I hated the two made for TV Terry Pratchett adaptations of Colour of Magic and Going Postal. Like, they pissed me off so hard I couldn’t sleep. Particularly Going Postal (my favorite Pratchett book), they couldn’t have missed the point of it any harder even if they tried.
Starship Troopers. The book is great, but the movie is like if someone wrote a short summary of the cliffs notes of the book. I guess they both had bugs.
Funny you say that- that isn’t far from how it was made. Someone wrote a spec script about a human war with space bugs, independent of starship troopers. When one of the production people read the script they brought up the point that there was a book that they remembered that was kind of like it. When they checked, no one had the film rights to it so they bought it for cheap. They then did a quick rewrite to slap in the character names and basic/cheap/easy things from the book to make more of an appeal to the book fans. Then when the director came on board he was a fan if the book but also wanted to do his own thing. So you now had at least 3 different directions the story was going and it was simply held together by the loose premise of starship troopers.
I really enjoy the movie Phantoms, but not because it's as good as the book. It's just a fun movie if you're into that genre. But we could definitely add almost every Stephen King adaptation to this list. Don't get me wrong--some of them I very much enjoy, but that doesn't mean they're not terrible (looking at you, The Stand (first one), Storm of the Century, and Tommyknockers).
Are you referring to the Golden Compass movie or series? The movie was trash, but I thought the TV series they’ve been doing has been pretty good.
For me Ender’s game was a massive disappointment. I also didn’t like the hobbit trilogy. Huge fan of LOTR, but the hobbit movies just didn’t do it for me.
Dark Tower - But I don’t think it can be done. I think the reason a lot of Stephen King’s adaptations fail as movies is because his books spend a lot time describing his character’s inner monologue.
Ender’s Game - I was so excited for this movie. But if you are a fan of the books then you saw a lot of discrepancies between the movie and the book. So it ended up being a decent general sci-fi movie.
That’s the reason most books can’t be adapted exactly as written. Unless the writing is so horribly stilted (X went to Y, X said Z to α, X had β happen to him because of α…) that you wouldn’t want to read it in the first place, you’ll need a large amount of narration and/or characters speaking their thoughts out loud, which doesn’t work most of the time and gets worse if they’re doing it solely for the purpose of the viewer getting into their headspace.
I tried to watch Foundation, mostly because Asimov is one of those writers whose style I can’t stand in his actual books (his characterization is really flat–you could tell he was far more interested in his ideas and the characters were just pawns on a stage), and I’ve had a few cases where books I couldn’t finish were very watchable on screen. Also, I was following Jared Harris from the Expanse to Foundation in the hopes of seeing something awesome.
But what I saw, and what I remembered from the books, didn’t add up. Nor did it suck me in on its own merits, like some other adaptations have.
It feels more like an addition than an adaptation (it isn’t, but it’s the only perspective in which the show can be good). I’m a big fan of the books, and I’m also enjoying the show so far.
From the first season I thought the Trantor stuff was awesome but the Terminus stuff sucked. Never have I had a show where I was more divided.
I was this close to skipping the Terminus stuff, I just couldn’t give a shit about it and was constantly waiting to see Trantor and the beefcake to do some boss shit
I agree but a direct adaptation of the books would not make a good TV show.
The books are a series of vignettes spaced decades apart with no continuing characters and each is a separate short story. While they work in the written form, they would not on the screen.
It could be done as a series of vignettes, for example, as 6 episode series, with each series centred around each crisis. That would give you 4-5 hours - or 2.5 Mrs Doubtfires - to do what Asimov does in around 60 pages (depending on crisis).
I don’t understand the argument that this is impossible to do, pretty much every film you will have ever seen will have had a shorter runtime than 5 hours, and handled all aspects of character introduction, motivation, conflict, growth, and resolution, within than time too.
I am not saying it has to be identical or a word for word adaptation - I have no issues what so ever with gender swapping Hardin - but as another poster points out, having Seldon live on (other than as recordings getting increasingly divorced from reality) directly rejects the core premise of the book, which is a refutation of the great man hypothesis.
The first season of the TV series is a banger, but the subsequent seasons suffer from a decline in quality. Also, the series finale is just so disappointing compared to the ending of Gaiman’s novel.
Pretty much every movie based on a Crichton novel except the first Jurassic Park and the original 1971 adaptation of The Andromeda Strain. Every other one has been awful (including The Lost World which is so far from the book it shouldn’t even get to be called “based on”).
Edit: After sleeping on it, I don’t know if the movie adaptations are objectively awful or if I was just unimpressed because I read the novel first for all of them.
I agree it is acceptable, I don’t often miss an opportunity for a marathon- it just isn’t really true to the book, it’s more like bits of the book are scattered throughout the movies.
And I’m really upset that Hammond didn’t get eaten cause that would have been awesome.
The novel was great. The movie…eh, not so much (IMO, anyway). Not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L Jackson, and Queen Latifah could really make it work for me. There’s just too much subtlety in the book that didn’t make it to the screen.
It's not terrible, it's just incredibly underwhelming. It's a movie where occasionally things happen. Sometimes fantasy things happen. But somehow in the most boring way possible. Eventually the movie ended.
Put a list of Ursula Le Guin works on a wall and throw a dart at one of them. Don’t know which one you threw a dart at? That’s okay, because absolutely none of them have gotten good adaptations.
