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Changes when an older work is adapted into dramatic form are old hat.
We see this first in adaptations of older works in Greek drama. That we don’t find more complaints about it may be because the poetic sources themselves disagreed very much, and by the time we have commentaries the new dramatic adaptations have themselves become ancient classics.
Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet were likewise adaptations of older tales which took great liberties with them. King Lear in the earlier versions ended with Lear happily restored to the throne and his daughter Cordelia named as his heir. Hamlet in the earlier stories was the tale of a man who took revenge on his uncle by pretending to be a fool, and then had many other adventures before his death in a dual with Wiglek, ancestor of the early kings of Mercia.
Perhaps some contemporaries of Shakespeare likewise blamed Shakespeare for ruining the stories. And I suppose Shakespeare might have responded that the changes were necessary to bring in the modern audiences. The same could be presumed for Wagner who likewise could be said to have ruined Norse/Germanic mythology in his opera cycle Nibelungenlied and Arthurian material in his Parsifal and his Tristan und Isolde.
The difficulty is that films, like the older dramas, are made by creative people who can’t help being creative, being more interested in what they can make of a story than in the story they were given. Give all films to uncreative people to direct? That doesn’t sound like a viable solution?
And there are honest differences of taste among audiences. Rilstone also reviewed the original Jackson Lord of the Rings films and found the first one to be mostly excellent and the second bad and the third worse. But Rilstone also very much likes new Doctor Who for the most part, which is why he is writing a book on it.
Zigûr doesn’t like new Doctor Who much at all.
So who is right? Neither, I suppose, because there is no provable right in matters of taste. I once searched for a bad film to use as an example, but not one that was so bad it was considered good for that reason by some people, and one that was also well known enough to be likely to be recognized by the people I was addressing. I looked up loads of film titles on the web, but could not find a single one that was so bad that some people could not be found who really liked it for some reason. So I rewrote the reference to mention only an unnamed “notoriously bad film”.
The Harry Potter films were rather a shock to reviewers when they first started to appear, because author J. K. Rowling had full power over the directors to insist that no changes be made in the films over what was in the books, without her permission. The films accordingly followed the books very closely, leaving many reviewers to point out that this should not work, although it did.
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