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"The first question, which is the most important is: is the movie good? The second question, which I consider less important is: how much does the movie deviate from the book/story? For some people, the second question is important and their answer to the first question can hinge on the answer to the second. For them, the greater deviation from the book/story, the worse the movie. This rests on the view that an important aesthetic purpose of a movie based on a book/story is to faithfully reproduce the book/story in movie format."

"My view is that deviation from the original is not relevant to the quality of the movie as a movie. That is, if the only factor that allegedly makes the movie bad is that it deviates from the book/story, then the movie would seem to be good. One way to argue for this is to point out the obvious: if someone saw the movie without knowing about the book, she would regard it as a good movie."

"If she then found out it was based on a book/story, then nothing about the movie would have changed-as such, it should still be a good movie on the grounds that the relation to the book/story is external to the movie. To use an analogy, imagine that someone sees a painting and regards it as well done artistically. Then the person finds out it is a painting of a specific person and finds a photo of the person that shows the painting differs from the photo."

A movie based on a book can be evaluated using multiple questions. One key question asks whether the movie is good. A secondary question asks how much the movie deviates from the book or story. Some people treat deviation as decisive for judging quality, assuming faithful reproduction is an important aesthetic purpose. Another view holds that deviation is irrelevant to movie quality. If a viewer watches the movie without knowing the book, the viewer can still judge it as good or bad. Learning that it is based on a book should not change the movie’s artistic merits because the relation to the book is external to the film itself. An analogy compares judging a painting’s artistic quality to learning it differs from a related photo.

Read at A Philosopher's Blog