Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why the Harry Potter movie has disappointed some fans of the novels.
I can hear the objection: you can’t make a full-length novel into a feature film without leaving a lot out. (As Michael Cassutt says, a movie script is about the length of a novelette.) But it seems to me this is one of the commonest problems in translating the experience of good fantasy and science fiction into Hollywood films: not that Hollywood is actually any worse at characterization, plausibility, and imaginative brio than your average decent SF or fantasy writer, but rather, that for the average decent SF and fantasy writer, this kind of deep-background is the meat in the sandwich, whereas for Hollywood it’s extra coleslaw to be thrown away.
And that’s why prose SF and fantasy are sometimes subversive, whereas Hollywood translations of SF usually wind up being normative. Because if you’re building a world with a history, you have to think about how worlds work, which means having and defending some opinions and outlooks which, the more you think about them, the more they become political. It Is No Accident (as we ancient leftoids say) that so much written SF and fantasy is about the relationship of the individual to the commonweal. But if you take all the backstory, history, and deep-background detail and discard it as inessential decoration, what you’re left with is stories about good people who are good because they’re good, in conflict with bad people who are bad because they’re bad. Which is ultimately what all the “smelly little isms”, the dreadful simplicities, Toryism and monarchism and fascism and Islamicism and all the rest, are all about: establishing that some kinds of people are just good (brave, generous, deserving, and unfairly maligned) and others are just bad (cowardly, exploitive, foul, and deserving of obloquy)–and to heck with all that sissy “background” frippery which Just Gets In The Way Of The Story.