Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Especially the second movie, Sea of Monsters.
Thank goodness the TV show is coming in December. Rick Riordan, the author, has personally been overseeing the production. I have high confidence the tv series will be much closer to the books. Hopefully this will do well enough that future seasons will be funded and we’ll get seasons that adapt the rest of the books.
Battlefield Earth was my favorite book as a young teenager. Ignoring everything else about the author (which I didn’t know at the time), I thought the book was brilliant (especially the first half). It touched my imagination in a way no other book had before, and I must have read it about a dozen times.
I seem to recall the book cover saying that a major motion picture was coming out soon, but I guess time is relative. For me it was about eighteen years (which was more than half my life at the time) before the movie actually came out, and that seemed like an eternity.
I wish I could say it was worth the wait. The movie was horrible – it had bad acting, a bad script, and couldn’t carry the book in only two hours.
It currently has a 3% tomatometer score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5/10 at IMDB. The movie also won Worst Picture of the Decade at the 2010 Razzie Awards.
To be fair, as a Sci-fi writer L.Ron was actually pretty talented. I feel like I could have actually gotten in to his writing if I hadn’t only ever known him as fucking L.Ron Hubbard the idiot father of Scientology.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
I don’t know if it’s the worst, but I am very disappointed with the movie adaptation of Mortal Engines. The series has such a rich world to explore and very good plot points that would have been amazing to see on the big screen.
The movie ruined any possibility to see a sequel or even a reboot in a very long time (similar to what happened with His Dark Materials), although the fandom now prefers that if there is another attempt at an adaptation it has to be a TV series and animated.
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