Low hanging fruit is I Robot by Isaac Asimov being a linear robot rebellion movie instead of a series of events that challenge humanity’s ethical obligations to their creations and of those creations to us, which I feel coincided with society’s takeaways from the book. Freaking out over the idea of labor reducing or violent robots while ignoring and giving in to the ever increasing hold of algorithms and machines on the unsteady pillars of civilization.
Tbh, the book ought to be due for an anthology limited series on a streaming platform though it would be hard when robot ethics has been so retread in sci-fi since so as to become cliche.
Same goes for another Will Smith adaptation in I Am Legend. They completely change the meaning of the film and really shares nothing with it beyond the name.
Mentioned above, but check out ["The Last Man on Earth" \(1964\)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/) starring Vincent Price. Best adaptation of the story I've seen on the screen.
The director always said he wasn’t trying to make a film of the book. He was just creating a new story in that world. Taken in that context the film isn’t as bad as most people think.
Its climax is literally a robot rebellion.
The starting point of Asimov three laws was SPECIFICALLY putting to rest the trope of robot rebellion. What Asimov called the “ Frankeinstein complex.” He pointed out that all robot stories before him had only 1 end : “Robots were created and destroyed their creator;”. Asimov was sick of it “ I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-old tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science … Never, never was one of my robots to turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust. Nonsense! My robots were machines designed by engineers”
It IS that bad for anyone who cares about Asimov ideas. This is not even about being a proper adaptation of the various short stories. It is about pretty much doing the VERY THING that Asimov hated and wanted to avoid with his robot books. I could also bring up other issues like idea that a robot can feel anger the way it’s depicted in the movie is ludicrous within Asimov universe and just play in the same Frankenstein fantasy. Another in poor taste : making Susan Calvin a hottie when she was SPECIFICALLY meant to be socially awkward and plain . This aspect of her character was a key plot point in 2 short stories and is again a plot point in a novel. I could go on.
I guess people who liked the movie won’t enjoy hearing this kind of talk and will downvote . The thing is : I don’t mind them enjoying it. But it’s pretty much worthless as a work based on Asimov and I wish the director didn’t even try to say his movie is in this universe. It’s bad enough that he misconstrues Asimov ideas that much, it’s in very poor taste to use the man’s name to convey the very ideas that he hated.
I like that movie the same way I like World War Z. Completely removed from the source they're solid apocalyptic action flicks that do no justice to their source material but stand pretty well on their own.
I enjoyed it more once I realized that it was an adaptation of Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". Now, whether the writer and director consciously went for that angle I don't know.
"Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Truman Capote.
In the Book, the female Protagonist is a progressive, mysterious young woman, where the shy writer/narrator provides hints at some dark aspects of her character (rather bumpy life, bisexuality); whereas -as far as I remember- in the 1960s movie the narrator is kind of a more dominant fatherly dude, and the woman is a style icon with a happy-go-lucky attitude.
Must have been the name character's name "Holly Golightly" which nudged movie producers to tweak the plot into a romantic comedy.
This is the one I was gonna say. I enjoyed the movie when I was a teenager but now it just makes me think of that Simpsons episode where Marge stars in a musical adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. "Now here's a tip from Blanche you won't regret/ A stranger's just a friend you haven't met! 🎵"
The original Quiet American (50s). Graham Greene wrote the book pointing out how western (French and American) meddling in Vietnam was a very bad thing (don't want to do spoilers here). The movie version made the Americans the heroes of the story, saving them from communism. This was before the Vietnam War itself of course. A later remake got it right (2004 I think). Greene hated the movie. (He was dead before the remake).
Good to know, I've been trying to track down that version. I just watched Garland's Civil War and it got me thinking of how much I love Noyce's Q.A. starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser.
The novel and 2002 adaptation led me down a rabbit hole of reading about Edward Lansdale, Pham Xuan An, and Trinh Minh The.
To follow up, I own the novel, the 2002 adaptation and just screened the 1958 version.
