The Hobbit. Probably not the worst movies with not the worst bastardisation (that'd be The Dark Tower for me), but I simply can't wrap my mind around the overbloated monstrosity that the Hobbit TRILOGY is. Like why would anyone do this, it felt like it's in the bag, they got Peter Jackson, they already made LotR to great success, why do we suddenly need wacky wheels with cartoon CG goblins in 48 FPS for some reason... It doesn't even match neither the tone of the book nor the tone of LotR movies.
If you watch the behind the scenes stuff it honestly is pretty impressive how competent the movies ended up being. Yes, they are terrible, but they could have been a lot worse. Peter Jackson made them watchable, at least.
The hobbit movies should have fleshed out the dwarf characters better with all that extra time, give each of them a substory spread out over the trilogy so they would be more memorable. They did that with only one of the dwarves and it's a silly love triangle that barely goes into the character of said dwarf. With the movie we got, ask any average person directly after seeing the movies to name the dwarves, i bet hardly anyone can.
Not only does the love triangle not make sense, but it really only serves to erode the significance of friendship of Legolas and Gimli. They were supposed to be first friendship between an Elf and dwarf in a long time
Warner Bros didn't want to make the Hobbit. They wanted to make another Lord of the Rings movie, and had to use the Hobbit for it. The Hobbit is very much NOT a Lord of the Rings story, despite the shared setting. Square book, round movie.
Also, they knew there wasn't enough content, but Warner Bros had to split the profits of the first movie five ways. They didn't have to do that for the second movie, and then they added a third to squeeze out even more.
Full CGI ruined the hobbit for me. The costume and make up work was so good in LotR. That and the whole movie operated as if in a physics-free zone. Nothing made sense.
I never watched the other two, I imagine they are just as bad.
See, I think the high frame rate would look great if what you were looking at was real. But what you're looking at is a room of actors in nylon beards and Martin Freeman in rubber feet.
Spare barrel? Bear in mind I have only actually seen the first of the Hobbit trilogy, and then later I watched the Tolkien Supercut, that cut out anything not at least alluded to in the book.
I think it's in the second one. It's hard to be sure when you're vaguely remembering a 300 page children's book inexplicably squeezed into three movies.
It's the much hated GoPro barrel ride bit. All the dwarves have a barrel, there are no spares, Tim from The Office has to hang onto the side of one. The fat dwarf breaks his, and then after bouncing around like prequel Yoda, jumps into a spare that comes from nowhere.
I would think the version you saw just shows them all going into the water and coming out at the other end. It's been a long time since I read it (close to 30 years), but I don't remember any massive river battle going on.
In defense of The Dark Tower... it isn't an adaptation of the books. It's a sequel. It continues the story in a way in which Roland finally breaks the loop.
"I Am Legend" has been made into 3 or more movies, none of which have anything like the book's ending.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is dull and misses the point almost entirely, but almost manages the title line. Not quite.
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
I Am Legend (2007) almost gets it. The vampires are competent. Will Smith's smarter than Neville of the book, but crazier. But then both endings fail to treat the vampires as a society.
It's funny the irony of I Am Legend, it is an allegory to an older society having to make way to a newer one, and somehow every time that's the story they can't do.
I read the book on a whim in high school. I think it was one of those random Barnes and Nobles finds. The ending was an amazing horror twist, with Neville realizing he's the monster and the audience realizing that they've been rooting for the villain The whole time, and the acceptance of the transition to the new society.
The only adaptation I've seen was the Will Smith movie which was generic zombie movie nonsense.
The DVD released with an alternate ending to the movie that acknowledges that the vampires have a society and that Smith's character is their boogeyman. I have not read the book, but my understanding is this is much closer to the book than the theatrical ending.
That's at least the spirit of it. The original ending was just so laughable considering they chose to keep the book's title. "I am Legend" literally refers to him realizing he is the legend, the evil monster. Not having the book's ending makes the title nonsensical.
The DVD ending was clearly the intended original, given foreshadowing of the creatures’ intelligence throughout the movie which never paid off in the theatrical cut.
When I went to community college, I'd arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with "Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation."
Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.
Yeah. I guess this post is now about bad movie adaptations in general.
You are 100% right about the Eragon movie. I loved those books as a kid and I was so excited for that movie and it was just so bafflingly terrible. It was like they didn't even try.
I was going to read Eragon with my kids, but then remembered how bad the movie was - and knew that they'd want to watch it after reading the books. So I haven't read it with them. Might get around to it eventually.
Not a classic book, but Artemis Fowl. Disney managed to confuse fans of the books and newcomers to the series alike by adding a McGuffin that was unnecessary, bringing the antagonist from the second book into the movie on the first book, and mangling the relations between the two main protagonists beyond recognition.
Artemis Fowl was just bad, not just a bad adaptation. It was an incoherent mess. Felt like they left way too much on the cutting room floor for the finished product to make sense.
A running theme of Asimov's Robot stories is that the Three Laws are inadequate. Robots that aren't smart and insightful enough keep melting down their positronic brains when they reach contradictions or are placed in irreconcilable situations. Eventually Daneel and Giskard come up with the Zeroth Law; and if I recall correctly they only manage that because Daneel is humaniform and Giskard is telepathic.
::: spoiler spoiler
And the robots do take over, eventually!
:::
There were flaws, yes, but they never rose to the level of attempting to destroy humanity that I recall. We had a sort of plot armor in that Asimov wasn’t interested in writing that kind of story.
I’m getting this from a forward he wrote for one of the robot book compilations.
Wasn’t the last I, Robot story about how the robots directly the world’s politics decide that we were living better and longer lives without technology and brought the world back to medieval level of tech?
Flaws or interesting interpretations of them, but he rarely if ever approached the “robots destroy humanity” trope even if it was technically possible in his universe because he thought it was boring.
And it didn't succeed at showing the only part of the book that mattered, power armored space marines with shoulder nuke launchers!
If it was a good criticism of Heinlein's weirdo militarism it'd have been another thing, but the most damning criticisms of it are made up because Verhoeven couldn't be bothered to finish reading a short novel.
See the thing is that Heinlein wrote about a lot of different societies, some of which are completely antithetical to the militaristic selective democracy in ST.
People often say "oh this author thinks this or that" but if multiple of their works contradict how can you tell what is and isn't their personal views?
That being said, yeah most of what Verhoeven "criticized" wasn't even in the novel, there was no propaganda because they didn't actually want people to enlist lol if only he'd made it to the second chapter where the anti-recruiter gave his spiel about the military industrial complex and it's continuing growth due to the benefits tied to service...
I think Heinlein was actually much more against militarism than people give him credit for, hell he wrote "if this goes on-" about half a century before the problem became acute, he saw the religious authoritarianism from the US right wing coming miles away. I can't imagine he wasn't also critiquing our GI bill system of service for education, and the increasing dependency of military contractors on our economy with the novel.
Was RAH a weird dude? Absolutely. I think people are too quick to judge his personal values and beliefs based on one novel out of dozens of conflicting ideologies. Hell go read "beyond this horizon", the good guys are communists and run an automated economy with no standing army lol try and make that fit with the society of Troopers.
Yeah I thought that too. I saw the movie before I'd read the book and I was like "that was fine, I dunno what everyone's fussing about." Then I read the book and was like "...oh."
It'd be great to see the book done properly. I know everyone says it but a multi-part HBO-type show would be amazing.
It's a perfectly fine zombie movie, but it only takes small elements from the excellent book. The book needs to be a TV series, made in a documentary style. I just pretend the movie is unrelated; it's enjoyable as just a standard action movie with zombies in it.
I partly expected that this particular movie would come up in such a thread, as most people seem to be quite disappointed by it. Sure it was different from what everyone expected, and it could have been much better. I still appreciate it though because, like all adaptations/versions of H2G2, it tells a slightly different story, with the same humour and satire that is characteristic of Douglas Adams. And the effects were quite nifty IMO. Too bad DNA did not live to see the completed film...
Luckily there's the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)
Don't forget the BBC TV series, it was not bad either ;-)
I agree. Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel really didn't pull their weight. Zaphod with only one head nearly the entire time was lame. The whole thing felt too "American" to me.
It's a mess of a movie, but it's also the only version of the story where some bits of Adams' original material actually ended up being seen — namely Humma Kavula and the Point-of-View Gun.
