Books that are worse than the film (which was already bad?)
I've started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I've ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it's a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I'm just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
50 Shades of Grey.
The film is silly and mediocre but the book is next level terrible.
I've never consumed either media of that story. But I thoroughly enjoyed Dan Olson's take.
https://youtu.be/qzk9N7dJBec
Yep. This is probably the best take of showing how the movie's writing process changed the writing for the better, then the books' author put a stop to that.
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Thanks, forgot to delete that.
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its twilight fanfiction
This may be unpopular but I was deeply disappointed in Shawshank Redemption when I read it. The movie is top tier.
Edit: In retrospect this doesn’t really answer your question as you asked about bad movies with a worse book and Shawshank is definitely not a bad film.
Movie is definitely top tier, I also love the novella. Different Seasons is what I point to when people dismiss stephen king. Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and (while not on the level as the other two) Apt Pupil all in the same collection. But to each their own; pretty sure the final story is trash though haha.
The story was a novella King wrote in the early 80s for a short story collection, and it was his first real attempt at writing genres outside of horror. He's gotten better at that over the years.
Even so, I wouldn't say it's bad, just that the movie blows it out of the water.
Starship Troopers was a far different story in each medium, but I think the movie is much more worthy of your time
would you like to know more?
I'm doing my part
The movie is great but I'm curious as to why you think its better than the book?
I think the story and messaging of the movie is just amazing. We get to see the decline of Rico into a fascist mouthpiece, the casual disregard for human life and the way society warps us all. What starts out as perceived funny-ha-ha jokes in the opening act (the kid saying "I'll serve too") is retroactively depressing by the end of the film where Herr Commisar NPH shows how trivial the whole war is.
There's also an anime adaptation in 6 episodes, Uchuu no Senshi, made by Bandai. It was directed by Tetsurou Amino (Iria, Macross 7) and the mechas were designed by Kazutaka Miyatake (designer of spaceships and power suits for Macross, Gundam and Battleship Yamato).
It's considered an important milestone and a progenitor in the mecha genre. It has a very... anime approach to the adaptation, focusing mostly on the action and scifi with very little of the original drama or politics.
there's so much different I'd almost consider them related and not an adaptation.
It should be noted that the director explicitly meant the series as a tribute to Heinlein and it was dedicated to him when it launched (Heinlein had died during production) so there was a clear intent.
That being said it was a mini-series and there was only a limited amount of things they could cram into it. It's a pretty complex book with a lot of detail.
There's also the fact that a faithful adaptation would have been pretty hard to sell to the Japanese public. They have different sensibilities from the Western public and some of the symbolism would have been completely lost on them or appropriated to very different meanings.
A son who joins the marines and goes to war while regretting the rift with his parents is easy to understand in most markets. Add some cool SciFi imagery and action scenes, a touch of romantic interest, it's sufficient for 6 episodes.
+1 the movie is pure epic satire
I do like PKD as an author, I just never quite liked Starship Troopers the book, even though it's got some nice Forever War vibes to it
Heinlein not PKD.
Probably because Starship Troopers isn't PKD. It's Heinlein.
Kind of funny to imagine what it would have been like if it had been written by PKD. Johny Rico would have spent 1/3 of the book going through a divorce and the troopers would have all been on halucinogens.
oh whoops, I've made that mistake for X years then. Solves a mystery too - I hate Heinlein. Stranger in a strange land was dull.
The only book of his I'd recommend is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's quite Anarcho Capitalist, and sexist in places but it's an interesting revolution story regardless and has some interesting ideas in it
Yeah I found it boring as well. But yeah that would explain it!
Starship Troopers is Heinlein not Dick, and it's fascist nonsense. Verhoeven was right to throw the book in the bin after two chapters and the movie rules.
Heinlein experiments with loads of social structures and governments. Starship Troopers is the fascist example, not an example of all his work.
It's been a while since I've read it but what was fascist about it? That only people who served got to vote? It was either/or iirc, you could not vote while in the military, only after you left, and if you did you could not return. Not exactly Nazi Germany.
Only ex military caste have power because they are the only people who can vote or hold public office.
There's this respected teacher guy in it who goes on about how violence solves everything, hero's main trajectory is for him to become really on board with that setup. Bunch of capital punishment, whipping etc.
I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. There were other paths to citizenship (iirc something akin to the peace corps and perhaps even business success? It’s been a while since I read it). But it wasn’t just military. It’s just that military was the easiest for most people.
