Books vs. Movie

About the Clive Cussler novel Sahara I recently saw that it has been made into a movie. So it piqued my interest because it was an engaging story that i thoroughly enjoyed, and so i rented it. After doing so, I noted many different conflicting concepts between the book and the movie. First of all, in the movie, the female actor was significantly more involved in the action of the movie than she was in the book. She really holds a very minor role and engages in very few action sequences in the book, but in the movie she was in the center of the action and she took part in many rescue missions and she was in the middle of the conflict and the climax. I very well remember her being off in a safe place while these actions were taking place in the book. I thought this was odd that the movie producers could write so far off script as to do this. This shows how the producers are allowed to go into such "creative liberties" and stray of the traditional plot line in order to fuel the interests of the public. The public always loves a romantic. Two tough guys going through and saving the planet would only appeal to the male spectrum of the public, but by varying the plot to make it more romance based it includes the interests of the females as well and makes it a date night film and will make more profit. This has happened in many other book-to-movie situations, such as The Chronicles of Narnia and especially in the case of Beowulf . In Beowulf, Beowulf travels to the foreign country and slays the monster, then slays the monster's mother. However, in the movie, Beowulf does slay the monster, but the similarities stop there. After that, he goes after the monsters mother and ends up falling in love with her and they have a child together and Beowulf has a secret life. Talk about a creative liberty?? The movie producers are able to throw in the whole monster hero love in there somehow in some twisted way to make them able to incorperate attractive women, drama, and love into a traditionally solid action classic. The way this occurs throughout our society is bizarre and almost disrespectful to the authors in that the producers can just chuck the real storyline out the window so they can try to make a little more green. And in my opinion, after reading the book, the movie version isn't even as good with the Hollywood makeup and drama. In summation I am just commenting and criticizing the fact that in our society, the truths and storyline that the author thought was best for the book are put at the end of the priority list and the number one focus is really always on the money.