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I always find films are very disappointing, when I have read the book first. I generally spend the whole film sitting there picking holes in it, “he didn’t say that,” “that didn’t happen,” “hey, they left out the best bits!”
The Martian was a good film, but they left out so much of the great dialog, like where he is complaining about the media that his colleagues left behind, that he had to watch and listen to.
I used the Harry Potter series to learn German, when I moved here in 2002. I read and re-read the books in English and German to help me learn, knowing the story and what happens in each paragraph made it much easier to guess the meaning of words, rather than grabbing the dictionary every 2-3 words to try and understand the sentence. But that also means I have real problems to watch the films, because they are so different. Different characters say the lines from the book, or different characters do things - the Goblet of Fire, for example, Dobby steals the gillyweed and gifes it to Harry, but in the film Dobby doesn’t even make an appearance, making Harry’s diving under the water less tense, because he Neville gave it to him, not Dobby, whose “help” always seems to backfire.
I actually actively avoid films when I have already read the original book. The Lord of the Rings is probably the only one, where I think, despite the missing bits and re-writing of dialog and motives, still holds up as a film series that I enjoy watching. Turning Merry and Pippin into comic relief characters annoys me, how they grow in the books is much more interesting than playing them for laughs, but the rest is generally acceptable.
The most egregious is probably the Bourne series. The books are brilliant, the film with Richard Chamberlain, Jaclyn Smith was a fairly faithful adaptation, but the new films with Matt Damon have absolutely nothing to do with Jason Bourne. They are great action films in their own right, but for anyone who is a fan of the “real” Jason Bourne, they are very frustrating. If they had made the films with a different character name, they would be brilliant, but to say they are based on the book is a joke.
I find it much better the other way around, watching the film often inspires me to read the book, as the book is always so much more detailed and informative.