Been a long time since I read it too but basically you had to do federal service and military was the most popular branch of that. But the book is mostly interested in military and high up characters talk about their military background etc. It's definitely fascist.
Funny thing, The Forever War is considered a direct reaction to Starship Troopers, the former as a pacifist take to the latter's militarism.
Learn something new every day!
The Forever War is a book that I'll always point to as a gateway into reading sci-fi, not just watching it.
Such a good book.
Ready player one, though to be fair I didn't finish either version. I feel like percentage-wise I made it further through the movie, but only because the movie is less than 2 hours long. I made it to the 2nd chapter of the 2nd part and couldn't take the masturbatory prose any more. There's no self insertion on one side of the scale, Mary sue-ing in the middle, and ready player one sits on the far side of the scale.
I was going to say, Ready Player One is not a great movie, but it does at least have Spielberg at the helm, and while late-career Spielberg is a shadow of his former self, the movie is directed competently and interesting enough visually.
Not least of all because you can actually see and enjoy all the various IP in action, rather than just have them name dropped like in the book. When there's a sea of interesting or recognizable things on screen, that does a lot to help distract from how terrible the plot is.
But even at its worst, the movie is a tolerable popcorn flick. Turn your brain off and enjoy some pop culture references, then forget it all an hour later.
Because the book is just terrible. It's an absolute slog, a lot of the dialogue is embarrassing, the prose is uninspired, it's overloaded with explanations of UIs and unnecessary, long winded ramblings about the various pop culture references. The movie at least has the benefit of just putting a thing on the screen, the book has to describe all of this shit, and it's tediously done.
Which is to say nothing of just how terrible the plot is in general but more than enough people have gone off about that.
Twilight for nerdy boys is the best description I've ever heard of it, but at least Twilight isn't as gratuitously masturbatory.
The movie is so much better than the book because it drops a lot of cringe that the book has.
Ready Player One is the Skeet Ulrich of Snow Crash ripoffs.
I read the whole book twice. Its bad. The first time was fun because I was just looking for the pop-culture references, but thats the only kinda good thing the book has. The second time I focused more on the story and the characters and its just bad. There are no likeable characters, but you are supposed to like the main protagonist who is an antisocial creep. The setting makes no sense and the plot is just there to move to another place to show off more references stacked onto each other
Yeah, the book felt like I was being beaten over the head with pop culture references...but then you open up VR Chat...
I feel like there was value in the predictions RPO was making, particularly at the time it came out, just before Facebook became Meta and basically made it their playbook. If the world ever gets so shitty that the friction of putting on a VR headset actually becomes preferable to doing literally anything else, I think it's a pretty believable future.
Fight Club, book is decent but the film seems a more complete package.
Even Chuck Palahniuk agrees.
Source: https://www.dvdtalk.com/interviews/chuck_palahniuk.html
There is a Fight Club 2 in the form of a graphic novel. I normally don’t believe a shitty sequel can ruin my opinion of a movie I enjoy, but this one really put that to the test, boy howdy.
It's tv series not a movie but The Three Body Problem. The ideas are poorly thought out ass pulls to setup the weirdly specific situations the wittier wants.
At least the show makes the characters more interesting.
I haven't tried to watch Three Body Problem, because I disliked the book so much. I'm not surprised it's better, but I still probably won't watch it.
its relieving to hear others didn't like the book because everytime it gets brought up you usually see nothing but gushing praise bordering on fanaticism. I liked the concepts behind them but really didn't enjoy reading them at all
Agreed, most of the characters in the book are so flat, and only do things because the plot needed them to do that thing.
The Netflix series managed to make the character’s motivations seem more believable which I appreciated.
Funny, I didn't mind that the characters' motivations were written differently. Much more about their pasts and their circumstances than their outward emotional states, their irrational fears or momentary actions, and their short-term gains. It more all about the situation, the collective motivations, and the achievable ends.
I liked reading a Chinese sci-fi novel. It was alien twice.
I quite enjoyed the books. Would I then enjoy the show?
I loved the books and found the netflix series to be a pretty enjoyable westernization of them.
There were a few changes/choices that were a bit strange or missed the point, but overall it's worth watching
It earns its 7.2 or whatever rating. On the whole, watchable. Parts were bothersome. Others, magnificent. Not sure about rewatch value.
It's decent. I feared a worse version.
Takes some liberties, but overall enjoyable
Just Panama alone.... Jesus
I really had a hard time with the chinese names, especially the ones that sounded similar.