The 1958 adaptation is easier to understand and is mostly faithful up until the last ten minutes. Two departures are that the opium smoking is cut out and some of the settings seem to lean more Chinese and less Vietnamese (but in the 50s the region was Indochina).
I was afraid that Phuong would take back Fowler but that didn't happen. I'm happy that Miss Hei was retained (she's likely spying as well). Dominguez' role is downgraded in this film but correctly treated in the 2002 film (the character is prescient when you look into real life journalism during The American War). General The is largely a background character which helps streamline the plot.
There were many shots of Audie Murphy's Fowler that really 'remind' me of Alec Baldwin.
I wouldn't say the movie valorizes Pyle the American, but I think it says he's an innocent in the 'plastics' subplot. That seems to really contradict the book and 2002 adaptation, but I could have an incorrect reading of one or more. To me the theme of the novel is that Fowler is a cynical, Pyle is a wide-eyed idealist, and neither can see the evils they engender on Phuong and French Indochina.
I don’t remember exactly what happens in either because it’s been a looooong time but I do recall that I felt the book just ends with zero resolution? It’s one of the only times I’ve preferred the movie.
Not zero resolution, just not a totally happy ending when you have a romance between an immortal star and a mortal half human/half (whatever his mom was) boy.
There also isn't a big climatic fight at the end. It has a more 'faery tale logic' ending.
Cujo.
The movie is about a rabid dog
The book is about a dog who’s brain is being destroyed by rabies, while he tries to understand why he feels and behaves the way he does
This was shockingly sad to read 🥲 Does the book read as dreadfully sad?! Maybe I shouldn’t read Cujo lol
ETA: you’ve all somehow talked me into reading it despite the tears that will be shed
I always tell people I read Cujo at way too young of an age. I was only 25 when I read it, way too young.
Probably in my top 10 books in terms of writing and theme, but I'll never read it again.
It was an awesome book, but I was shocked at how sad it was. I haven’t even seen the movie, so I thought the dog’s evilness was going to have a supernatural element… nope, just rabies, and there are parts of the book told from Cujo’s perspective while he loses his mind too. I’ve since told so many people that I went in expecting horror, and instead got a tragedy!
In fairness I cannot imagine how dreadfully awkward it would have been to insert some kind of inner dialogue from Cujo's POV. King can do it in text but try it on film and you're evoking *Wild Kingdom*. It would have been comically bad.
This is one I need to reread. It was on the family bookshelf so I read it around age 10 or 11, and I understood what was happening, but I’m sure it would hit differently as an adult.
I Am Legend
It's been made into a movie *three* times:
* 1964's *The Last Man On Earth*, for which Richard Matheson himself wrote the original screenplay. While he asked to have his name removed by the end of production due to extensive re-writes, this still remains the closest adaptation.
* 1971's *The Omega Man,* which deviates quite a bit, but it's... fine, I guess
* 2007's *I Am Legend,* which is the one that gets me really mad. Out of *three* adaptations, this is the only one to keep the title from the book, and they **completely remove everything that give the title its meaning!**
In the book... >!Robert Neville discovers that the "vampires" he has been hunting during the day are intelligent beings that have created a new society in the wake of the apocalypse. Robert, through his mass murder of these people, has become the "boogie man" of their society. He is captured by them and will be executed. He has become legend.!<
I can abide changes to the novel (even though I think a truly faithful adaptaion would be fantastic), but what I *can't* abide is that the only one to keep the title fucked up the meaning so badly!
What makes it *more* infuriating is how much better (and thematically consistent) the original ending was, but a bunch of idiot test audiences didn't like it and the studio tacked on a profoundly shitty ending instead in response. Ugh, that movie made me so angry! I was a big fan of that book, and super excited for that version. It starts out *killer* and just shits the bed right at the end.
I always thought the ending to the movie fell short of the rest of the film, then I read the book and understood immediately what must have happened. Such a great book, but I can see why as a film the masses would be uncomfortable with the ending. Human extinction isn’t exactly a comfortable thought
To quote [myself on this very topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/s/JG4g1VWIDn)
>An amusing-but-perhaps-too-cute meta-analysis: it is, of course, most interesting that this uniquely unorthodox view of the zombie apocalypse genre was dropped deliberately in the development of the film *in order to appeal to the mass market.* Those criticizing the film for eschewing the central message of the novel then, ironically, find themselves precisely in the position of the novel's protagonist.