That was Catch-22 for me. Every time I had a free moment to read it, some random, horrible thing would happen. First, a garbage disposal exploded, next time my work truck ran into the back of a bus, and then finally I got fired from my job as an appliance installer for reading books on the job.
I would imagine that it's tough to go back to a book that defined humor for a generation of readers, spawning copycat jokes and stories across the world. Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, per E.B. White, nobody is that interested and the frog dies. So I won't go into why Adams' writing is considered some of the funniest literature in modern history, but I will say two things:
First, none of it is actually random. It might seem random, but that's just how it looks from your limited perspective. That's part of the beauty in the stories, things come back around later. It's a story centered around a literal improbability generator, and yet everything exists for a reason (even if that reason is to be a cosmic punchline).
Second, I would suggest you don't compare it to the overwhelming number of pale imitations. There are famous, successful authors who learned to write humor reading the HGttG, and for every one of them there are thousands of untalented failures who think "lol so random" is all it takes to be funny. To complain about how Adams' writing reminds you of stupid cliches is like complaining about how a Van Gogh painting looks like hotel art.
The last thing I'll say is you don't have to like the books. Taste is subjective, and you might not find the books funny. That's OK. Read something that makes you laugh, makes you think, and makes you want to keep reading. But if you say you don't understand why something is enjoyable to everyone else, you're going to get long-winded rants from internet strangers who care very deeply about the thing you don't understand. You don't have to read those, either. I probably should have started with that bit.
Dude this is such a lame reply. I gave my personal opinion of the book and you wrote a whole condescending lecture of hand wavy arguments about how my opinion is apparently objectively wrong and then had the gall to follow it up with:
The last thing I'll say is you don't have to like the books. Taste is subjective, and you might not find the books funny
Yeah, no shit. I didn't like the book and frankly I don't need your permission to not like the book.
This is my opinion, I do not need you to validate my opinion. Surprised you managed to finish the book when you couldn't be bothered to actually read my comment. Go be a condescending twat elsewhere.
The Wheel of Time. I waited for reviews before watching it, so glad I never wasted a second of my life watching that piece of blasphemous garbage. Just stick to the source material, how fucking hard is it??? Apparently too hard for modern directors, they have to "fix" everything and make it appealing for a "modern audience." Bitch, I am the modern audience, and fuck you.
Hard disagree here. I'm a rabid wheel of time fan who has read the books at least 6 times.
Ir would be downright impossible to "stick to the source" for book one (or really, any if them) and have it be good on film. It just wouldn't work on film, there is too much going on. The story would feel like it drags and is being forcefully stretched out, because the book is rather repetitive. That repetition works in a book because you are getting to read the characters inner thoughts, and in paper it adds tension that, for example, Rand and Mat are unsure whether the next place they stay will be full of dark friends.
But after the third time they get chased out by dark friends a TV audience would be like "OK they did this already get on with it." Repetition on TV gets boring FAST.
And the magic system is all kinds of messy in the books. They're diving into it a bit more now, but it's still got Tobe simplified for screen. You can't convey characters thoughts on screen, which basically neuters the whole system. The book is VERY exposition heavy, and that gets boring real quick on screen. Look at the LOTR theatrical VS extended editions. There is a reason that Bilbo talking about Hobbits at the beginning got cut. I like that scene, but it also is too much exposition to drop on the viewer right after the intro, which is also exposition. EOTW is like half exposition, and most of the books are at least a third exposition. That all has to get cut or reworked to be actually fun to watch without being super preachy. It's
Listen to Brandon Sanderson talking about the adaptation of Mistborm he has been working in for ages now. He has said that he had to make big, fundamental changes to the characters and story to make it work on film. He said his first draft was closest to the book, and that it was quite bad.
The biggest fuckup season 1 of the show did was not including the prologue. Idk why they cut it, it's such a good intro. Besides that, I thought they did alright. Season two has been much better so far, and has shown that they really do understand the core of this story and all of the characters in it.
Agreed, there is a ton of internalized exposition in the books which can't be done on the screen without it getting awkward. I have also generally enjoyed the show so far, and I think the pacing is actually pretty good. There are definitely times in the books where we are getting "scale" via brute force word count, and the visual medium definitely opens some things up in that regard.
"Stick to the source" doesn't mean "show every line on film". It means things like "don't shoehorn in this random-ass Warder that isn't in the books and nobody cares about" or "don't make up a dead wife for Perrin that adds nothing to the plot". And that's not getting into things that they almost did, like "Yeah, it's cool if Moiraine murders the ferryman in direct violation of the Three Oaths".
Sorry, the show was trash. It had a rich and complex world to draw from, and fucked it up hard. Just awful writing.
I've never read the books, although I'd really like to. I only know two things: Its fucking awesome and really, really long and convoluted. Someone told me that getting into it is hard, but there is nothing quite like it and its worth it.
I watched the series while drinking beer and hanging out with my father. We both like fantasy, needed something to binge and I heard of the source material.
We thought the series (only seen the first season) was pretty cool. Knowing the infamy of the books it was clear that they had to cut vast parts of the books, but for someone uninitiated it was a fun watch.
At the same time I already thought it had to be unbearable for fans of the book for the same reason.
They even ignored Brandon Sanderson who offered free advice on how to write the story FFS. Even the show runner had the gall to say he's a fanboy of the series.
I like this! Maybe the book is a telling of the story as it happens and the show is a retelling centuries later with the information available to them. They don't have the inner monologue of the characters, they don't know all the exact details (ok, so Perrin wasn't married? Eh, his early life wasn't super clear in the written histories).
Yeah it's a popcorn show. You watch it to relax your brain. It's entertaining as a Xena episode, and the production feels as cheap as Xena's.
But if you've read the books you're wondering what the hell is happening. And it doesn't make you want to read them. That's the lamest part. A show based on books should make you want to read them at some point. I mean, if you adapt them to screen, they must have been loved by a lot of people...
Well actually, the dwarves were created by the smith god Aulë deep in darkness under the mountains of Middle-Earth, made to be strong and unyielding. I don't think he cared much about their reaction to the sun, it stands to reason their skin would mirror the materials used by the god that created them - clay and stone. A darker skin tone makes more sense to me frankly.
Starship troopers. I say this not because the movie is bad (it's not, I think it's exactly what it meant to be and did it well), but that the movie and the book are thematically opposites. The book is very pro military authoritarian. The movie is a satire of that.
You'll probably recognize it as Blade Runner but the film took so much liberty the author allowed a good friend to write three sequels in order to harmonize the book with the movie.
No, Starship Troopers was not a direct endorsement of fascism. This is exactly why it wasn't a good adaptation, largely because Verhoeven famously didn't even read the very short novel he wanted to criticize but he's convinced a horde of fans of trash movies that the novel says things it simply does not.
The movie made up the majority of its criticisms of Heinlein's fictional society, including misrepresenting the process of "earning" citizenship, the most suspiciously fascistic element that in the novel is much more benign, and throwing out a completely fabricated plot hint that Buenos Aires was a false flag, as well as portraying the Pseudo-Arachnids as simple space bugs when they're a technological species, but he didn't bother critiqueing all the time he spent on malding on modern military officers being hyper-responsible warrior-poets.
And that's, like, the bad part! Which he'd have fuckin known, if he'd read the fuckin book!
Heinlein is best described as a militarist liberal, and eventually a neoliberal when that became a thing. He literally ran for office as a Democrat in the Reagan years.
Everyone who's read one Heinlein novel thinks they know exactly what Heinlein's real-world political views must have been, because he wrote characters who expound on theirs. But the politics of Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the Lazarus Long stories aren't the same, just to pick a few examples.
The terror mission in the opening of the book would have been a very interesting introduction to the political and military dynamics in the universe. Shame it doesn’t seem to show up in any Starship Troopers media.
Haha I would put both of those at the top of my list of movies that were actually much better than the books.
Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep felt so flat to me, I think it probably didn't age well. The animal obsession didn't land for me, I guess it's supposed to be an allegory for material obsession, since the animals are more for showing off than being actual pets, but it just seemed to slap you in the face with it like many of the very not subtle metaphors. The main character is also just dull as hell and walks straight into dangerous situations or traps without a second thought, but it always works out for him because plot armour and the androids either just comply for some reason or they're so incompetent that it doesn't matter. It wasn't a fun book imo and it's themes were so obvious that it didn't "make you think".