I've started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I've ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it's a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to want to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I'm just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
Jaws doesn't quite fit the prompt but although it's a good movie, the book is essentially a sub-par beach read. And there was no USS Indianapolis monologue in the book.
The thing about a shark, it's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white.
The lord of the rings!
I love reading....I read a lot. But Tolkien's style just never worked for me, the movies were great.
I like Tolkien's style, but I get it. If you're not prepared to hear everything described in excruciating detail, maybe just stick with the Hobbit.
The Hobbit was pretty good. It's been a long time since I read it.
I agree with thus, I tried the books and got pages in before abandoning them, the movies are well done
I liked most of the books, but I hate the long songs. Maybe this is a hot take but authors should not put in songs longer than a few lines.
Yeah no I hate songs in books. Most of the time it's pretty hard to figure out what the actual tune of the song is supposed to be sung like, unless the author's pretty good at it, and most aren't.
I remember hearing that tolkien when reading the songs aloud never sang them, so noone really knows what they should sound like
I always skip a song that is more than a few (max 5) lines long
Harry Potter, the movies are at least wizards do wizard stuff even if the world is pretty boring to me. The books on the other hand, are just straight up strange and mean. Reading them as kid they just sucked, I have no clue why they are so popular outside of the movies.
Harry Potter has some issues, but for children's fiction it's better than a lot of series.
I’d have to disagree with that, one of the main reasons I didn’t read Harry Potter as kid was because there was simply better fiction. That and also easy access to manga in the west had started becoming bigger.
What do you mean by strange and mean?
There’s a lot of moments where the characters will laugh at or make fun of someone for something to a degree I would never do irl, or the slave bit with hermione. The characters also just don’t evolve at all. Reading Harry Potter just gave me a fish out of water feeling, there were better magic books with characters that actually grew and changed.
I dunno, I'm sure there's a more complicated and interconnected series of events which lead to them truly being popular, not least of which was the movies, but in terms of how they're structured, it kind of makes sense to me why they were a successful fiction. The various different houses, even though they're mostly indistinguishable from one another internal to the books, give kids something to identify with and self-categorize into, which is something that teenagers kind of love doing in a struggle for identity. They're also part of the hidden world subgenre, which means it's even easier for tweens to self-insert into.
Then, I think it also helps that they're kind of poorly written, weirdly enough. Every character isn't usually a real, fleshed out individual, they're just an archetype, and a shorthand, a common trope. I think this is probably desirable for a tween audience, and I think probably also a simple to follow plot and set of plot elements is also more desirable. There's no lore to keep up with, it's just like you've taken a bunch of other tropes from other, better works and compressed them into an easily digestible series of books full of melodrama. It's not super hard to understand. Those other books, they're like the various PDAs and shit you'd see floating around in the 90's, they're explicit works of art constructed for a singular purpose. Harry potter is like an ipod touch, or an iphone, or something, it's just engineered to have more mass appeal at the expense of complexity and possibly quality.
Hunt for Red October. The book is great and for it's time had done amazing insight into modern naval warfare but the movie irons out a bunch of this which are a bit lame.
The Akula that kills itself with its own torpedo simply blows up because it abused its engine and another sunk when the titular sub rams into it.
The titular sub is later returned to the USSR.
The movie changes those and a few other things for a more exciting and satisfying outcome.
Hey now, I read Jumper as a teenager and it was one of my favorite books... Admittedly, adult me has never gone back and read it so maybe you're right, but I have read the sequels and I thought they were okay. The fourth one has Danny and Millie's daughter teleporting into Low Earth Orbit and using a bunch of real life space and satellite communications technology, which was cool because I consult in that industry and so it was like "Hey! I know what she's doing and that would work!" or even "I have a client who's working on something just like that!"
It doesn't fit the prompt because they're actually both really good, but the movie Contact is better than the book. Carl Sagan wrote in a very rambley, wordy way (kinda like how he talked). He spends like two and a half pages describing Palmer Joss's tattoos or Ellie Arroway's hair. So much of the stuff in it is so cool, but it's very hard to read. I've tried three or four times in my life, and I've ended up skipping around and just reading random parts of the story.
I can see that. Maybe as a teen I would have clicked with the style more. As an adult it just feels like I'm reading a twilight fanfic.
Never read Contact. Maybe it's time!
the Sookie Stackhouse novels vs. True Blood. the show got dumb but the books go off in so many more ridiculous directions. I quit watching the show after 3 seasons because the repetitive sex/violence juxtaposition got to be boring, but I still have to recognize that the show writers at least had restraint. also, Charlaine Harris writes like my foot
In the book, I remember that sookie says that someone “had her engine running like the pace car at the indie 500”or something like it.
