Sweetheart—you appear innocently under the impression that the film spectacle just now soaked through your wondering retinae is akin to an ordinary cinematic adaptation from an existing literary source, and deplore the sundry cuts and compromises attendant upon the imperative of squeezing the original saga with all its richness into just 140 minutes. Alas, dear, we're not talking Brideshead Revisited* or even Lord of the Rings here: there was no literary "original," for all that a booklike object was made available for gentle pop culture consumers like yourself in advance of the cinematic release. The booklike object (which you are pleased to call a "novel") was in fact derived from the shooting script, and the author, 43 year-old "Matthew Woodring Stover" (whose bibliography and biography both fairly shout "Hack!" "Hack!"), was permitted, doubtless with adult supervision, to flesh out the story you raptly absorbed from the screen. You really should understand, though, that your experience at the St. Louis McMultiplex was the real deal, and that the paperback you greedily absorbed upon its release last month was merely a riff upon a theme.
yours in hope that a life awaits you after SWE3,
*Brideshead Revisited is a novel by Evelyn Waugh (a boy), originally published in 1945, that takes up 351 pages in the trade paperback edition. It was adapted for television a quarter of a century ago, and in a full eleven hours was rendered to the screen as faithfully as it is possible for a novel to be so transformed. You, Brenda, would find it unendurable: if pinned beneath a heavy bookshelf with Brideshead Revisited playing on a monitor in your line of sight you would chew your leg off and crawl to the multiplex to see "Revenge of the Sith" one last time before you expired from loss of blood.
[edit: repetitiontion]