Starship Troopers (Book) was just hoorah military propaganda. The movie did such a good job of making fun of it and turning into a ridiculous over the top satire.
Electric Sheep is the first book I thought of when I read the thread title.
I'm pretty indifferent on Blade Runner. It's got a great soundtrack and aesthetic, but as an adaptation of my favorite SF book of all time I can't stand it.
I’m beyond the debate over the Starship Troopers book vs movie. Both are very much being their own thing, and I am able to enjoy them both.
The knife training scene in each summarizes the different approach they have.
I highly recommend scifi fans read Starship Troopers and Forever War back to back. I consider them complimentary books regarding the nature of war, and government.
Was my first thought, as well. I saw the movie first and hated it, glad I stumbled across the book at some point and found one of my now favourite authors.
No one appears to have yet mentioned Forrest Gump. In the book he was a chess grandmaster who wrestled professionally and was an astronaut. Also, the book sucks.
American Gods: they made unnecessary changes and introduced unnecessary filler plotlines until it felt like a drag to watch. The book already explored social issues, but the showrunners decided to dial it up to 100 and spoonfeed it to the audience at the expense of the actual plot.
Ready Player One: they dumbed down the whole thing about hunting keys and portals, removed tons of important worldbuilding details, made pointless changes that ruined the spirit of the books. They should have made it into a series instead of a movie.
What made me mad at RP1 movie was they put the Easter Egg in Atari Adventure. Which is mentioned in chapter 0 of the book, and again in the fake town (not put in the movie) because it's so obvious, nobody who cared about games at all would hide anything there.
And no Tomb of Horrors.
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he's too senile to understand the game references.
And the actors are far too pretty for the "but you're beautiful inside" plot.
Not to mention the bastardization of the entire plot.
I liked the book because it felt like the villains had actual capabilities to accomplish their goals. The protagonists did everything right and it still wasnt enough to get the bad guys off their backs.
In the movie the protagonists make stupid decisions and the villain helper character which didn't even exist in the book just overhears them talking about it.
That's because the novel was about nerd culture in general, while the movie was almost entirely about video games. All the D&D, Rush, Monty Python, etc. references were absent. The Shining was in there because Kubrick was Spielberg's mentor.
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he's too senile to understand the game references.
Have not seen the movie, but that sounds like Spielberg nailed the tone of the novel. The book reads like a thinly veiled essay by an aging Gen X geek about how pop culture peaked during the authors childhood and the world would be perfect if we could go back to the 80s.
Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn't as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.
American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.
Ready Player One: they dumbed down the whole thing about hunting keys and portals, removed tons of important worldbuilding details, made pointless changes that ruined the spirit of the books. They should have made it into a series instead of a movie.
I went into the theater expecting it to be not so great, and it still managed to disappoint me.
Like, the whole "master smith discovers alloys" thing was a way to show the three elven rings being made of the different metals without directly referencing the Silmarillion describing them. When they pour out the "alloy" to make the rings they're clearly made of different metals.
But like, who was that for?
Real huge lore nerds you just pissed off because Sauron wasn't supposed to know about their existence or take part in their making? Him not knowing is why his plan didn't work!
But the thing is, Rings of Power is incredibly fun, because it completely ignores source, steals just enough character names & places to get Lord of the Rings fans excited, but it's not boring. Lord of the Rings is about thousands of pages of walking.
Galadriel is a WOMAN and therefore according to Professor Tolkien is useless. Show makes her the one badass in Middle Earth.
I did hate the not-yet-Hobbits, that was not a good invention.
It's amazing just how visually impressive the show is. If it was done with the best we had 30 years ago it still would have been good, but the vfx would have dragged it down. Now it raises it to a whole other level.
I'd say it's a bad adaptation of the book. But as a sci-fi series, it's quite good. I rate it at least 7 out of 10. Although I haven't watched the second season because I'm waiting for it to be finished so I can binge it if I wanted to.
The show is based on the universe and some characters created by Asimov but it's freely adapted. You'll have to see the TV shows and the books as two entities, there are a few similarities, Easter eggs, etc. But they're different and both great IF you're not looking for a translation from text to screen.
The TV series is eerily beautiful, the story is better in S2 and more complex. Great cast too and on a "small" budget.
The way I see the TV show is like the creators are constantly placing details to say "Hey! This Asimov guy was really smart and he wrote this rad SF saga, you should really check it out!".
David Goyer and his team, they're not just making a show about some old scifi books : they're truly fans of Asimov's work and you can feel it. It's a work of love.
The original book spends almost no time with the old empire. Once the Foundation is established, the details of the empire’s fall are irrelevant to the story. In fact, the premise makes a point that the exact details of its fall don’t really matter.
Hot take but I kinda liked the percy jackson movies. Yeah they could've been done better but it was one of my favorite series and to see some parts of it visualized and on the big screen is a cool experience. Still, I'm very excited for what Rick Riordan has cooked up with Disney right now.
Oh, another one I just thought of - How to Train Your Dragon.
The movies are fine, but they are so completely different from the books in almost every respect that it's barely worth giving them the same name.
The books are absolutely brilliant, especially the further you get into them. Would love to see them developed as a TV series that stuck to the style and messages of the books. Would likely need about 10 seasons though!
I'm going to flip the spirit of the question and say that Michael Crichton's Timeline movie adaptation is so bad that it falls into so bad it's good territory. I own it on bluray, and we watch it at least once a year.
Any visual media that you've seen after you've read the source book. A better way to look at it. It is which movie was better or as good than its book.
Jurassic Park was a better movie than the book.
The Martian the movie was as good as the book.
Uh, the movie made some serious mistakes, namely having them decide to shut down the Oasis 2 days per week, at the end? Where the hell did that come from? There are in-universe people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihoods and self-worth. Fuck 'em, right? And also the main characters are not a "clan" and having Z affirm they were a clan to Og was a middle finger to the book's whole spiel on not being a clan.
Imo the Amazon series is good if you just mentally separate it from the source material, which you honestly have to do with pretty much every adaptation if you've read it, so it isn't like it's a new phenomenon.
I'm probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.
But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn't just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.
I'm willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.
My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything and put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I'm assuming will align with the third book.
I've seen S2E1 so far. It was a bit slow, but at least Egwene and Nynaeve are mostly in the right spot, and Perrin is almost exactly where he's supposed to be (a bit strange considering of the five main characters he was the one with the biggest change to his backstory)
As a very long time reader of the Dark Tower series, I was super excited to see what they would do with it. I couldn't watch more than 5 minutes before I had to shut it off, it was just so fucking BAD.
That was probably a good idea. I made it about 30 minutes in. The movie kept moving further and further away from the books. And it was in the weirdest ways. I'm not sure what all it showed in the first 5 minutes, but Randal suddenly has a group of people to help him, and they're using sifi technology with computers to open portals instead of the doors. I get things will always change from book to movie. I go in expecting it. And usually it's not a huge deal. But I just don't get the decisions they decided to make.
Agreed. It bears so little resemblance to the """source material""" that they were legally required to remove all mentions of Stephen King from the film credits and promotional materials when it released on VHS.
"The NeverEnding Story" should never have been made into a movie. It's almost ironic.
Every time a child watches the movie instead of reading the book, that's an opportunity lost.
I'm a huge reader, massive... like, I spent up until I was about 29, 30 or so going to the library every week or two and getting 10 books out every time (That was the most you could get). I'd have read them all, and be champing at the bit to go back well within the week... it was a regular trip for us to go.
I've never actually read the Never Ending Story, and I loved the movie... one of my favourite childhood movies.
You should definitely read it but I think the great thing about the book is that it can turn a kid into a reader. When they've watched the movie already I think some of the magic is gone and it's not as impactful.
YES! I read the book a long time before I saw the film and was so disappointed when I finally got around to watching it. And then I know people who read the book years after seeing the film and didn't like it, because it was so different to what they were expecting. And that's such a shame, because the film just doesn't have the same depth to it.
I should really read those, as I really enjoyed those movies (the earliest ones more than the later ones, admittedly). What's so different about the movies?
I enjoyed the films more than the books. The books after the first feel like the author had a good idea, but didn't know what to do with it. The films tidy it up nicely
I still enjoyed the movies but I felt they did not do the story justice. I hated how everything looked and I also hated how little time was spent on the characters relationships inside the hunger games.