My mom was into True Blood for a little bit when it first came out, probably because she was trying to fill a Buffy-shaped hole in her entertainment and TB was close enough, lol. She bought me the first novel for Christmas one year and I very quickly donated it, it was so fucking bad. She asked me if she could borrow it, got mad when I told her I'd donated it already, and then sad when I told her it would ruin her enjoyment of the show by being complete and utter trash xD
I don't know about worse, but the Eragon books and movie are equally terrible.
I'm not gonna go claiming that the Eragon books deserve a prize, but I loved them as a kid, and comparing them as equals to that movie is bordering on insanity.
The movie was good because it dropped all pretentiousness about where he was stealing his plot from.
Eragon was my first foray into proper swords and sorcery fantasy after Harry Potter.
Are the books really that bad in your opinion? By no means do they reinvent the wheel, but I enjoyed the magic system and enjoyed the aspect of Dragon + Rider and that relationship we see between the two.
I haven’t read much other Fantasy besides LotR and Stormlight Archive, but I enjoy the Inheritance Cycle.
The books end that bad. The first couple were pretty good, but the ending was awful and ruined the whole series.
I enjoyed the magic system at first, but it kept expanding and expanding to basically undo its own limitations. I remember being disappointed with the last book, but being especially disappointed by how it ended. It felt like a very forced attempt to have the same bittersweet ending Tolkien gave us in Lord of the Rings, but unlike in that, it felt completely unearned and illogical.
Take my opinion with a slight grain of salt because it's been at least a decade since I read the book and a half of the series that I got through, but from what I recall the books just didn't really have much to them - flat characters, awkward dialogue, and the actual prose itself was pretty bad. It was also boring enough that I just didn't care about anything that was happening, and I'd read enough good fantasy by the time I read Eragon that its flaws were hard to look past - I know the dude was a teenager when he wrote it, but that doesn't make the work magically better. Not trying to shit on anybody's parade, but it just really wasn't my thing.
I'm a bit sick of its narratives around sexuality and state, apart from that I really liked the books, but HATED the movie.
Been a long time since I read them. What were the narratives around sexuakity and state?
Roran and Katrina have this weird martial 'A man needs to protecc' and tradwife dynamic.
Eragon is somewhat a minor while try-harding to flirt with Arya who is superhuman even to Eragon as a Rider. It is not out of character, but it really confused me when I read it as a teen.
Nasuada is a glorified dictator. Islanzadi, Hrothgar, Orik and Arya are glorified superhuman dictators. Human civilians have no agency and the great magic system even further cements that (Dwarfs have gods, Elves have the forest and their magic, while human magic doesn't seem to aggregate to create a check on rulers).
I just re-read them last year. What narrative are you talking about? Is it to do with Eragon not understanding that he’s a teenager and he shouldn’t hit on the elf princess who is literally 80 years older than him?
Arya is not a viable partner for him for at least another five to ten years, IMHO actually for like 20-30 years. Eragon is still a displaced peasant with power not seen for millenia and Arya is a monarch of a superhumanity, who was stuffed with knowledge and experience since birth while having a very different mind. Eragon might not even fully understand yet how relationships work and how truly different elves are.
Roran's martial masculinity and Katrina's clicheed submission, Sloan's power trip etc.
I think the whole point was that Eragon wasn't right for Arya, I thought that was quite refreshing and a pretty important message for adolescents. It's a pretty big deal, imo that they don't end up together at the end, and eragon has to get over it. I think thats an original part of an overall cliche but enjoyable book. I do agree with roram and Katrina's plot though.
Granted the author was quite young when he started the series (15) to when the first book got published (18, first self published then republished by an established publisher a couple years later). He's came out with a new series recently, but I don't know how much better it is.
And while I'm not saying the books are anything great, they're still a far cry from the movie imo.
I'm gonna mention "How to train your dragon". I actually preferred the books, but they are very different and I know many people who much prefer the movie.
I honestly think they're different enough that the comparison becomes unfair. I enjoyed both, but there's only a superficial amount in common.
The audiobooks read by David Tenant are superb - something the whole family was happy to listen to in the car with small children. He does a fantastic job with a different regional accent for each tribe.
And yes, the movies are just a different thing.
How do they differ? My kid loves the movies and I always thought about buying the books.