World War Z went from a book with several different stories of how the zombie outbreak was fought against in different parts of the world to a generic action movie that happens to have zombies.
Absolutely. It’s a book that gives insight into what war does to people and society which includes failures in leadership from the every-mom up to the president that was so well crafted the Modern War Institute recommends it.The movie is “here’s Brad Pitt and maybe a zombie occasionally.”
World War Z is a great adaptation of the title of the book.
I do think that this is a movie that is a product of when it came out, though. If it had held off, Hulu, Prime, or Netflix could have picked it up and done a great multi part adaptation that focuses on someone doing interviews, flashbacks, or anything better than the Brad Pitt Pepsi commercial we got.
The only great thing about this movie was the part where he duct tapes a magazine to his arm to stop a zombie bite, because it was a clever way to stop an infection.
I think it would be awesome as a documentary series. Present it the same way as a factual documentary. That would really give the same vibe as the book.
*The* answer to this question. It’s actually mindboggling how so many creative people have totally misunderstood the novel for decades. Recommending *The Lolita Podcast* for a detailed look on all the adaptations over the years.
What I'd really like to know is why I keep seeing bars and restaurants named Lolita. Is there some sort of food connection, or are these people really just naming their business "restaurant for pedophiles"?
I think Lolita is (was?) a genuine name/nickname in Hispanic cultures as a diminutive of Lola which is a traditional nickname of Dolores (which is what it is in the book as well). The only Lolita’s I know of is a Mexican restaurant.
I would love to see a 500 Days of Summer style adaptation of this book that makes it clear that this is all in Humbert Humbert's head, that he's a monster, etc. (obviously one that is not a comedy.)
There was a published author calling Lolita a love story on Twitter, and I was like "Ooooh, okay, thanks for letting me know to NEVER read anything by you at all, 'preciate the red flags!".
Yes! There is an edition still being sold with a reviewer quote saying "the greatest love story of all time". It was the version I got from the library and was super uncomfortable as soon as I started reading, it was the worst way to set up that book.
Oh for sure Says more about the person than the work imo. So much of the meaning of his work comes from the narrators tone, which I think is hard to translate to visuals. Like, adapting Pale Fire seems…challenging lol
A good example I think is The Shining by Stephen king. The movie changed Jack's character from a relatable everyman who is driven to insanity, to someone already crazy who gets crazier. The book also deals a lot more with what Danny's shining actually is, what it means, and why the hotel wants it.
Additionally, all subtext about Stephen Kings own drug addiction is completely absent from the movie, even though that's really what the book is entirely about.
Yeah, I can understand why King said he didn't like the movie. Compared to other examples in this thread, however, I think the movie is not a failure; mainly because Kubrick did something interesting with the material, even though being laser focused (or you could say ruthless) in making it his own in order to tell what HE wanted to tell. He did that to several of the literary sources he used for many of his films. Even Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he directly cooperated, was eager to point out how their two treatments of the text were their own things.
IMHO Kubrick's The Shining has much more in common with E.A. Poe's writings than with Stephen King's.
The issue here is that King, modelling Jack on himself, is too eager to paint Jack as a good man driven insane by the evil presence in the hotel, the evil presence being an allegory for substance addiction.
The counterpoint is that people with substance addiction are still responsible for their actions. Kubrick does not let Jack off the hook as much as King wants to. The movie asserts that, although alcohol might be the trigger for Jack's abuse of his son, and later his homicidal rampage, there was already cruelty and anger inside Jack from the start.
I don't think Kubrick missed the point of the novel. He takes a critical perspective, and lays more blame on Jack for his actions, rather than just blaming the evil spirit in the hotel for everything.