Well. It's clearly not a book, but Disney's Hercules was the first time I really felt disappointed about going to the cinema. My ten year old brain was having none of it. I wanted the adultery, the murder, the dirty stuff the story was supposed to have and I think it's the Disney film (that I've watched) I hate the most up to date.
So true. Michael Ende was a total genius and the book has to be filmed again. It has so much potential for surreal dreamy landscapes, morphing sceneries, psychedelic images...
I understand, but I grew up with that movie, and it's entrenched in my psyche. I still love it. Discovering the book was an absolute treat. It's so special!
Don't know if it counts as "classic", but Mortal Engines comes to mind. The film cut out over half the book. I loved the book and got really excited for the film, but it was a massive let-down. They could've easily made the film twice as long, maybe more.
The vampiers assistent, bases on the Darren Shan series. The tried to fit the first 3 books and the last one in one movie, and skipping over the other 8 books.... And who is Rebecca the monkey girl.... I wand Debbie and Sam....
I LOVED that book! It was one of the books that helped me learn English as a kid. The movie was an utter mockery of it and I don't even know what the fuck they were thinking with the sequel.
I hate to admit it but it's actually worse an adaptation than the Starship Troopers "adaptation." Although admittedly I do like the JCV movie. I used to like Starship Troopers until I found out the director made a mockery of Heinlein on purpose because Verhooven is a jackass. Did you even read the book?
Anyway.
As I understand it there actually is a reason for this. Basically, a studio ends up with the rights to an IP, and they sit on it because they suck at the one thing they're supposed to be good at. Then along comes somebody with a project idea, and the studio goes, oh that's similar to something we already have in the pipe. Then they steal that idea, tweak the script to include at least one or two elements from the IP, claimants an original work and they don't have to pay the original screenwriter, and churn out something that may or may not be any good, but is nothing like the IP, thus potentially making significant profits for the executives at the meager cost of pissing off the original IPs core fan base.
The Lovely Bones. Haven't actually read the book, but that movie was a painful experience to get through. Peter Jackson knows how to do special effects and spends over two excruciating hours showing off all of them, even though they add little to the story which could have been told in less than half the time.
The Hobbit. Probably not the worst movies with not the worst bastardisation (that'd be The Dark Tower for me), but I simply can't wrap my mind around the overbloated monstrosity that the Hobbit TRILOGY is. Like why would anyone do this, it felt like it's in the bag, they got Peter Jackson, they already made LotR to great success, why do we suddenly need wacky wheels with cartoon CG goblins in 48 FPS for some reason... It doesn't even match neither the tone of the book nor the tone of LotR movies.
peter Jackson was dragged in kicking and screaming years after preproduction started. it was destined to be a studio driven mess from the start
If you watch the behind the scenes stuff it honestly is pretty impressive how competent the movies ended up being. Yes, they are terrible, but they could have been a lot worse. Peter Jackson made them watchable, at least.
The hobbit movies should have fleshed out the dwarf characters better with all that extra time, give each of them a substory spread out over the trilogy so they would be more memorable. They did that with only one of the dwarves and it's a silly love triangle that barely goes into the character of said dwarf. With the movie we got, ask any average person directly after seeing the movies to name the dwarves, i bet hardly anyone can.
Not only does the love triangle not make sense, but it really only serves to erode the significance of friendship of Legolas and Gimli. They were supposed to be first friendship between an Elf and dwarf in a long time
Grumpy, Doc, Sneezy, I definitely forget the rest though.
IIRC the crushing of the Actors Union in NZ is what sidelined the dwarves.
Warner Bros didn't want to make the Hobbit. They wanted to make another Lord of the Rings movie, and had to use the Hobbit for it. The Hobbit is very much NOT a Lord of the Rings story, despite the shared setting. Square book, round movie.
Also, they knew there wasn't enough content, but Warner Bros had to split the profits of the first movie five ways. They didn't have to do that for the second movie, and then they added a third to squeeze out even more.
Full CGI ruined the hobbit for me. The costume and make up work was so good in LotR. That and the whole movie operated as if in a physics-free zone. Nothing made sense.
I never watched the other two, I imagine they are just as bad.
See, I think the high frame rate would look great if what you were looking at was real. But what you're looking at is a room of actors in nylon beards and Martin Freeman in rubber feet.
And where did the spare barrel come from?
Spare barrel? Bear in mind I have only actually seen the first of the Hobbit trilogy, and then later I watched the Tolkien Supercut, that cut out anything not at least alluded to in the book.
I think it's in the second one. It's hard to be sure when you're vaguely remembering a 300 page children's book inexplicably squeezed into three movies.
It's the much hated GoPro barrel ride bit. All the dwarves have a barrel, there are no spares, Tim from The Office has to hang onto the side of one. The fat dwarf breaks his, and then after bouncing around like prequel Yoda, jumps into a spare that comes from nowhere.
I would think the version you saw just shows them all going into the water and coming out at the other end. It's been a long time since I read it (close to 30 years), but I don't remember any massive river battle going on.
They lost me at what they did to my boy Radagast.
Those didn't happen. Go back to the animated movies.
The 1970s animated The Hobbit is a good adaptation, also the Tolkien Supercut version of the live action movie is watchable.
In defense of The Dark Tower... it isn't an adaptation of the books. It's a sequel. It continues the story in a way in which Roland finally breaks the loop.
"I Am Legend" has been made into 3 or more movies, none of which have anything like the book's ending.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is dull and misses the point almost entirely, but almost manages the title line. Not quite.
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
I Am Legend (2007) almost gets it. The vampires are competent. Will Smith's smarter than Neville of the book, but crazier. But then both endings fail to treat the vampires as a society.
It's funny the irony of I Am Legend, it is an allegory to an older society having to make way to a newer one, and somehow every time that's the story they can't do.
I read the book on a whim in high school. I think it was one of those random Barnes and Nobles finds. The ending was an amazing horror twist, with Neville realizing he's the monster and the audience realizing that they've been rooting for the villain The whole time, and the acceptance of the transition to the new society.
The only adaptation I've seen was the Will Smith movie which was generic zombie movie nonsense.
Days Gone (the game) did a better job than the "I am legend" movie, imo. Approached a similar plot from a different angle.
I agree! >:(
The DVD released with an alternate ending to the movie that acknowledges that the vampires have a society and that Smith's character is their boogeyman. I have not read the book, but my understanding is this is much closer to the book than the theatrical ending.
That's at least the spirit of it. The original ending was just so laughable considering they chose to keep the book's title. "I am Legend" literally refers to him realizing he is the legend, the evil monster. Not having the book's ending makes the title nonsensical.
The DVD ending was clearly the intended original, given foreshadowing of the creatures’ intelligence throughout the movie which never paid off in the theatrical cut.
Omega Man is a fun movie though.
I only know of Will Smith version of "I am Legend". There are more?
Appropriate, as the star of that movie usually did too.
Because no one is going with the classic, I can mention Eragon.
When I went to community college, I'd arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with "Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation."
Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.
The Eragon movie is like the last season of Game of Thrones, but with none of the context of earlier seasons.
The first tome of Dragon is 600 pages, it's hardly a novel.
Yeah. I guess this post is now about bad movie adaptations in general.
You are 100% right about the Eragon movie. I loved those books as a kid and I was so excited for that movie and it was just so bafflingly terrible. It was like they didn't even try.
That was my first movie as a kid where I thought "wow, the adults really fucked up the retelling of the book, if this is what this is supposed to be"
I was going to read Eragon with my kids, but then remembered how bad the movie was - and knew that they'd want to watch it after reading the books. So I haven't read it with them. Might get around to it eventually.
Not a classic book, but Artemis Fowl. Disney managed to confuse fans of the books and newcomers to the series alike by adding a McGuffin that was unnecessary, bringing the antagonist from the second book into the movie on the first book, and mangling the relations between the two main protagonists beyond recognition.
Somewhere deep down I think I remember that book as great, the movie has to be horrible
Butler... is the comic relief.
oh god I remember this nightmare
I’ve been told that Artemis Fowl in the books is actually a nice and smart person. In the movie he comes across as an arrogant dick for a larger part.
Artemis Fowl was just bad, not just a bad adaptation. It was an incoherent mess. Felt like they left way too much on the cutting room floor for the finished product to make sense.
I, robot.
Asimov: "The 'robots take over the world' plot is overdone. I think humans would make robots intrinsically safe through these three laws."
