Worst Book to Movie Adaptations Part 1

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

Disclaimer: I love this series. Definitely more than Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl. Just in general I. Love. This. Series. I eagerly wait for each new book to come out. I cried when a certain character was reunited with another certain character (hopefully that was vague enough). I think that this series is one of the best since Harry Potter. Seriously. I love Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Which is probably why I hate the adaptation so much. 

Point Number 1. The Movie as a Movie. This movie got a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes which isn’t...the worst. But it’s still pretty bad. Fans of Tim Burton that I’ve talked to liked this movie but they always are people who haven't read the books so…  I thought the pacing of the movie felt off. Like Jacob milled around for an hour and then suddenly saved the world. And then it had kind of a fake out ending. Nothing was particularly noteworthy about the special effects. Asa Butterfield was...fine. The guy needs a break from trashy adaptations really. The Ender’s Game movie was also bad, I just haven’t seen it recently. I’ll talk about it later maybe.  The only actor that really stuck out to me was Eva Green as Miss Peregrine. She was just as I imagined her. But every other actor was just...eh. 

Point Number 2. The Characters. This is probably the point I complain about the most when it comes to this movie. Why did they switch Emma and Olive’s powers? It makes zero sense to me other than the fact that Tim Burton probably found out a character who wore heavy metal boots isn’t in the book that much and so made her the love interest. The change was disarming and made me upset from the first scene in the trailer. Olive is a six-year-old (looking) girl who is lighter than air. Emma is a red haired, hot tempered yet fiercely protective teenage (looking) girl who used to be in a relationship with Jacob's grandfather. The chance felt really odd. The twins were in this movie despite only being in a picture in the books. The secondary love story was between ENOCH AND OLIVE (aka Emma). I cannot express how much I hated this. I mean, talk about a love story out of nowhere. This was WORSE Spock and Uhura. That’s right, I said it. Seeing as Olive is SIX in the books and Enoch is straight out of the Addams family a romance between them wasn’t even conceived in the darkest of fanfictions. Which is saying something. But I guess in Tim Burton’s sick, twisted mind, making the six year old character older so she could be with Enoch is better than the secondary love story in the books, Hugh and Fiona, who make a WAY better couple than anyone in the movies or even the books. They did not get the screen time they deserve. Plus, Hugh’s one of my favorite characters so I’m bitter he only had a few lines. Personality wise, Miss Peregrine was by far the best. Emma/Olive (movie Emma, book Olive) was eh. She definitely wasn’t book Emma but she wasn’t book Olive either (thank goodness). She was pretty boring and not that great of a love interest. Jacob was boring too. Most of the characters were boring. I didn’t feel a connection to any of them.  Bronwyn was younger which I can actually understand, it exaggerates her strength more. But all in all, the characters were very bland. Nobody had personality or backstory. Everyone’s character had so little screen time that they were super washed out. Horace, Millard, Claire, all the characters we loved were reduced to boring background extras. 

Point 3. The Plot. Oh boy. Where do I start? One consistency with these novels is combining books, which is frankly an odd choice. Nobody is ever happy about it. And it never works. This is especially true in the case of Miss Peregrine. It was like for the first and second act Burton planned for it to be a trilogy, like the books (before the second series, of course) and then all of the sudden decided to wrap the entire thing up. And RANSOM RIGGS WROTE THE SCREENPLAY. I have never been so disappointed as I was when I found that out while writing this. I had been blaming Tim Burton this whole time but now I come to find that RANSOM RIGGS had a part in this. I’m honestly sad for him. How could he? But moving on. As with most adaptations, some plot points were changed. Some made sense. Most didn’t. The wights were changed so they could shapeshift in order to make the reveal that the therapist=the birdwatcher= a wight more shocking but it didn’t have to be changed. The way that time loops works was changed so that Jacob could jump time loops and find the kids again. It just felt sloppy and rushed. At least the other movies pretended there was going to be a sequel. Miss Peregrine straight up ending its story in the single weirdest way, with a battle that didn’t exist in the books and resolutions that didn’t happen. Also they brought Jacob’s grandfather back which was weird. I don’t think anyone cared about that or was asking for it. 

Disclaimer Part 2: I knew this movie would be bad from before the trailer even came out because I saw the poster which is bright and green and colorful, which is obviously the exact opposite of the covers of the Miss Peregrine books, which are real life black and white photos.