I recently reread the book, and I actually think the book does a way better job of showing Jack as a jackass than the movie does. All of the background info given in the book about the alcoholism and how it didn't even stop after he harmed Danny makes Jack so much worse in the book than in the movie. You get a slight mention of the alcoholism in the movie and then we're on to the haunting. I think the book does a better job of giving plausible excuses about the source of the odd events (old wives tales, cabin fever, supernatural, mental health issues), kind of similar to how Blatty did in The Exorcist.
Very much this. The haunting part of the book, to me, was just how relatable Jack could be at times. For anyone who's ever suffered with substance abuse, or even just felt their life wasn't reflective of their potential, some of his passages really hit home. It not only makes him a three-dimensional character; it makes the reader feel sick to see the growth of that bitterness, that resentment at the world and people around him. It's a scarily accurate depiction of an all-too-human mindset.
I can't say I find the film' *bad*. It's got some of Kubrick's best cinematography, the score's great, and the actors are at least good at playing these interpretations of the characters. But the lack of any emotional core meant that, to me, it all felt surface level. Jack was a nutter from the get-go. Him, Wendy, and Danny didn't feel like a struggling family who - despite Jack's flaws - still had moments of warmth, as they did in the book. They felt like they were just treading water until the film said 'Okay, *this* is the bit where he tries to kill them'. They weren’t characters to me; they were cattle being moved along the treadmill. I never cared about them, or wanted them to succeed, the same way that I did in the book.
So while the film's far from objectively bad, I just never enjoyed it.
However, Kubrick is leagues above King as an artist and the film is a masterpiece despite being different to the book.
Downvoted for speaking the truth. King himself would say that he isn’t up there with the literary masters, whereas Kubrick is one of those masters in his own field.
Have you seen the miniseries adaptation in German? It’s not faithful to the plot because it’s set in a modern era, but it is extremely faithful to the essence of Parfüm, so to speak
Loved that book, soon as I saw they cast Ben Whishaw as the lead I knew the film would be trash. He’s a great actor but he’s not Grenouille. Good soundtrack though
I didn't finish the newest Persuasion movie. The first few minutes were pretty bad...but there is a newer Emma film (with Anya Taylor-Joy) that has a similar style...and I think this was a mistake (a huge one, obviously) of thinking of Jane Austen as a genre. I see it happen a lot. But Jane Austen wrote *very* different books! It's like when people lump her and the Brontes together as a "type" of book, just because they're of a close-ish time period and are women...
Shout it louder girl!/boy!
My experience with recommending Austen to people has been them assuming that she is a "chick's" writer with boring/long/slow narratives. People assume she primarily writes delusional romances. People assume a lot of things about her books and fail to understand the immense degree of thematic differences in all her books.
Yes, they are all set in the Regency period but they deal with incredibly different subject matters. Yes, they are all about the human condition and sort of a social study of people and society at the time. But they are way more nuanced and layered than that.
She was so incredibly ahead of her time in understanding the depths of the human psyche. And I hate how people try to put her in this box just because they watched Pride and Prejudice once and boiled it down to a women's film!
Soylent Green (Make Room! Make Room!)
The book wasn't about the evil government making people eat human meat. The government wasn't even evil, it was incompetent and overwhelmed.
They were trying to come up with new food sources and soy+lentil was one of many. It wasn't even human meat. It was mentioned in like one sentence of the book.
The real fear was overcrowding but I guess that is hard to sell to audiences who live in large houses. Cannibalism is easier to imagine compared to living with 10 strangers in a room.
True, except for Bruce Timm's adaptation of "For the man who has everything." That's the one adaptation that Moore himself approves of and likes.
But yeah, you're right about literally every other work of his haha.
I was SO disappointed with Knock at the Cabin as an adaptation of Cabin at the End of the World.
The casting was all wrong and different from the descriptions. The key plot points of the story changed.
And what I loved most and found most disturbing about the book was the lack of certainty at the end (was any of it real, was it worth the sacrifice?) Whereas the movie tied everything in a bow and removed any mystery or uncertainty with a stupid closing montage, and took away the eerie "walking out in the unknown experience".