Movie: "What if the robots interpreted the three laws in such a way that they decided to take over the world??!?"
The only good part of that movie was when Will Smith's sidekick was like "this thing runs on gasoline! Don't you know gasoline explodes?!"
A running theme of Asimov's Robot stories is that the Three Laws are inadequate. Robots that aren't smart and insightful enough keep melting down their positronic brains when they reach contradictions or are placed in irreconcilable situations. Eventually Daneel and Giskard come up with the Zeroth Law; and if I recall correctly they only manage that because Daneel is humaniform and Giskard is telepathic.
::: spoiler spoiler And the robots do take over, eventually! :::
There were flaws, yes, but they never rose to the level of attempting to destroy humanity that I recall. We had a sort of plot armor in that Asimov wasn’t interested in writing that kind of story.
I’m getting this from a forward he wrote for one of the robot book compilations.
Oh, sure, the robots never want to destroy and replace humanity, but they do end up taking quite a lot of control of humanity's future.
Wasn’t the last I, Robot story about how the robots directly the world’s politics decide that we were living better and longer lives without technology and brought the world back to medieval level of tech?
Wasn't there books that he wrote that were about flaws in the Three Laws?
Flaws or interesting interpretations of them, but he rarely if ever approached the “robots destroy humanity” trope even if it was technically possible in his universe because he thought it was boring.
Yeah it’s more about whatever safe guards you put life will find a way to twist them.
Life, uh, finds a way
I don't know what you're talking about, there has never been a movie adaptation of the book! Never!
In fact, there hasn't. It was an original script called Hardwired with an Asimovian paint job.
Ah, the Starship Troopers effect.
Yup. However I'd say ST succeeded and IR failed miserably.
ST didn't succeed in it's day, it just retroactively got a cult following from people who didn't read the book.
And it didn't succeed at showing the only part of the book that mattered, power armored space marines with shoulder nuke launchers!
If it was a good criticism of Heinlein's weirdo militarism it'd have been another thing, but the most damning criticisms of it are made up because Verhoeven couldn't be bothered to finish reading a short novel.
See the thing is that Heinlein wrote about a lot of different societies, some of which are completely antithetical to the militaristic selective democracy in ST.
People often say "oh this author thinks this or that" but if multiple of their works contradict how can you tell what is and isn't their personal views?
That being said, yeah most of what Verhoeven "criticized" wasn't even in the novel, there was no propaganda because they didn't actually want people to enlist lol if only he'd made it to the second chapter where the anti-recruiter gave his spiel about the military industrial complex and it's continuing growth due to the benefits tied to service...
I think Heinlein was actually much more against militarism than people give him credit for, hell he wrote "if this goes on-" about half a century before the problem became acute, he saw the religious authoritarianism from the US right wing coming miles away. I can't imagine he wasn't also critiquing our GI bill system of service for education, and the increasing dependency of military contractors on our economy with the novel.
Was RAH a weird dude? Absolutely. I think people are too quick to judge his personal values and beliefs based on one novel out of dozens of conflicting ideologies. Hell go read "beyond this horizon", the good guys are communists and run an automated economy with no standing army lol try and make that fit with the society of Troopers.
Imagine if they did an anthology series... /drooling
For now I've got Pluto to look forward to.
Pluto? I never finished reading the manga, but it was looking promising. Is there a movie made or coming up?
There's a Netflix anime getting made!
Oh oh interesting interesting!
... should I finish reading it first...?
It's a great story, but that's up to you! I ended up reading scanlations of it years ago.
I was so disappointed I just forgot of its existence until now.
I thought for sure this would be the top comment.
Easily "World War Z." What an utter waste of the source material.
Related in name only. I loved the book and got curious about the movie.
What a boring useless mess of tropes. Brad Pitt travels the world and saves everyone. There, I just saved you 90 minutes.
It's not even a bad movie. But it's only very tangentially related to the source material.
Yeah I thought that too. I saw the movie before I'd read the book and I was like "that was fine, I dunno what everyone's fussing about." Then I read the book and was like "...oh."
It'd be great to see the book done properly. I know everyone says it but a multi-part HBO-type show would be amazing.
would love to see it done as a mockumentary mini series, like it already has the format built in!
It's a wonderfully stupid movie.
The plot is nonsense, everything is forgettable, and I've easily watched it a dozen times both because of, and in spite of, all that.
World War Z. Not a classic book, but still...Wtf.
World War Z has NEVER been made into a film!
Was it that bad?
It's a perfectly fine zombie movie, but it only takes small elements from the excellent book. The book needs to be a TV series, made in a documentary style. I just pretend the movie is unrelated; it's enjoyable as just a standard action movie with zombies in it.
Yeah, 10 part mini series! Could be amazing.
World War Z is absolutely a modern classic. You can just tell when people are going to be talking about a book a hundred or so years later.
Possibly controversial, but I thought the movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a huge disappointment.
Luckily there's the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)
I partly expected that this particular movie would come up in such a thread, as most people seem to be quite disappointed by it. Sure it was different from what everyone expected, and it could have been much better. I still appreciate it though because, like all adaptations/versions of H2G2, it tells a slightly different story, with the same humour and satire that is characteristic of Douglas Adams. And the effects were quite nifty IMO. Too bad DNA did not live to see the completed film...
Don't forget the BBC TV series, it was not bad either ;-)
At least the easter egg with the old marvin from the bbc series was a nice touch
That was the TV show I meant :-)
Sorry, my bad :-)
It's all hoopy, my frood :-)
Do you sass that hoopy itsraining? Now there's a frood who knows where his towel is
I agree. Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel really didn't pull their weight. Zaphod with only one head nearly the entire time was lame. The whole thing felt too "American" to me.
Bill Nighy was fantastic though.
Zooey was definitely meh, but Mos Def was amazing imho. Especially considering it was his first acting role iirc.
Mos was about 7 years into his acting career by that time.
He's always good though.
Really? Wow. My bad, then. I must be confusing him for someone else, but i have no idea who.
It's a mess of a movie, but it's also the only version of the story where some bits of Adams' original material actually ended up being seen — namely Humma Kavula and the Point-of-View Gun.
I'm just the opposite. I enjoyed the movie but not the book.
I've not read the book. I swear theres some weird curse on my copy, because every time I sit down to read it some major shit hits a fan.
But I loved the movie, and the only disappointing thing with regard to it is that it didnt do well enough to get the sequels made.
That was Catch-22 for me. Every time I had a free moment to read it, some random, horrible thing would happen. First, a garbage disposal exploded, next time my work truck ran into the back of a bus, and then finally I got fired from my job as an appliance installer for reading books on the job.
It was terrible!
I found the book over the top and a cringy "penguin of doom" "I'm so random" style of humour. I don't get that series
I would imagine that it's tough to go back to a book that defined humor for a generation of readers, spawning copycat jokes and stories across the world. Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, per E.B. White, nobody is that interested and the frog dies. So I won't go into why Adams' writing is considered some of the funniest literature in modern history, but I will say two things:
First, none of it is actually random. It might seem random, but that's just how it looks from your limited perspective. That's part of the beauty in the stories, things come back around later. It's a story centered around a literal improbability generator, and yet everything exists for a reason (even if that reason is to be a cosmic punchline).
Second, I would suggest you don't compare it to the overwhelming number of pale imitations. There are famous, successful authors who learned to write humor reading the HGttG, and for every one of them there are thousands of untalented failures who think "lol so random" is all it takes to be funny. To complain about how Adams' writing reminds you of stupid cliches is like complaining about how a Van Gogh painting looks like hotel art.
The last thing I'll say is you don't have to like the books. Taste is subjective, and you might not find the books funny. That's OK. Read something that makes you laugh, makes you think, and makes you want to keep reading. But if you say you don't understand why something is enjoyable to everyone else, you're going to get long-winded rants from internet strangers who care very deeply about the thing you don't understand. You don't have to read those, either. I probably should have started with that bit.
Dude this is such a lame reply. I gave my personal opinion of the book and you wrote a whole condescending lecture of hand wavy arguments about how my opinion is apparently objectively wrong and then had the gall to follow it up with:
Yeah, no shit. I didn't like the book and frankly I don't need your permission to not like the book.
Except you didn't say you didn't like it, you said you didn't get it, and proved you didn't get it with an invalid criticism.
Hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are.
