I’m sure that you’ve heard the complaints before. It might have been one of the Harry Potters, or maybe the 1974 adaption of The Great Gatsby, but there will definitely be at least one of your friends saying, “They totally rehashed the original plot,” “That was not how I imagined that character at all,” or most bluntly “I liked the book better.” An English major myself, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s sometimes very hard for a film adaptation to translate well-written prose into a visual spectacle. Just most recently, Walter Salles attempted to bring the freewheeling energy and the beatific restlessness of On the Road to life on the silver screen, only for the on-screen personas to fail to live up to the legendary adventures of The Beat Generation. What the book made out to be a journey of spiritual, existential discovery and a revival of the American soul, seemed on the screen to be a couple of guys who do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. What is it about novel-to-film adaptations that fail to live up to their source material?

Trick question, guys. Movies don’t ruin good books; bad movies ruin good books. American audiences seem to have developed a textbook case of confirmation bias, which Wikipedia defines as “a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.” Yes, it’s been established, Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby was boring, even with a fantastic cast that included Robert Redford and a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. Yes, comic book fans, Snyder’s Watchmen did not get it right.

But, in lamenting the poor turn out of these adaptations, people forget to realize how many really good films start out as books. In fact, “really good” is an understatement. Many book-to-screen adaptations have become undeniably part of the Western canon of greatest films of all time. The Godfather? The Graduate? Gone with the Wind? All originally novels. Five out of ten of what AFI deems to be the greatest American films since the beginnings of Hollywood cinema use books as source material.

The problem that often screws over adaptations is that directors often get too caught up with catering to the original book audience, letting faithfulness and accuracy to the source novel interfere with the development of a real artistic vision, unique to the silver screen. However, when filmmakers take a written story and use it as a launch pad for their own crazy ideas rather than as an end point or goal, something truly fantastic usually happens. If you’re not quite convinced, here are four movies that are just as good as, maybe even better than, the books that they are based on.

1. There Will Be Blood

Just about everyone’s favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie, There Will Be Blood was loosely (albeit VERY loosely) adapted from the 1927 social satire Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair’s works are often one-dimensionally immersed in socialist agenda, letting social merit outweigh literary merit. Despite how limited Sinclair’s story is by its political preachiness, Anderson brilliantly transforms this extremely topical tale into the post-millennium’s answer to Citizen Kane, a timelessly tragic downfall of an oil tycoon consumed by greed, alienation, and madness. The cinematography, as erupting infernos and the sinister oil-spilled desert evoke a personal hell, is gritty but gorgeous. The method acting is so naturalistic and convincing that it’s almost scary. The tense, brooding, and eerie soundtrack is, by the way, by Radiohead-virtuoso Jonny Greenwood. If you were born fifty years from now, and there were one film from the 2000s that you had to watch, this would be it.

2. Fantastic Mr. Fox

An adaptation of the beloved children’s novel, Fantastic Mr. Fox is Anderson’s first shot at an animated film whose outdated choice of animation is immediately nostalgic for a simpler and more youthful era of the past. However, as the film freewheels through Mr. Fox’s charmingly whimsical adventure, Anderson weaves an astonishingly intricate film that is at once a high-stakes heist, an existentialist discourse, and a dysfunctional family drama that will hit home with anyone. These critters’ exploits have more in common with Ocean’s 11 and Wes’s favorite European art films rather than any Disney movie. By the time the film is over, and Mr. Fox’s rash stunts have embroiled his entire village in total war, this movie becomes anything but a children’s tale.

3. Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola’s own take on Heart of Darkness, the sweetheart of every high school teacher (and the anguish of every high school student), Apocalypse Now is awesome because of how amazingly faithful the movie remains to its source material. No, seriously. The original novella may have not been set in Vietnam, and it might not have involved any of the helicopter invasions, explosions, and indulgent gunfire that make Apocalypse Now a bad-ass movie, but the heart of the story is still there (*wink*). This is still the same scathing depiction of Western exploitative imperialism. This is still that metaphysical journey into the deep-seeded darkness and madness that hides in the human soul, and Marlon Brando’s depiction of Kurtz is one of the few times when a movie truly captures the essence of a larger-than-life book character. You can watch it for the deep philosophical subtext, or you can watch it for the dizzying violence. Something for everyone!

4.The Shining

Legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s horrific psychological masterpiece took so many major departures from the original novel that renown author Stephen King has been quoted to say that it is the only movie adaptation of his works that he “remembers hating.” However, I think that King’s hate for the movie really stems from jealousy, because, in one shot, Kubrick damn-well perfects an entire genre that King has devoted an entire lifetime to working on. While the original novel was a typical haunting story, with its reliance on psychic powers as a plot driver bordering tacky, Kubrick instead tapped into what really scares us: a descent into insanity that is all too real. The movie seriously calls into question the actual existence of the ghosts, and instead focuses on real demons that are way too familiar to us: claustrophobia, alcoholism, family tensions, all of which drive Jack Nicholson to a murderous rampage. Kubrick does way too good of a job of spookifying things that are so commonplace; by the time you’re done, you’ll find elevators, hallways, and well-lit rooms incredibly nerve-wracking.

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