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SPOILER ALERT - In order to properly analyze the book-to-film translation, plot details will be revealed. If you want to know how the movie is, here you go - the film is not good and trades graphic violence for actual scares.
Usually, the case is that the book is always better than the film, but "The Ruins" should have been a close contest. Author Scott Smith already translated his first novel, "A Simple Plan," into a great film directed by Sam Raimi, so by adapting his follow-up novel, all should have been well. Unfortunately, the film adaptation of "The Ruins" pales in comparison to the source novel.
The first point is the film is far too short. Being able to squeeze the events of a 300-plus page book into a 90-minute run time proved to be one of the film's most prominent shortcomings. The novel is an extremely slow buildup into terror, which the film completely undercuts by moving through the plot at an insanely rapid pace and ending almost as soon as it had started.
One aspect that is very surprising is how young the film's cast is since, in the book, the characters are so fully formed and well-rounded that they don't seem like a bunch of young random 20-somethings. They're quickly established in an opening scene that basically pegs each character with a one-word description like "whiny."
The film's worst sin against the book (here's where the spoilers come into play) is that the vines on the ruins are barely even a villain. In the book, they not only are carnivorous and play tricks on the characters, but they also relish in the pain they cause. In the film, the vines can mimic noises and voices, but in the book they can recreate entire conversations between characters and use the voices to their advantage. That's what made the vines so terrifying in the book. They would not only choke someone to death in their sleep, but then once the character had been killed, they'd mimic their voice and cry out for help. Once the body was uncovered, the vines would explode out of the body. The vines would then laugh. They took pleasure in the pain they inflicted on the characters. In the film, they merely eat some flesh and infest a body or two, leading to some intense gore but very little horror.
By cutting down on character development and the brutality of the vines, the core of the source novel was pretty much lost in translation. Perhaps the next time there is a Scott Smith book to adapt into a screenplay, the author should leave the writing to a professional.
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