Recently, I went and saw the recent “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials” and while I thought the movie itself was pretty well done, as a book reader I noticed a lot of red flags when watching the movie.

The film is based off James Dasher’s book, “The Scorch Trials” and is the sequel to 2014’s “Maze Runner” and both movies were pretty well done, but there were a lot of things in both films that were featured in the novel but were absent in the film.

Normally in these types of films, if the director, producers and writers choose to omit certain aspects of the book to not include in the final film project.

That is fine, but to omit so much from the book that it changes the movie, there lies the problem.

For those who have not seen “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”, I am not going to spoil anything in the film, and it was a good film and I did enjoy it.

There were just a lot of changes made to the film that I felt were really unnecessary and completely change the movie.

“The Scorch Trials” was my favorite book out of the entire “Maze Runner” series and I was really looking forward to seeing the movie, but I was not prepared for the amount of change made to the actual film.

There were certain scenes and moments that were in the book that I was looking forward to seeing on the big screen and they were just not there.

I do not understand why filmmakers have to change so much to book-based films, I mean they practically have their screenplay already written for them.

Sure, I could say the same about other similar films like the “Harry Potter” series and “The Hunger Games” films and yes, those films do omit certain characters and scenes that many readers were looking forward to.

What these films managed to do was effectively replace these characters and scenes and yes, some times the films included these omitted scenes as deleted scenes when the film is released on DVD, such as the “Harry Potter” films.

Another thing that filmmakers do to these films is splitting the books to make more movies, such as the final “Harry Potter” film, and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and 2” were originally one book. While I can understand from a financial standpoint why these films are being broken up, it feels unnecessary. In the case of the final “Harry Potter” film, the first part was largely a set up to the huge battle of Hogwarts which did not even take place until the last part.

Again, I do not really understand why filmmakers feel this need to play around with a book for a movie, only to change the movie to the point where it vaguely resembles what actually happened in the book.

Books should be the entire basis of the film, whether you have to omit characters or scene to fit either screen time or to finish shooting for the film within a certain time frame.

If you want to make a film based on a book, then your focus should be on keeping the film as faithful to the book as possible, not completely change the film and creating a entirely different narrative than what was originally written in the book.

Luis  is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or lpmartinez@eiu.edu