The only exception, extremely ironically given I’m saying this, is Tales of Earthsea. The first half is alright but I guess they lost their train of thought during the second act (their words not mine) and it became a Legend of Zelda story. Still not terrible though, I can’t understand why people hate on it when the same people love Ponyo.
What Ghibli films don’t have plots? Ponyo, Totoro, Arrietty, Poppy Hill and Marnie have plots. Whisper of the Heart? I don’t remember the plot of that one.
Tales From Earthsea’s problem was the predictability. The course of the story was formulaic. Ooh there’s this evil wizard who must be defeated, big deal. Ghibli characters are usually more complex. Villains should have something noble or beautiful about them to get some of the viewer’s sympathy. When the protagonist was imprisoned and then the friend came and saved him, it was just too predictable. The rescue could have been done artfully but it was not.
The villain of Castle in the Sky was similarly boring, but the colorful supporting cast made up for it.
By a plot, I mean a structural one. None of the ones you mentioned except for the last two had plots. The studio is famous for going on record saying they go out of their way to make their movies scriptless, instead preferring pure improv, though it kind of shows in how freeform and non-rule-based it feels. To be fair though, it does help to have read the book it was based on, you get the context of where exactly the movie begins to lose its identity (and appreciate it was trying to have one).
Honestly, I fucking hate the new Dune. The old Dune at least has charm for how goofy it can get. The characters and editing choices I have huge problems with. It's a very pretty movie and most scenes made it in but the characters just aren't there. Also the world isn't established properly. They don't even mention the Landsraad until the tailend of the movie but they're important to know about because they are why the Emperor takes the strategy he does.
Oh God, I remember how disappointed I was when seeing the Eragon movie. After having read the trilogy I was having such high hopes, it could’ve been a LOTR alike trilogy, but instead we got this half baked… Stuff. At least the actors gave their best.
Kind of in the same line with the golden compass I guess?
It wasn’t a bad movie, I actually liked it a lot - but the book is significantly better and the movie left out a lot. If I had read the book before watching the movie I would probably have hated the movie tbh.
Also even picking that book to make into a movie was a mistake, enders game was only written to give backstory for speaker for the dead which is much better than the enders game book but never made it to becoming a movie itself
The book Ender’s Game has a psychological component that it’s nigh-impossible to nail in a visual medium with child actors. The story works in book form because books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, but it’s harder to do in a visual medium simply because visual storytelling is different from written storytelling.
You could probably do the movie with really good adult actors–but most of the cast are children. And really good child actors are rare to come by–you’re lucky to have one, much less multiple. And when the cast is made entirely up of children who are all supposed to be geniuses, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get the casting and talent you need.
The Ender’s Game movie wasn’t terrible–it was surprisingly watchable compared to other adaptations of other books–but it didn’t come close to nailing the feel of the book.
Not seeing Ready Player One listed here. There were some choices made in that movie that might seem fine to someone who hasn’t read the book, but the huge number of absolutely unnecessary discrepancies was just gross.
It was and will always be impossible to turn RPO into a movie, first there are the copyright issues and second the challenges are really boring to watch.
That doesn’t excuse swapping Wade’s deliberate-servitude-to-hack-the-system with Art3mis’s damsel-in-distress-happening-to-save-the-day-by-chance sequence, nor Wade’s decision at the end to shut off the Oasis two days of the week (what about people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihood or for self-worth, like severely disabled people? Hello), nor him saying his friends are his “clan,” something they are vehemently against in the book.
I really like the second season. And did like the book series. I think a TV show has to move faster, it’s an adaptation not a recreation. So it’s a different story but it works. Not the first season, that was not good but the next one I enjoyed so much.
I've hate-watched all of it. It's not good, some things are wrenching departures the books, but there's also been parts of it they adapted well I think.
I watched the first season, loved it, read the books, watched the show again and was a bit disappointed by some of the changes. I’ll watch the whole series though and think of it as a different turn of the wheel. It’s a decent series imho it just isn’t a one to one translation.
yeah I find I can enjoy it if I just try not to think about the series. The big issue is the way gender worked in the universe (fictional universe for anyone who is going to get triggered) with magic. By having her search for boys and girls it discounts a pretty large plot point later. Not sure how they are going to deal with it when it comes up other than gloss over it.
Braid tugging and poorly written female characters aside, a very large number of the interpersonal problems in those books could be solved in anybody ever talked to each other. The nobody ever trusts anybody or talks about an issue gets kind of irritating. Even if he was going for realism it is pretty over the top.
Kind of like how a large number of Seinfeld episodes would be over in five minutes if they had cell phones.
Imagine taking a beloved classic fantasy series and handing the material off to the CW for adaptation and you’ve got the gist of Amazon’s WoT series. It’s pretty, it’s vapid and there’s a whole pile of extra teenage soap opera drama thrown into season 1 for no real reason.
Same thing that happened with the Shannara TV show. MTV wanted a kid friendly fantasy romance competitor to GoT, so they butchered a series that’s basically none of those things. They also started with book 2 for whatever reason.
What? No it’s totally different, our Gandalf is named Allanon and he’s a Druid, not a Wizard. Druids get a d8. And the Warlock Lord’s Skull Bearers are definitely not Nazgul, they fly with wings not horses.
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