I rarely find movies have enough interaction or realistic plot to be worth watching. Mostly, I prefer historically based series since they can't make the people too unrealistic. European productions are often better and I think that is because they never had such vast resources so are used to concentrating more on character interaction and plot than on effects.
Most movies based on novels are disappointing because you expect to take longer than 2 hours at most to read a decent book. The movies I like are mostly old and tell a story - Dr. Zhivago, Soldier Blue, Don't Look Now, The Wickerman.
I like Science Fiction especially but that has the biggest gap between movie and novel. The movies and series are really still stuck with Flash Gordon. The novels moved beyond that 50 years ago. Even Isaac Asimov's Robot stories (which are really detection stories in the Sherlock Holmes style he loved and wrote as 'Black Widowers') only use the exotic setting for a psychological story. All good science-fiction stories deal with the familiar in an unfamiliar setting or the unfamiliar in a familiar setting. When they try to do both, all rules are off so when anything can happen there's nothing surprising about anything that happens.
In most movies, SFX takes precedence over plot and characterisation. I've just had confirmation of this checking
Enemy Mine, a novel that I thought explored race prejudice from both sides very well. I will make one exception: Solaris. First off, Stanislaw Lem was so versatile that some people think he was a pseudonym for a Polish dissident collective, second the film Solaris (1972 version) Soviet made. What the Russians got away with in Soviet days they got away with
brilliantly and SF was one area the censor was light on. Soviet SF is brilliant analysis of human gullibility and susceptibility to not questioning things because they are told those things do not exist to be questioned. They had a good series of comic but telling novels based around a robotic Napalm factory that was given enough intelligence to decide that napalm is bad stuff and produced jam instead. (American of course: who else would be Soviet villains?)
In the novel, human and alien fighter pilots crash on a barren planet and have to co-operate to survive. They learn about each other and realise that both are just expendable pawns in a control game for their masters. The alien is pregnant and dies giving birth but extracts from the human the promise to bring the child up and teach it its genealogy, a religious thing with the aliens, all contained in a booklet the alien wears listing Deeds of the Ancestors that must be learnt and recited by heart.
Both are finally rescued by humans after the war is over and the alien returned to its family. The human fulfills his vow to bring the Book to the alien and ships out there. Now he finds the other side, that while he has no human prejudice, they are prejudiced against him, like Whitey infringing the ghetto with the best of intentions. When he arrives the family deny that any such person exists. Eventually he discovers that the very few aliens returned home without hatred for humans have been considered brainwashed hopelessly insane and shipped off to compounds where everybody tries to forget the shame.
He proves his honesty by reciting the generations with his own addition of praise for the alien's mother. At this, the family feel he deserves the chance, maybe lack of hatred for human is not insanity and he restores the alien to the family and shows that others without prejudice may not be insane either.
For 'Alien' easily read 'Black', 'Feminist', 'Muslim' etc etc.
Compare that story with Wikipedia on the movie version and see why I find SF film so disappointing
Enemy Mine (film - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)