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I've been toying with the idea of working out whether faithfulness to the source material is correlated with quality of the end product.
Lords of the Rings was pretty faithful to the books, and an excellent series of films, while the Hobbit was less faithful and much less good, although I can easily imagine a faithful adaptation that was bad, since I'd say the main problem with the Hobbit was that it allowed Peter Jackson complete control to bring out his worst impulses.
The Dune films have been very faithful to the books and I would say good films in general.
The Watchmen film was infamously too faithful to the graphic novel and suffered for it.
Shogun was very loyal to the book and was excellent.
I can't think of any adaptations that are very different to the source material but still good, but I suspect in those cases the film/TV adaptation could end up eclipsing the original, which fades from public memory.
Excellent series of films, absolutely. Faithful to the book, absolutely not. They made serious changes to the source material in the LOTR movies, ones which I think made the movies worse off.
In the spectrum of movie adaptations, the Jackson movies (while I have my problems with them) were fairly faithful. You cannot set the standard at "nothing whatsoever is changed."
Certainly as a Tolkien überfan I wish that certain things had been done better, but there are some elements that one would never hope in a million years for that got included.
My standard is not "nothing whatsoever is changed", but I do expect an adaptation to uphold the core themes of the original work. The LOTR movies do not: one of the most important themes of the book is that the One Ring is a powerful temptation, but that there are stronger things still. Friendship, like between Frodo and Sam, is stronger than the pull of the Ring. Faramir is so dedicated to right action that he says "even if I found it by the highway I would not pick it up", and lives up to that claim. Jackson chose to discard those moments (per the movie commentary) because they didn't fit with the story he wanted to tell of the corrupting power of the One Ring, and felt they diminished that aspect. But in so doing, he eliminated one of the core themes of LOTR. That makes them not particularly faithful adaptations.
Faramir did in the movie but there was an interlude.
In my opinion, "there was an interlude" makes it not really the same thing at all. In the movies, Faramir tries to take the One Ring by force (something book Faramir declines to do). The fact that he later comes to his senses and lets the hobbits go does not change the first fact. Faramir in the movies isn't much different from Boromir when you get down to it. Both of them saw a way the Ring could be used to achieve their goals, both of them use force (or attempt to use force) to take it, and both later repent of their sin and do their best to make amends. Which isn't a bad story to tell, but it discards the wonderful example of book Faramir rising above temptation, showing that the seductive voice of evil can indeed be resisted. And worse still, the reason that it was changed wasn't because of the constraints of film as a medium (that would be understandable), but because Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh decided they knew better than Tolkien and just had to have some cheap drama. Which is such a lamentable choice.
No there is still a difference. Boromir repents when the ring has eluded his grasp. Yes he fought valiantly to protect the hobbits but if he had taken the ring I don’t think he gives it back.
Faramir still has the ring basically on his possession yet lets Frodo and the ring go.
The added Faramir subplot also does two things that are important for the film medium: they introduce Osgiliath and also subtly rejig the timelines of the two plots so they are aligned
It also makes Faramir rejecting the ring meaningful. There can be a worf problem where we are told the ring is seductive but Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Faramir all pretty easily reject the ring.
Making it harder for Faramir gives it depth.
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