This is my opinion, I do not need you to validate my opinion. Surprised you managed to finish the book when you couldn't be bothered to actually read my comment. Go be a condescending twat elsewhere.
Also you. I'm sorry about your memory problems. Maybe that's why you struggled with the books? At least maybe you'll forget about me and fuck off.
The Wheel of Time. I waited for reviews before watching it, so glad I never wasted a second of my life watching that piece of blasphemous garbage. Just stick to the source material, how fucking hard is it??? Apparently too hard for modern directors, they have to "fix" everything and make it appealing for a "modern audience." Bitch, I am the modern audience, and fuck you.
Hard disagree here. I'm a rabid wheel of time fan who has read the books at least 6 times.
Ir would be downright impossible to "stick to the source" for book one (or really, any if them) and have it be good on film. It just wouldn't work on film, there is too much going on. The story would feel like it drags and is being forcefully stretched out, because the book is rather repetitive. That repetition works in a book because you are getting to read the characters inner thoughts, and in paper it adds tension that, for example, Rand and Mat are unsure whether the next place they stay will be full of dark friends.
But after the third time they get chased out by dark friends a TV audience would be like "OK they did this already get on with it." Repetition on TV gets boring FAST.
And the magic system is all kinds of messy in the books. They're diving into it a bit more now, but it's still got Tobe simplified for screen. You can't convey characters thoughts on screen, which basically neuters the whole system. The book is VERY exposition heavy, and that gets boring real quick on screen. Look at the LOTR theatrical VS extended editions. There is a reason that Bilbo talking about Hobbits at the beginning got cut. I like that scene, but it also is too much exposition to drop on the viewer right after the intro, which is also exposition. EOTW is like half exposition, and most of the books are at least a third exposition. That all has to get cut or reworked to be actually fun to watch without being super preachy. It's
Listen to Brandon Sanderson talking about the adaptation of Mistborm he has been working in for ages now. He has said that he had to make big, fundamental changes to the characters and story to make it work on film. He said his first draft was closest to the book, and that it was quite bad.
The biggest fuckup season 1 of the show did was not including the prologue. Idk why they cut it, it's such a good intro. Besides that, I thought they did alright. Season two has been much better so far, and has shown that they really do understand the core of this story and all of the characters in it.
Agreed, there is a ton of internalized exposition in the books which can't be done on the screen without it getting awkward. I have also generally enjoyed the show so far, and I think the pacing is actually pretty good. There are definitely times in the books where we are getting "scale" via brute force word count, and the visual medium definitely opens some things up in that regard.
"Stick to the source" doesn't mean "show every line on film". It means things like "don't shoehorn in this random-ass Warder that isn't in the books and nobody cares about" or "don't make up a dead wife for Perrin that adds nothing to the plot". And that's not getting into things that they almost did, like "Yeah, it's cool if Moiraine murders the ferryman in direct violation of the Three Oaths".
Sorry, the show was trash. It had a rich and complex world to draw from, and fucked it up hard. Just awful writing.
I just realized that Wheel of Time ≠ Sword of Truth, or rather I read WoT and was thinking of SoT
I've never read the books, although I'd really like to. I only know two things: Its fucking awesome and really, really long and convoluted. Someone told me that getting into it is hard, but there is nothing quite like it and its worth it. I watched the series while drinking beer and hanging out with my father. We both like fantasy, needed something to binge and I heard of the source material. We thought the series (only seen the first season) was pretty cool. Knowing the infamy of the books it was clear that they had to cut vast parts of the books, but for someone uninitiated it was a fun watch. At the same time I already thought it had to be unbearable for fans of the book for the same reason.
They even ignored Brandon Sanderson who offered free advice on how to write the story FFS. Even the show runner had the gall to say he's a fanboy of the series.
I liked it, as long as I looked it at as an interpretation rather than an exact translation.
I like this! Maybe the book is a telling of the story as it happens and the show is a retelling centuries later with the information available to them. They don't have the inner monologue of the characters, they don't know all the exact details (ok, so Perrin wasn't married? Eh, his early life wasn't super clear in the written histories).
Yeah it's a popcorn show. You watch it to relax your brain. It's entertaining as a Xena episode, and the production feels as cheap as Xena's.
But if you've read the books you're wondering what the hell is happening. And it doesn't make you want to read them. That's the lamest part. A show based on books should make you want to read them at some point. I mean, if you adapt them to screen, they must have been loved by a lot of people...
Just watch the Prime "x-ray" animated shorts. That's the perfect preamble to the books reread.
To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.
And don't get me started on black unbearded female dwarves who have no need for melanin underground.. what the fuck.
There's no dwarves in the Wheel of Time.
And it's not a problem for LotR either, lol.
Among other things, the setting isn't just creationist, there are elves running around in the show that remember it.
Well actually, the dwarves were created by the smith god Aulë deep in darkness under the mountains of Middle-Earth, made to be strong and unyielding. I don't think he cared much about their reaction to the sun, it stands to reason their skin would mirror the materials used by the god that created them - clay and stone. A darker skin tone makes more sense to me frankly.
Ooo nice take, I like this. I could totally get behind this if it was all dwarves being darker skinned, but unfortunately in the show it isn't.
Starship troopers. I say this not because the movie is bad (it's not, I think it's exactly what it meant to be and did it well), but that the movie and the book are thematically opposites. The book is very pro military authoritarian. The movie is a satire of that.
Doesn't that make it the BEST bastardization of the book then? :)
haha, yes, in some sense :D
The many adaptations of the Iliad, none of them is gay enough.
somewhere in the distance, the Blue Oyster Salad Bar music starts playing
"Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep"
You'll probably recognize it as Blade Runner but the film took so much liberty the author allowed a good friend to write three sequels in order to harmonize the book with the movie.
Also "Starship Troopers".
No, Starship Troopers was not a direct endorsement of fascism. This is exactly why it wasn't a good adaptation, largely because Verhoeven famously didn't even read the very short novel he wanted to criticize but he's convinced a horde of fans of trash movies that the novel says things it simply does not.
The movie made up the majority of its criticisms of Heinlein's fictional society, including misrepresenting the process of "earning" citizenship, the most suspiciously fascistic element that in the novel is much more benign, and throwing out a completely fabricated plot hint that Buenos Aires was a false flag, as well as portraying the Pseudo-Arachnids as simple space bugs when they're a technological species, but he didn't bother critiqueing all the time he spent on malding on modern military officers being hyper-responsible warrior-poets.
And that's, like, the bad part! Which he'd have fuckin known, if he'd read the fuckin book!
Heinlein is best described as a militarist liberal, and eventually a neoliberal when that became a thing. He literally ran for office as a Democrat in the Reagan years.
Everyone who's read one Heinlein novel thinks they know exactly what Heinlein's real-world political views must have been, because he wrote characters who expound on theirs. But the politics of Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the Lazarus Long stories aren't the same, just to pick a few examples.
The terror mission in the opening of the book would have been a very interesting introduction to the political and military dynamics in the universe. Shame it doesn’t seem to show up in any Starship Troopers media.
Haha I would put both of those at the top of my list of movies that were actually much better than the books.
Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep felt so flat to me, I think it probably didn't age well. The animal obsession didn't land for me, I guess it's supposed to be an allegory for material obsession, since the animals are more for showing off than being actual pets, but it just seemed to slap you in the face with it like many of the very not subtle metaphors. The main character is also just dull as hell and walks straight into dangerous situations or traps without a second thought, but it always works out for him because plot armour and the androids either just comply for some reason or they're so incompetent that it doesn't matter. It wasn't a fun book imo and it's themes were so obvious that it didn't "make you think".
Starship Troopers (Book) was just hoorah military propaganda. The movie did such a good job of making fun of it and turning into a ridiculous over the top satire.
Electric Sheep is the first book I thought of when I read the thread title.
I'm pretty indifferent on Blade Runner. It's got a great soundtrack and aesthetic, but as an adaptation of my favorite SF book of all time I can't stand it.
I’m beyond the debate over the Starship Troopers book vs movie. Both are very much being their own thing, and I am able to enjoy them both.
The knife training scene in each summarizes the different approach they have.
I highly recommend scifi fans read Starship Troopers and Forever War back to back. I consider them complimentary books regarding the nature of war, and government.
Was my first thought, as well. I saw the movie first and hated it, glad I stumbled across the book at some point and found one of my now favourite authors.
