{ The Curious Case Of Creativity: Adaptations }

These are those movies which connected with the novels on a level of almost perfection.

J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings is much loved and cherished by his fans. Its magnum stature of heavy imagination was a tough task to develop on screen but director Peter Jackson has an eye for the smallest of details and that was certainly what brought him such a huge success. Even the most elusive of critics comment this to be the best adaptation there could be to the novels.

One cannot praise enough the Indian movie adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth in the form of Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool. With a backdrop of Mumbai underworld, Bhardwaj captured Shakespeare's Macbeth in all faith and perfection. The tragic villain who quests for heroism was the life of Macbeth and Bhardwaj seemed to know how to unfold this Shakespearean masterpiece with his genius.




The Bible to every love story, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice takes love, heartbreak and the hands of society through stages resembling all times. The original book deals with some serious & a seemingly never ending literature, but director Simon Lington, took it in his stride & made this series which got an overwhelming response than the book itself.




Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone was a journey from being five point somebody to becoming five point someone and that was where its soul rested. 3Idiots, for an adaptation of the book was as good as a stand alone but Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Raj Kumar Hirani knew how to search that soul, keep it intact, create an imagination out of the fiction and make a movie worth being written again in a novel.




J. K. Rowling immortalized Harry Potter in the world of the greatest literary characters through a literature so magical. The magnetism of these 7 wonderful novels was hard to deny and thus the daunting task of living this on screen was even greater. But Warner Bros. did it for the greater good and how many may criticize the result, there is no denying the fact that each Harry Potter movie did live up to the exception always.

And these are those on screen adaptations which left the literature to the darkness somewhere.




2 States, a novel written by Chetan Bhagat in more of an autobiographical fashion talks about the journey of two diametrically different people, in love and how they make a life out of it. The movie adaptation of 2 States with a similar name sucks the life out of the Chetan Bhagat charm. The use of overt sexuality and the burden of pristine expensive sets make the literature go dead and wish to remain that way. The movie as a stand alone has its own worth but viewed as an adaptation to a wonderful book, it lands far away into some unknown state.




The film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's fantasy romance novels of the same name is a love story about a vampire Edward Cullen and a mortal named Bellla Swan. There's a lot to cover in the movie as cramming hundreds of pages to 120 minutes movie can be an uphill task, and this is where the movie falters. Detail thoughts and occurrences of the characters are not depicted. Some major and important scenes have been changed or omitted not to forget the pace of the movie, which is really slow.



Chetan Bhagat's novel One Night @ A Call Centre' was no literary brilliance but it did have the scope for a Bollywood masala flick. However, the cinematic adaptation Hello failed to capture the essence of the novel. The plot is tedious and the modified screenplay of the film fails to tap the aspect of the novel. Not every best sellers turn out to be successful cinematic adaptations and so is the case of this movie.



Sophie Kinsella eats, prays and loves Chick literature. The Shopaholic series is a literary living example of this. But director P. J. Hogan's Confessions of a Shopaholic, a rip off of the first two novels from the Shopaholic series is anything but brilliant. While the soul of the novels was the English background and the polished dignity of Rebecca Bloomwood who shopped till the world dropped, even in financial adversity, the movie shifted the base to America giving the aristocracy a miss and literature a wide berth.


Ram Leela is a movie with gorgeous cinematography, alluring soundtrack and electrifying chemistry between the lead pair but is it really Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet retold? The answer is no. Romeo and Juliet is about two individuals who fall in love with each other and end up dead due to their misunderstanding and the enmity between their families. The relationship between Ram and Leela is demonstrated only as a physical comfort. The film is loud and there are more than required violent scenes.