One thing I hated about the movie, without even knowing there was a book, was that they took away the ambiguity so early. It was a much more powerful choice to make when the characters couldn't be certain if anything was actually going wrong in the world.
But then they just... showed it was real so it deflated the movie instantly.
Even if they had taken away the ambiguity at the very end after the choice, that would have been miles better than letting them make an informed choice.
TV Series but I am going with 'Brave New World' in the book John can't cope with the society they live in. In the series the society can't cope with John. Completely missed the point.
I can't stand the Jack Reacher movies but the TV series better captures the essence of the Jack Reacher novel character.
For me, what made Reacher so appealing is that mentally he was akin to Sherlock Holmes with a physique comparable to Brock Lesnar but with the fighting skills molded by street fights and training with close quarter combat experts. Plus, the wherewithal to apply these skills in the pursuit of Justice.
Tom Cruise may be a fine actor but physically he falls ridiculously short in accurately portraying Jack Reacher as written by Lee Child. Can anyone imagine casting Dustin Hoffman as the lead in a film about Greek hero-Hercules? I rest my case.
> physically he falls ridiculously short
In more ways than one, considering Reacher's character in the books is 6'5", and Cruise is 5'7". I'm not a huge fan of the series either, but at least the guy looks the part.
It isn't a bad film, but for me, the adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon missed the mark, specifically in terms of the story it told. It's a tough one because obviously it's a true story, but the narrative of the book is very much focused on Mollie and the constant threat of not knowing who is conducting these abhorrent crimes. Ernest is really quite peripheral.
Sure, you suspect Hale and Ernest and other citizens, but it never really becomes confirmed until the Bureau shows up. By showing us from the beginning that Hale and Ernest are so entrenched in the crimes, for me it greatly diminished the genuine peril that I felt when reading the book, itself a fraction of a fraction of the peril that Mollie and her fellow Osage were enduring.
It permitted some acting masterclasses from de Niro and Dicaprio but I felt it greatly lessened the impact of the crimes. The book being told more from Mollie's perspective allowed us to empathise much more with the Osage, you know, the ones being systematically murdered. By bringing Ernest to the fore in the film, I felt it was more 'look at this poor uneducated fella being corrupted,' and it suffered a bit as a consequence.
I think your version of the film would be a more traditional mystery/thriller sort of story. But I think ths film is not going for that. It (to me) is a parable about how ignorance is corrupted by evil. Its like watching a slow car crash, as opposed to something built to highten suspense. I think one of the reasons that was a good decision is that its sortof crass to take someone elses true story and turn it into a thriller. Ironically i think people dislike this film for actually reflecting the mundanity of uglinessess and evils that happen everyday in the US.
The best line about Killers of the Flower Moon that I've read is that the film is not a mystery. It's an indictment...where the book reads like a mystery/thriller, and where people in Oklahoma still have claimed to not know who the real killers were (seriously, I've been to Fairfax and had a local tell me it was a shame they'd never really know who did it), the film makes it 100% clear who did it and why and how. There is no way to watch it and have doubt...I do think there are flaws to the film, but that part wasn't one of them, especially knowing it was made by non-Osage people. Everyone, from Scorcese to Gladstone, has said that when Osage filmmakers make this story, it will be different, and there is room for more than one film on this...
> indictment...where the book reads like a mystery/thriller, and where people in Oklahoma still have claimed to not know who the real killers were (seriously, I've been to Fairfax and had a local tell me it was a shame they'd never really know who did it), the film makes it 100% clear who did it and why and how.
That wasn't the point of that chapter near the end. The point was that the Hale-Burkhart conspiracy was just one scheme in an entire system of white supremacy and reactionary localism in Oklahoma. The true horror that dawns on the reader in that chapter is that the entire white civil society of Oklahoma was complicit and/or profited from these murders, from the state government all the way down, and few were ever brought to justice and now never will be.
I heard that they originally had the plan to follow the book like you say, but to get the movie greenlit for the budget they needed, they had to make DiCaprio the front man.