No one appears to have yet mentioned Forrest Gump. In the book he was a chess grandmaster who wrestled professionally and was an astronaut. Also, the book sucks.
I haven't watched or read it. Are you saying the movie is better than the book in spite of bastardizing it?
Yip. Also, they were very slightly totally different.
the book as an audiobook is good
Forrest was a POS and he was a bum because he knew it!
Not a classics, but:
What made me mad at RP1 movie was they put the Easter Egg in Atari Adventure. Which is mentioned in chapter 0 of the book, and again in the fake town (not put in the movie) because it's so obvious, nobody who cared about games at all would hide anything there.
And no Tomb of Horrors.
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he's too senile to understand the game references.
And the actors are far too pretty for the "but you're beautiful inside" plot.
Not to mention the bastardization of the entire plot.
I liked the book because it felt like the villains had actual capabilities to accomplish their goals. The protagonists did everything right and it still wasnt enough to get the bad guys off their backs.
In the movie the protagonists make stupid decisions and the villain helper character which didn't even exist in the book just overhears them talking about it.
Fucking. Stupid.
Said it better than I could.
Exactly.
That's because the novel was about nerd culture in general, while the movie was almost entirely about video games. All the D&D, Rush, Monty Python, etc. references were absent. The Shining was in there because Kubrick was Spielberg's mentor.
But Art3mis in the real world has a port-wine stain so she's ugly! Can't you see how disgusting she looks?!
/s
Have not seen the movie, but that sounds like Spielberg nailed the tone of the novel. The book reads like a thinly veiled essay by an aging Gen X geek about how pop culture peaked during the authors childhood and the world would be perfect if we could go back to the 80s.
Thanks for your completely useless post.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HollywoodBeautyStandards
It doesn't happen all the time, though
Ready Player One was a good adaptation of a mediocre book into a mediocre movie.
Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn't as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.
I won't argue with the book being mediocre (I myself enjoyed it but many others didn't), but it wasn't a faithful adaptation at all.
Both of these.
American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.
I kinda want to rewatch it again someday though…
I went into the theater expecting it to be not so great, and it still managed to disappoint me.
I would say Rings of Power, then again it has basically nothing to do with any books and seems to be based on bad fan fiction.
There’s a book for rings of power??
It is very loosely based on the appendages to the
SilmarillionLOTR.Appendices to LOTR*
They legally cannot use the silmarillion
They try to sneak some stuff in anyways though.
Like, the whole "master smith discovers alloys" thing was a way to show the three elven rings being made of the different metals without directly referencing the Silmarillion describing them. When they pour out the "alloy" to make the rings they're clearly made of different metals.
But like, who was that for?
Real huge lore nerds you just pissed off because Sauron wasn't supposed to know about their existence or take part in their making? Him not knowing is why his plan didn't work!
Yes you're right. Thank God they don't have access to that
I think they got permission to use a bit of material, especially from the earlier chapters about the two trees.
But the thing is, Rings of Power is incredibly fun, because it completely ignores source, steals just enough character names & places to get Lord of the Rings fans excited, but it's not boring. Lord of the Rings is about thousands of pages of walking.
Galadriel is a WOMAN and therefore according to Professor Tolkien is useless. Show makes her the one badass in Middle Earth.
I did hate the not-yet-Hobbits, that was not a good invention.
I have friends who are big time LOTR fans who absolutely hate it and didn’t get past the first couple of episodes.
Me - who has no context around the whole thing - found it kinda entertaining :/
I can see how it could be entertaining. Much like watching a train wreck. But "fun" is taking it a bit too far.
The foundation series by apple is pretty bad.
How bad? The absolute best part is a part not present at all in the books (the Cleons). Everything related to the book is bastardised, imo.
I love the series and I love the books. It's just not for book purists but they've made a really good take on the universe and it's also beautiful.
It's amazing just how visually impressive the show is. If it was done with the best we had 30 years ago it still would have been good, but the vfx would have dragged it down. Now it raises it to a whole other level.
Do you think the show itself is bad or is it just bad as an adaptation of the book?
I'd say it's a bad adaptation of the book. But as a sci-fi series, it's quite good. I rate it at least 7 out of 10. Although I haven't watched the second season because I'm waiting for it to be finished so I can binge it if I wanted to.
The show is based on the universe and some characters created by Asimov but it's freely adapted. You'll have to see the TV shows and the books as two entities, there are a few similarities, Easter eggs, etc. But they're different and both great IF you're not looking for a translation from text to screen.
The TV series is eerily beautiful, the story is better in S2 and more complex. Great cast too and on a "small" budget.
I enjoyed it so far as well and really like the development the Cleons go through. Maybe I'll look into the books when the series is concluded
The way I see the TV show is like the creators are constantly placing details to say "Hey! This Asimov guy was really smart and he wrote this rad SF saga, you should really check it out!".
David Goyer and his team, they're not just making a show about some old scifi books : they're truly fans of Asimov's work and you can feel it. It's a work of love.
The Cleons aren't even in the book!?? What the...
The original book spends almost no time with the old empire. Once the Foundation is established, the details of the empire’s fall are irrelevant to the story. In fact, the premise makes a point that the exact details of its fall don’t really matter.
The most recent episode had opened an interesting path of exploration. I'm hopeful, but they are bound to twist it somehow.
Not a classic for most people but zoomers will agree that Percy Jackson and the lightning thief was a tragedy.
Then Sea of Monsters ended up being worse somehow.
Yeah. They even got a second chance. Am opportunity to make respectable sequels for each book... But no. We can't have nice things.
God, I forgot that even existed..
Hot take but I kinda liked the percy jackson movies. Yeah they could've been done better but it was one of my favorite series and to see some parts of it visualized and on the big screen is a cool experience. Still, I'm very excited for what Rick Riordan has cooked up with Disney right now.
Yeah the new Percy Jackson series has a lot of potential and good young actors who are more accurate in terms of characters age.
The Dark Tower. I don't get what that was, the books were far richer.
Oh, another one I just thought of - How to Train Your Dragon.
The movies are fine, but they are so completely different from the books in almost every respect that it's barely worth giving them the same name.
The books are absolutely brilliant, especially the further you get into them. Would love to see them developed as a TV series that stuck to the style and messages of the books. Would likely need about 10 seasons though!
TIL How to Train Your Dragon is originally a book. Thank you.
Yeah, Cressida Cowell. It's very different though, be warned. There's a guy called Hiccup who is a Viking and has a dragon... And that's about it :-)
Isn't there literally a TV series for it? I could have sworn I've seen it at some point
I think there's a series based on the movies, but not really on the books as far asni know.
I'm going to flip the spirit of the question and say that Michael Crichton's Timeline movie adaptation is so bad that it falls into so bad it's good territory. I own it on bluray, and we watch it at least once a year.
Any visual media that you've seen after you've read the source book. A better way to look at it. It is which movie was better or as good than its book.
Jurassic Park was a better movie than the book. The Martian the movie was as good as the book.
Fight Club. I actually enjoyed the dumbass movie doesn't-work-that-way ending more than the mental break of the main character in the book.
The first time I read it, I didn't even understand it and thought he literally met god.
I got this.
Ready Player One.
The movie was a pretty entertaining Sci film that took the overall concept/plot of the book and then did its thing.
The book was like a Sci fi incel fan fiction. Like an incel white night wet dream.
Reading the book first had me almost skip ever seeing the movie, but the movie wasn't nearly so cringe.
Uh, the movie made some serious mistakes, namely having them decide to shut down the Oasis 2 days per week, at the end? Where the hell did that come from? There are in-universe people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihoods and self-worth. Fuck 'em, right? And also the main characters are not a "clan" and having Z affirm they were a clan to Og was a middle finger to the book's whole spiel on not being a clan.
Well I just said the book sucked of incel love fest wet dreams, but you do you.
I think all Hunger Games films worked better than the books
Dune. The Wheel of Time series on Prime.
I both agree and disagree on Dune.
True, Lynch’s version did the book no justice. But, gosh, is a guilty-pleasure of a movie for me.
I’ll judge Jodorowsky’s version when it’s done.
Ok, you caused some cognitive dissonance with the callback to Jodorowsky and I thought I was in a parallel reality for a few seconds. Well done.
the recent dune film or the 80s one?
I haven't seen the old one but I liked the new one.
