Totally Random

The Dunedain life span was more than double that, so Aragorn is fairly young at that point.

Look, Forest managed a hat trick! Without even having logged in for ages. I think we need to remind him we exist

On a similar note, I have just bought and read the full version of Hiyao Miyazaki's Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind.

It is very, very different to the Studio Ghibli film. I have not seen the Lord Of The Rings movies, but I am guessing that they are reasonably faithful to the original books? Departure from the original story is often frustrating, or even upsetting, but sometimes that departure is a good thing.

What do you good folks think? Is faithfulness to the original story something you prefer to see, or is there room for re-interpretation?

MERRY CHRISTMAS GUYS !

MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone

To get back to Dom's question... I tend to quickly forget about the differences between books and movies or TV-series based on the books. This means I usually don't mind the changes much, but I have seen versions where someone dies or doesn't die (can't recall which), in the movie as opposed to the book and that means that any follow up movies need to divert further still from the books. Can't recall which movie. Might have been Eragon, but I'm not sure.

Thanks for the reply Charlotte!

A good example of when the books and the movie differ for the better (in my opinion) is in the How To Train Your Dragon series. I have the nine book collection, but the story is massively different in the movie. It's like an "inspired from..." sort of thing. Only the names of the characters are the same. Everything else is different. Much, much better though!

An example of the opposite would be the World War Z movie. The book was loads better and had so many more ideas. The movie just had Brad Pitt!

By far the oddest death/non-death is in House Of Cards (I mean the British one, not the Netflix Kevin Spacey thing that I haven't seen.)

SPOILER ALERT!

You still reading? Well it goes like this:
1:Man writes one-off political thriller which ends with a main character dying.
2:TV adaptation is made that changes ending.
3:Man then writes two more books that follow on from the TV show rather than his own work. So you now have a trilogy where a character dies and then comes back to life, although I think he has rewritten it for more recent editions. But even so, it's very weird indeed.
And the lesson for all authors is: Be careful who you kill off.

Come to think of it, one of the best examples of changed endings are probably pretty much all the Disney movies... Pocahontas, Quasimodo and Esmeralda, the Little mermaid and so on, don't die in any of the movies, do they?

Disney are the best example of story changers!

But the question remains, is it better (at least in their case) to change the story or keep it faithful?