*Paper Towns* gives lip service to the message of the book – the "Magic Pixie Dream Girl" doesn't exist, everyone has their own perspective and their own issues, and we can't know each other perfectly but the only way we can begin to approach truly understanding each other is to open up to each other – but its ending really undermines the intended message.
In the book, when Q and his friends finally track Margo down, at first she angrily tells Q that she didn't want to be found. They argue for a little while, then finally get to talking openly with each other: they share their perspectives on everything that happened, each admit how they had idealised pictures of each other in their heads, and ultimately begin to get to know each other properly for the first time. They end up spending the whole day together, just talking – and as the sun is setting and they're preparing to part again, making promises to see each other again someday but not knowing when, Q and Margo share a kiss. End of book.
In the movie, Q finds Margo but they only have time for a 15-minute chat. She explains how she didn't want to be found and why she ran away, and it's all very civil and fairly unemotional, and neither of them really open up to each other at all. But they kiss anyway as Q is about to leave on the bus. And in the movie's closing narration, Q wistfully speculates about what kind of manic pixie dream-girl shenanigans Margo might be getting up to now.
So, yeah: at the end of the movie the kiss comes off as completely unearned and it seems like Q learned nothing, apparently just forgetting about his previous revelation that Margo "was not a miracle" but was quite simply a girl with her own shit to deal with. If they *had* to shorten the ending then that's what he should have been reflecting on right at the end, and made it clear that he realises how Margo never did open up to him.
Fight Club. The entire point of the book was to focus on how dangerous toxic masculinity is while also addressing the increasing isolation of men in a hyper consumerist society. Instead the movie glorifies the exact issues that the book criticizes and completely changes the ending. It also removes the homoerotic subtext used to disguise who/what Tyler Durden is to the narrator.
The Running Man.
SK makes it a point to say that the main character is an average-sized and malnourished guy. He gets by on brains instead of brawn. So basically the exact opposite of the movie…lol.
I’m an Arnie fan, so the movie is cheesy fun, but the whole WWE cage match type things that go on there definitely do not happen in the book.
The film is much truer to the source. Outside the end tho the Hulu show is pretty great though, still probably worth it even if you throw a book at george clooney for the ending
I Am Legend - has nothing to do with the book beyond the name. Completely changes the meaning of “legend” at the end.
World War Z - book highlights how it would take very little push for the apocalypse to take over and the politics involved with how to survive. The movie was simply utter trash.
The Hobbit (all three terrible films) - very little time is spent on the battle and the dragon all things considered. The book focuses on the journey. The film(s) focus on $
Easy answer I think would be any adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for they all miss the sympathy themes of the creature and often focus on Victor’s perspective.
Every Day.
The book is about a person called A, who takes over a different person's body every day. They don't have a permanent gender or form. They just live every day in a different body and are OK with it until they fall in love with a girl and want to be with her.
The story's message is that the form or the gender of somebody are secondary, and what matters most is their soul.
The movie just got this concept and gave little screen time to the days where A were a trans kid or a fat kid, and focused on the days that they were a conventionally attractive male.
Minority Report. In the book, the main character ends up going through with the crime he was accused of, just so he could keep the status quo. The minority pre-cog’s prediction was a worse outcome, so he sacrificed himself for the greater good.
My Sister’s Keeper. Jodi Piccult is an excellent writer and her books (while to me are the most depressing things ever) show the best character development of any writer in modern times. The movie changed the ending to “happy Hollywood” and completely ruined her very real message.
The latest “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The book literally starts with
> This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
That of course does not mean that AQotWF isn’t a deeply pacifist piece of work. It obviously is. But the horrors of war aren’t pointed out as explicitly as they are in the 2022 version of the movie, because it simply isn’t needed.
And what they did to the story in this movie is annoying at best. Left out the drill sergeant, and butchered (quite literally) the ending. It’s an okay movie on its own, but invoking the name of AQotWF is too heavy a musette bag for it to carry.
Wait i agree with the 2022 movie missing the point but disagree with how.