I haven't read the wheel of time. The Amazon series is certainly uneven but I've enjoyed it so far
Imo the Amazon series is good if you just mentally separate it from the source material, which you honestly have to do with pretty much every adaptation if you've read it, so it isn't like it's a new phenomenon.
I'm probably on my own in being a big fan of the books and also liking the first season for the most part. Despite the changes, the world felt recognizably like Randland. I only really hated the last episode.
But that last episode was an absolute trash fire. It wasn't just different, it was wrong. A bunch of characters and story elements are either killed off, not present to begin with, or in the wrong place at the start of the second season.
I'm willing to forgive a lot of that due to the troubles the production had with COVID and the loss of one of the main actors. All that was on top of regular old studio meddling that happens with these things.
My hope then is that the second season will go about trying to correct everything and put all the characters where they are supposed to be at the start of season three, which I'm assuming will align with the third book.
Season 2 has three episodes out now! I'd say they recovered nicely from the S1 blunders.
I've seen S2E1 so far. It was a bit slow, but at least Egwene and Nynaeve are mostly in the right spot, and Perrin is almost exactly where he's supposed to be (a bit strange considering of the five main characters he was the one with the biggest change to his backstory)
Eragon. They really fucked up so much about the book!
I loved that book growing up and was so excited when the movie was coming out (on my birthday!)
To this day, that movie is the only one I legitimately walked out of. It was such a terrible adaptation.
I never read the book but I agree the movie was absolute rubbish
The Gunslinger. It was supposed to be more of a continuation of the books but it just sucked all around.
And to think I was so excited to see Elba play Roland. What a disappointment.
As a very long time reader of the Dark Tower series, I was super excited to see what they would do with it. I couldn't watch more than 5 minutes before I had to shut it off, it was just so fucking BAD.
That was probably a good idea. I made it about 30 minutes in. The movie kept moving further and further away from the books. And it was in the weirdest ways. I'm not sure what all it showed in the first 5 minutes, but Randal suddenly has a group of people to help him, and they're using sifi technology with computers to open portals instead of the doors. I get things will always change from book to movie. I go in expecting it. And usually it's not a huge deal. But I just don't get the decisions they decided to make.
It wasn't an adaptation of The Gunslinger
I have to imagine that Lawnmower Man is in the running. Talk about having nothing at all to do with the 'book' , (well, short story anyway).
Agreed. It bears so little resemblance to the """source material""" that they were legally required to remove all mentions of Stephen King from the film credits and promotional materials when it released on VHS.
When I found the short it was based on I was all "cyber-gore here I come" and then I read it...
I guess they both had a lawnmower?
"The NeverEnding Story" should never have been made into a movie. It's almost ironic. Every time a child watches the movie instead of reading the book, that's an opportunity lost.
I'm a huge reader, massive... like, I spent up until I was about 29, 30 or so going to the library every week or two and getting 10 books out every time (That was the most you could get). I'd have read them all, and be champing at the bit to go back well within the week... it was a regular trip for us to go.
I've never actually read the Never Ending Story, and I loved the movie... one of my favourite childhood movies.
Going to have to give it a read...
You should definitely read it but I think the great thing about the book is that it can turn a kid into a reader. When they've watched the movie already I think some of the magic is gone and it's not as impactful.
YES! I read the book a long time before I saw the film and was so disappointed when I finally got around to watching it. And then I know people who read the book years after seeing the film and didn't like it, because it was so different to what they were expecting. And that's such a shame, because the film just doesn't have the same depth to it.
The Black Cauldron
That. Is a deep cut, and yes.
Hunger games.
I should really read those, as I really enjoyed those movies (the earliest ones more than the later ones, admittedly). What's so different about the movies?
I enjoyed the films more than the books. The books after the first feel like the author had a good idea, but didn't know what to do with it. The films tidy it up nicely
Each to their own I guess :-)
The later books really take it to a new level IMO, much more weight to them and more character development.
Those movies are good.
I still enjoyed the movies but I felt they did not do the story justice. I hated how everything looked and I also hated how little time was spent on the characters relationships inside the hunger games.
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke is one of my most beloved series
read that series several times and when they announced a movie I was so hyped!
and the movie was just ok :C
I haven't seen any movies based on books since then unless it receives high praises which I haven't seen much
Well. It's clearly not a book, but Disney's Hercules was the first time I really felt disappointed about going to the cinema. My ten year old brain was having none of it. I wanted the adultery, the murder, the dirty stuff the story was supposed to have and I think it's the Disney film (that I've watched) I hate the most up to date.
Yeah. And Hunchback of Notre Dame was similarly disappointing.
The fact that nobody dies in Disney’s Hunchback will always be super weird…
The NeverEnding Story
It had an ending. This is unacceptable!
So true. Michael Ende was a total genius and the book has to be filmed again. It has so much potential for surreal dreamy landscapes, morphing sceneries, psychedelic images...
Personally, I would be ok if they leave Artax's ability to speak out of a new one as well
I understand, but I grew up with that movie, and it's entrenched in my psyche. I still love it. Discovering the book was an absolute treat. It's so special!
I commented the same >_< The stories of Michael Ende and Astrid Lindgren are in my opinion supposed to be experienced as books.
Don't know if it counts as "classic", but Mortal Engines comes to mind. The film cut out over half the book. I loved the book and got really excited for the film, but it was a massive let-down. They could've easily made the film twice as long, maybe more.
I decided not to watch that one when I saw the trailer show all the important moments of the book, the whole plot basically
The vampiers assistent, bases on the Darren Shan series. The tried to fit the first 3 books and the last one in one movie, and skipping over the other 8 books.... And who is Rebecca the monkey girl.... I wand Debbie and Sam....
After binging the 12 books over the holidays, I've made an attempt to watch the movie adaptation. It couldn't be that bad, could it?
It was much worse. Possibly the worst movie I have ever seen.
Idk how they fuck up kids/young adult book adaptions so bad so often.
The series of unfortunate events movie was similar, I did like it but they smushed the three books into one movie and then never did the rest wtf?
Percy Jackson was also pretty bad
Then you didn't watch Eragon. Lucky
I know its not a classic, but Dan Brown's inferno the book and the movie have two different endings and it angers me every time.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs should have never been made into a movie.
The movie was great, so I suppose that only says good things about the books!
I LOVED that book! It was one of the books that helped me learn English as a kid. The movie was an utter mockery of it and I don't even know what the fuck they were thinking with the sequel.
I didn't know it is a book. I liked the movie though.
I should probably add it to my list then!
Vampire$ -> John Carpenter's Vampires
I hate to admit it but it's actually worse an adaptation than the Starship Troopers "adaptation." Although admittedly I do like the JCV movie. I used to like Starship Troopers until I found out the director made a mockery of Heinlein on purpose because Verhooven is a jackass. Did you even read the book?
Anyway.
As I understand it there actually is a reason for this. Basically, a studio ends up with the rights to an IP, and they sit on it because they suck at the one thing they're supposed to be good at. Then along comes somebody with a project idea, and the studio goes, oh that's similar to something we already have in the pipe. Then they steal that idea, tweak the script to include at least one or two elements from the IP, claimants an original work and they don't have to pay the original screenwriter, and churn out something that may or may not be any good, but is nothing like the IP, thus potentially making significant profits for the executives at the meager cost of pissing off the original IPs core fan base.
So here me out.
A story by Harlan Ellison.
Adapted to screen by Frank Miller.
Directed by Paul Verhooven.
This way it can be assholes all the way down.
Someone fetch me a proctoscope so I can watch this!
I have no butt yet I must shit
LXG 😬
Really needs a do-over with modern special effects.
The Lost World. The movie is nothing like the book.
The Cat in the Hat.
So bad the Dr. Seuss's window forbade them from ever doing another live action Dr. Seuss movie lol
2009's Confessions of a Shopaholic.
The movie was decent but coming from the book, I was so disappointed in the adaption and how they basically took the entire series into 90 minutes.
Though Hugh Dancy as Luke was chefs kiss
Swallows and Amazons. So disappointed.
There's a movie?!? That has to be a multi-season TV series to be enough depth.
Both movies were approximately based on an idea inspired by the first book of the series.
The Lovely Bones. Haven't actually read the book, but that movie was a painful experience to get through. Peter Jackson knows how to do special effects and spends over two excruciating hours showing off all of them, even though they add little to the story which could have been told in less than half the time.