even sure which is better in a vacuum. The adaptation is pretty straightforward. The tech stuff is toned down somewhat, I guess, but not much more than the medium requires. It's one of the more seamless adaptations I can remember.

Speaking of, I expect the adaptation of Project Hail Mary (the author's more recent novel) will end up in this thread once it's released, and for mostly the same reasons. It's a little more obviously cinematic than The Martian was (probably because Andy Weir wrote it knowing it would almost definitely be made into a movie), but I expect a similar level of fidelity with that.

As you know, I read Project Hail Mary recently in between book club titles, and as I read, it was clear to me he had a screenplay in mind the entire time. I really enjoyed that book, btw.

We've gotta rig the voting on the next book club. Only way I can participate at the moment is if we discuss something I've already read.

Psssst, you post this is a public thread - I thought we only colluded behind the scenes?

I thought about Blade Runner but since OP specifically asked whether or not the film adaptation "did justice to" the book and Blade Runner takes considerable liberties with the source material, I felt like I had to discount it on those grounds. However, that did make me think of Linklater's A Scanner Darkly and how that did prove to be both a faithful adaptation and a more enjoyable piece of work than its source.

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I forgot all about that one. Good call there. Sadly, my wife abhors A Scanner Darkly, so I rarely put it on these days,...

I will reserve judgment on Dune until after the second half is released; I want to see if Villeneuve can stick the landing...

The Hunger Games movies were every bit as good as the books.

Has anyone read Who Goes There? or The Puppet Masters?
Just thinking in terms of The Thing and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers being such sci-fi horror classics.


Though I guess there's always the complication of the word "justice" since A Clockwork Orange seemed about as good as the book (arguably better), but if you're really invested in that 21st chapter which wasn't even included in the edition of the book Kubrick read...

Kind of the reverse, but some novels I'm interested in checking out based on how much I loved the movie adaptations are:

Annihilation
Contact
All You Zombies (apparently the inspiration for Predestination
Children of Men (I've read almost all of PD James' stuff, but not this one)
Seconds

Though the Annihilation movie and book are both lovely, I found them to be drastically different.

I thought the K-PAX film stayed pretty true to the book in terms of quality and storyline.