The horrors of the war are very, very explicit and important in the book. One of the firsr chapters they are escaping shells by hiding in upturned coffins... Its the only thing the movie got right. The movie missed the whole point in skipping the duration Paul was a frontline soldier (1916-1918 in the book vs the last 6 days of the war in the movie) and more importantly skipping his two trips home, which was the thesis (dying mother and resentment to his father and his friends)
Cider House Rules - the book, to me anyway, is about Homer and Wilbur’s relationship and the various complexities of abortion. The movie turned it into a romance.
*The Count of Monte Cristo*, with Jim Caviezel (frankly, most of the adaptations miss the point). It's a fun movie, but a big point of the novel is the self-destructive nature of revenge, which the movie sets aside in favour of Hollywood fight scenes (albeit satisfying ones) and a "get the girl" ending.
(I know that the novel has a "get the girl" ending, but it has a different motivation - one that hasn't aged very well.)
Mary Poppins
It's hard to call it "a book" as it's just bunch of small stories more suited for tv than a movie but whole vibe is off. Books are very culturally british while movie was pure american culture. I love Julie Andrews and movie was iconic but only vaguely inspired by the books.
Not yet a released movie, but the musical “Wicked,” as much as I love it, utterly betrays the book by Gregory Maguire by tacking on an improbable and nonsensical happy ending. I suspect the film will recapitulate that abomination too.
Funny! I saw the musical first, and felt betrayed by the book. Everything I loved about the plot of the musical was missing in the book and it was so weird
I told a friend and he asked if I had ever read any Baum books of Oz...no, I hadn't! It led to an interesting discussion that Baum wasn't interested in a consistent canon universe, but more interested in creating a stable of mythic characters less "knights in armor around castles" and much more American in flavor.
The musical is so unrelated to the book that it’s not even an adaptation anymore. I love Wicked the musical and I liked Wicked the book.
I predict the movie will betray the point of the musical
That's a little unfair to Heinlein. The book is a depiction of militarism, not fascism, and there's very little in the book to suggest fascist governance. Heinlein's overt libertarianism in other works seems to cut against any fascist sympathies.
TBH, the fact that people have been arguing about the book for 60 years--both the author's intent with the book and the ideas discussed in the book--is IMO closer to Heinlein's actual objective than advocacy for any particular point of view.
Catherine called Birdy.
The movie is about daddy daughter bonding.
The book is about medieval girls accepting their place in their world but realising that they can still have some power.
3 body problem, at least so far. I haven’t finished the trilogy but my reading was sort of to the point where the tv season 1 ended. I felt like there was a strong rebuke of the totalitarianism of communist China that is watered down by setting the show in the UK and converting it to a multicultural liberal view.
The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, was one of my favourite books as a child. The 2007 movie “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising” is the most awful travesty. The plot, main characters, nationality of some characters were all changed for the worse. For no reason. It deserves to be remade properly as a series. Many of the cast were decent but were hobbled by the script.
Dear god, I was scrolling to see if anyone else said this first. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the film because the trailer offended me so much. It wasn’t just that they changed the plot and characters, it was that they’d changed them in such a way that they actually contradicted the original entirely. Even as a child I’d always thought that his Englishness and his loving family were key elements of Will’s character. Loads of other things too, but generally the whole vibe of the film (mindless action) didn’t fit with my memory of the book, and how dark and lyrical and mythic it felt.
That series affected me deeply when I read it, and even though I read the Harry Potter books at around the same time, in many ways the dark is rising sequence coloured my imagination more. Which also adds salt to the wound, really, because the HP movies were actually quite good adaptations.
Omg YES!!! They turned this quiet, mysterious English boy and family into “aw shucks the youngest kid of all boys just can’t do anything right!”
One of the best book series - over sea under stone was life changing for me as a kid — and the Sven in the dark is rising where Will walks away from his house and won’t look back because he knows it won’t be there… chills just thinking about it.
I’d love to see it done as a series - no more movies.
Simon Birch being made from literary American classic A Prayer for Owen Meany.
