I am forever bitter about Eragon…
The giver
Gawwwd. The trailer sunk my stomach, and the worst part was not being able to explain the OBVIOUS problems with the concept without spoiling what made the book great.
Eragon never got a movie.
Atla never got a movie
These things are true.
Eragon was not a great book. It was a decent premise, the characters and story had potential. Given it was written by a teenager, it’s very impressive.
But Mr Paolini must look back on it and cringe so bad. I’d actually like him to go back and reboot it now as a mature author.
I mean are you judging it as the target market?
It was a young adult book. I refer to it as baby’s first high fantasy.
Do 8-12 year old boys that will love super long high fantasy later in life probably still love it? I would bet money.
But of course as adults we look down on the young adult book. Basically all young adult books seem not well made as adults.
I know a handful of exceptions, but they stand out in my head as remarkable because they were exceptions.
I don’t think we’ve had a single good adaption of an Isaac Asimov story - Foundation the show is very clearly not Foundation the series and I Robot is…not even worth acknowledging and infuriates me because like, if they wanted to do a murder mystery about Asimov’s robots and call into question his “laws”, Caves of Steel is right there and it’s great. I’d love a good adaption of Caves of Steel but nooo lets all adapt the nigh impossible to adapt because it’s dense as all fuck Foundation instead because that’s the story everyone knows.
Also because you’ve mentioned kids media - How to Train your Dragon. The original series was this fun and interesting world where dragons have existed along humanity since the beginning and were our friends and work animals and the main character was a legitimately weak kid who was more interested in being a biologist and was legitimately pretty good at it, being able to actually talk to them and he had friends and Toothless was this highly entertaining small sassy green thing who was like, the world’s equivalent of a house sparrow. And then DreamWorks took the title and base concept of “dragons and vikings” and threw everything else out for a generic movie with a generic protangonist in a generic fantasy setting. The dragons are now big and scary but the main character goes out to prove that they’re not big and scary and Toothless is now just a giant dumb cat who’s the world’s equivalent of an invisible fire breathing polar bear but it’s ok because Hiccup is special and they replaced the fun gremlin Kamikazi with the generic female love interest character who’s trait is being better than the boys. But because everyone adores it we’re never going to get an actual adaption that actually follows the books are we?
Also Solaris deserves a good adaption that isn’t actively hostile to anyone who isn’t interested in avant garde Soviet cinema. Stanislav Lem’s one of my favourite authors and because of that fucking film it’s legitimately hard to recomend Solaris the book to people because they’re like “oh I tried watching it and it was really boring and confusing and overly arthouse?”
Also also I haven’t actually seen them but like, is there any adaption of Wuthering Heights that’s actually like, accurate? Because I’ve read the book and every time I talk to someone who’s only seen the movie or TV adaptions it feels like they’re talking about a completely different story that’s just like, “Austen but kinda deranged” and not the batshit anti-Austen sturm und drang trainwreck that is the actual story (and also they apparently kinda ignore the last third of the book with Cathy 2 and Linton and Hareton?)
Di Vinci Code was butchered, and I’m sorry to say it but Hanks was the wrong choice for Robert Langdon.
I mostly enjoyed the book until the antagonist made such a huge error by revealing himself way too early that it ruined the whole thing for me. The other books in the series also had major issues that just ruined them as well.
Nic Cage was busy.
For some reason I always pictured Clive Owen for the role of Langdon.
It should’ve been Van Damme. Then actione starred his way to the climax.
Animorphs. The show was atrocious, which is a crime because the books were amazing.
Artemis Fowl, Ella Enchanted, Inkheart. I loved these books as a kid, but none of the movies were good adaptations.
For kids books, I thought The Spiderwick Chronicles movie was unnecessarily shitty.
It wasn’t necessarily ‘bad’, but I think they could have done better with Ender’s Game.
I think it would have been better as a TV series. They glossed over the battle school battles too quickly. And in making it a series, they could have done Ender’s Shadow at the same time.
As soon as I heard about the movie I knew they were gonna milk the laser fight scenes for far more than they were worth.
I know this is a total pipe dream that never would’ve happened, but I wish they either just focused on Bean or just made a philosophical epic out of Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide instead.
Ender’s Shadow would actually be an excellent way for them to soft reboot the series.
Most of them? Lord of the Rings is the exception not the rule
Plus Princess Bride. I actually prefer the film.
The book Jurassic Park is great, I’ll take the movie every time given the choice
But these are all still exceptions, adaptations are usually best when they are either extremely book accurate or handled by a competent artist and not a studio or group of producers
There’s a list of great ones.
Shawshank.
Fight Club.
2001 (kinda cheating tho).
Green Mile.
The Godfather.
American Psycho.Since you brought up Kubrick I’d say pretty much his whole filmography is better, with the Shining being the lone debatable exception
Oh definitely. These were just of the top of my head, there’s plenty of other good book movies.
Kubrick…good adaptions
You mean Stanley “I didn’t even read the entirety of A Clockwork Orange” Kubrick? Mister “Actually let’s age up the girl in Lolita and spend time focusing on how sexy she is”? That Kubrick? Dude completely ignores the point of both books and does the one thing the authors very specifically do not want you to do
Yeah it seems like he just makes movies to his own crazy standards and doesn’t care too much about the source material.
I should’ve phrased that differently, Kubrick doesn’t adapt the work well but the films he made are, in my opinion, better and more interesting artistically than the work they are based on. And he did read Clockwork but his version didn’t have the last chapter, and having read the full book I still think the film is more compelling. And I’ll cite Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory as additional evidence, I also prefer his Lolita to Nabokov, even though he aged Dolores up, I’m pretty certain that’s because of standards and practices and he still managed to capture how rotten and disgusting a human Humbert is
Just my opinion but adapting a work of literature perfectly to the screen isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes it is I’ll happily concede that, but they are different mediums so some things are changed out of necessity and others because of differences in artistic perspective or even societal sensibilities
Before reading your last sentence, I was thinking Eragon.
We can hope for redemption. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/eragon-tv-series-disney-plus-1235325019/
Catch 22
I thought the 2019 mini-series was pretty decent.
Trailer sure as hell looked better than the original which butchered that amazing book.
I loved the Timeline book from Crichton, but one look at the trailer for the movie, I decided to not watch it. It looked really bad. 5.6 on imdb sort of backs that up I guess.
Indeed. I saw that movie and it was pretty bad. The book, like most of his novels, was a good read though.
I loved the book. The movie trailer made me ashamed of liking the book.
Not the best Crichton novel, but Sphere. The book was a fun read but not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson could make the movie adaptation palatable.
I liked the book.
The fucking Dark Tower.
What a complete waste of a great cast.It’s disgusting. There is so much story and world there why did they have to make it so shitty
And man that could have been a fantastic show spanning years. So many great storytelling opportunities.
I didn’t even recognise the story in the film. I did hear something about amazon making a series adaptation?
All Terry Pratchett adaptations. I think Hogfather is my favourite but still feels awkward. None have matched the tone, wit, and character depth in the books quite right and just feels wrong. To me, it seems like the perfect book series for a faithful multi-season adaptation, but has so far eluded those who have tried.
