Books vs Movies, Part 2

Vs.

Mortal Engines the book is written by Philip Reeve is a pretty good book. I've read the first and look forward to the next three.  These are YA books so they are simply written, easy to read and even though there is a lot of war and the carnage of cities eating cities the gore is left out.  Hester is shy about her looks and keeps her face hidden or rarely holds her head so Tom can see her scars.  Katherine Valentine and Bevis Pod really should have been used way more in the movie since they had really big parts in the outcome of the book.

Mortal Engines the movie has Peter Jackson attached to the producer's names and a couple of big names like Hugo Weaving and Colin Salmon along with a cast probably more well known in England than here in the USA.
The movie starts out kinda sorta like the book but then the direction of the movie takes a turn and becomes just a movie with really good CG and turns it into something that comes up with the same ending.  Characters like Pod are dropped are dropped into nothingness, deaths are changed and to me, Valentine's part is changed probably just because of having Weaving attached to the project. The actors also appeared to be older than I pictured them in the book.  You would really think that with Jackson's name so prominent on the movie poster the movie would at least tried to be closer to the book.

I think the best thing captured from the book is the CGI.  The cities and airships really came out looking like what I imagined in the book.  The CGI was realistic and didn't come out like a 2D cartoon in so many movies out recently.  The movie makers seem to think they have to change the story to make an eight-hour book into a two-hour movie.  Maybe a screenplay can't be done that way and that's why so many movies based on books just don't make it.  Or is it the people that write a screenplay think they know more than about the book than the book author.

Variety states that Mortal Engines lost more than 100 million dollars and Peter Jackson was hoping to turn 'Mortal Engines' into a new fantasy movie franchise.  In his defense, the YA fantasy franchises just aren't working.  Maybe the people making these movies are trying to hard and should stay closer to the books.

In all honesty, I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't just read the book.  The IMDB rating is at 6.3 at this time and can change direction after the DVD and on-demand releases.  Which way is the question.