From what I remember, where the movie has a longer guy discover a powerful dragon and with that starts a classic hero arc, the books are about a guy who gets very unlucky and is generally not very impressive, but still manages again and again to sort of stumble through adventures. In the books every kid gets a dragon to train, as a kind of rite of initiation. The main character only manages to get a tiny, rather pathetic dragon with literally no teeth (hence the name toothless). And he and his dragon both stay kind of pathetic as big events happen around him, but he keeps managing to somehow save the day, but of course no one realises what he has done and thinks it a fluke that he survived at all.
I read only the first couple books, so maybe it changes after that, or maybe I'm misremembering things. I really liked the story, but it's certainly quite different to the fairly traditional hero arc of the movie. If your kids loves the movie there's a good chance the book would disappoint them.
Stuart Little was the weirdest book you could possibly read, the movie managed to make it actually make sense while both were meh.
The classic would be fight club, I think even the author has said they enjoyed some of the symbolism that was added.
Jaws comes to mind, but I wouldn't call it a bad book, per your OP, its just that the film is a really good film. Books that are already bad don't really get film adaptions.
Same could be said for Jurassic Park if you feel like starting some arguments.
Books get adaptations when they're popular, not when they're good.
I actually think the book is way better than the movie
Babylon AD (the book is called Babylon Babies). I thought it was bad editing that made the end of the movie confusing. No. Turns out they took the actual ending of the book, toned it the fuck down and filmed it.
Not sure they could have filmed the part where the hyper-evolved babies take their comatose mother's consciousness, stuff it in an experimental space station and launch it towards the galaxy at 10% of light speed.
Howl's Moving Castle. Not that I didn't enjoy the book, I just preferred the movie more.
Same. I remember the book being actually kind of unimpressive and wondering "Really, this is what inspired that amazing movie?"
The Da Vinci Code. The film and book were both utter, contemptible garbage.
But the memes and parodies are priceless
This is a show and not a movie, but definitely The Magicians. The show is pretty incredible, and more or less abandons everything wrong with the original. The books mostly spend way too many pages following all the MC's petty grievances, and he's like a massive incel.
Oh, interesting! I may have to give the series a shot, then - I pretty much hate-read the books, hoping at first that he would get better and then later hoping that someone would just fucking kill him lol
Quentin is an incredible character in the show. Infuriating at times, immature, whiny, selfish, but in ways that are relatable. Everyone is immature, whiny, and selfish to some degree. Quentin’s story in the show is about getting out of his own fucking head and finding health and happiness in feeling connected to other people. His story as the MC is explicitly about him appreciating that he is not in fact the main character, and that’s a good thing.
Corollary of that is that the show ends up being a truly ensemble cast story, which is really refreshing. Plus Eliot and Margo are perfection.
Yessss, that's exactly how I felt! I only even forced myself to finish it so I'd feel qualified to write a terrible review lol
The name of the rose. The movies...fine, I guess. The books at least 300 pages too long and frequently segues into long-winded discussion of the political minutiae of the warring monastic orders during the reign of Pope John XXII.
If you want to read about the time period you'll be annoyed by the murder mystery shoehorned into your dry long winded historical fiction. If you wanted a murder mystery set in a historical setting then you'll be annoyed by the history lesson being shoved down your throat like a dehydrated fig newton.
I really liked the book. I thought it was clever to use the murder mystery to explore the world of the abbey. The minutiae was the point of the book for me.
Haven’t read the book, but watched a guy discuss the differences between The Devil Wears Prada and the movie.
His contention was that there were absolutely no redeeming traits about Miranda in the book and she had somehow failed upwards with no true talent. Andy the protagonist spends the whole time rebelling against the magazine and its people.
In the movie we see Miranda to be a horrid person but we see that overlays a keen eye and talent that has led her to the top. Moreover, Andy spends effort to fit in with the magazine people and she evolves as a character.
That's a good example. A filmmaker saw a 2D character and added a layer to save the story
My partner hateread Where The Crawdads Sing, but we haven’t seen the film, so probably that.
I haven’t read the book but enjoyed the movie. 🤷
I found the movie a bit sappy. A weaker version of To Kill a Mockingbird. What I couldn't get over was the nonsensical geography and impossibly frequent bus service.
maybe shrek? i never cared for the book though its not bad
Hunt for Red October though film wasn't bad at all, but the book was mediocre, boring and offputting.
Battlefield Earth. The movie is awful but it's a much smaller time commitment than the book.
Dine. The book is terrible, I couldn't read it at all after trying twice... way back decades ago, the recent movie was good.