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, robot.
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.
I was so disappointed I just forgot of its existence until now.
Are you saying the book does not have a blatant commercial for All Stars?
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?!”
Wasn’t there books that he wrote that were about flaws in the Three Laws?
Yeah it’s more about whatever safe guards you put life will find a way to twist them.
Life, uh, finds a way
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.
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
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?
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.
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 thought for sure this would be the top comment.
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.
The many adaptations of the Iliad, none of them is gay enough.
somewhere in the distance, the Blue Oyster Salad Bar music starts playing
The witcher is pretty bad.
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.
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.
To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.
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.
Just watch the Prime “x-ray” animated shorts. That’s the perfect preamble to the books reread.
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.
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.
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 liked it, as long as I looked it at as an interpretation rather than an exact translation.
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…
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).
A Wrinkle In Time was fucking insulting.
I think it was much worse for people that actually liked the book.
Agreed. I read it when I was in 5th Grade and thought it was wonderful. I noped out of the movie when Reese Witherspoon [?] turned into a flying carpet.
Is that even possible, the movie was fucking awful and I never read the book.
The book is actually very good for children’s literature. Its kid-friendly way of describing how wormholes work stuck with me.
for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
The Foundation TV series. No, it’s not a movie, but it’s so bad I feel it should count anyway.
It’s not all bad! The Cleon part is pretty cool. You know… the part that is not in the books at all.
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
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 can give Starship Troopers a pass though. Making it into a satire of fascism works better than it being straight up fascist propaganda. The book is basically a social experiment and people who read books will most likely get the point. People who don’t read on the other hand…
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.
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.
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.
Not a classics, but:
- 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.
But Art3mis in the real world has a port-wine stain so she’s ugly! Can’t you see how disgusting she looks?!
/s
And no Tomb of Horrors.
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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…
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First Blood
That book is so amazing. The film is good, but it really is a bastardization of the book, which is way more interesting in its characterizations of both “Rambo” (i forget his name in the book) and the Sheriff
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I found 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.
I don’t get that series.
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.
Hope the rest of your day is as pleasant as you are.
It was terrible!
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 ;-)
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
At least the easter egg with the old marvin from the bbc series was a nice touch
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.
Because no one is going with the classic, I can mention Eragon.
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.
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”
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 first tome of Dragon is 600 pages, it’s hardly a novel.
The Eragon movie is like the last season of Game of Thrones, but with none of the context of earlier seasons.
Eragon. They really fucked up so much about the book!