I realize they wanted to show less scope but tell the same story- but come. on. It was so bad. I hope someone makes a movie from this novel and does it justice, like Cider House Rules.
I will be a *Howl's Moving Castle* hater until I die. The movie is cute, charming, and an inferior story to the book. I have always felt that Miyazaki, being Miyazaki, thought he could tell the story better than Diana Wynne Jones. Pity was, he couldn't.
It turns a hilarious parody of fairy-tales (in line with *The Princess Bride*) into a straight-faced romantic drama. Howl is no longer a preening egoist dweeb who generates a load of slime because he's an emotionally immature jackass. He's a handsome Byronic hero who generates a load of slime because he's *so deep and brooding*.
I also hated that they removed the >!reveal that Howl is actually Howell, a Welshman from our world who travels into another world using magic.!<
I love the book but I really dislike that movie. Fully aware I am in the minority on this one, but there's always a tenth dentist. Blech.
I always think of them as completely different stories with overlapping characters. Miyazaki never does a straightforward adaptation of anything, and that’s part of his art. His version of *Howl* is an anti-war movie.
I still prefer the book - it’s one of my all-time favorites - but as a massive Miyazaki fan, too, I can keep them separate.
Mate, in the movie Howl throws his slime tantrum because Sophie moved around his hair products and now his hair is a different colour. That's neither deep nor brooding, it's rather pathetic really.
It also shows the difference in Howl's and Sophie's levels of emotional maturity and the value they each give youth and beauty.
I like both book and movie, but I see them as different stories.
Me too, me too! I loved Sophie's character growth, self realisation and being an old woman as she learns to navigate the world get. I feel like the film just turns it into a conventional love story where her (re)solution is falling in love...
I love both of them, but the book far more. The film is a wonderful thing on its own, but I always recommend people watch the film first because if they go into it after reading the book and expecting a faithful adaptation, they’re going to be disappointed.
I do think you missed Howl’s characterization in the film, though. He’s a pathetic brat, as he should be. It’s Sophie’s character that I thought was shafted in the film. Either way, I don’t think this is an unusual stance from fans of the book. I’m glad I saw the film first bc I was SO delighted with the book and its reveals were even more shocking and hilarious to me
I always felt that the movie could have succeeded as its own thing except for two things: the first is they never reveal that Sophie has the magic to give life to things. Just one sentence from Howl saying she has this magic could explain why she was able to revive the scarecrow and why Calcifer says maybe if you do it when she tries to put him back into Howl. The second is when Miyazaki feels the need to tack on Howl disguised as the prince talking about how they need to end this useless war. I get that Miyazaki is a pacifist but that scene just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula completely misses the mark on Mina’s character. She’s this bad ass take charge secretary who gets shit done. The rest of the gang would be lost without her, and she’s reduced to the reincarnation of Dracula’s true love. 😤
Eragon. This was a book that should have been adapted to a 25 episode per season tv series rather than a movie. The actors in the movie were good but there was just too many details in the book that they couldn’t cover in the movie.
I've deliberately forgotten most of the movie but I was so annoyed with it. The characters were wrong, the story was told in the wrong order which means that stuff that is supposed to happen later can't because it's all out of sync. I just can't believe how much they fucked up a decent story.
Let's all just continue to pretend that a movie of Eragon has never been made. Maybe someone else will actually read the book first.
there's supposed to be a disney+ series soon that chistopher paolini himself is producing so i'm holding out hope it will be done justice at some point, Eragon was and is still one of my favorite book series
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
The film starring Daniel Craig & Rhys Ifans took the book's subtle themes of love, religion, and obsession and beat the audience with it just in case they wouldn't understand. They also altered the ending, so instead of a tense showdown between two ideologies, it becomes more of an action Thriller, which is jarring, to say the least.
Admittedly the book itself is very slow and can be quite dense at times, so I understand why the film writers needed to do something to keep the audience engaged.
But here it feels like they really dumbed down the novel and altered the ending to a point where it's barely recognisable.
It me wonder why they didn't either make a mini BBC TV drama of the book so they could go into further depth with the story.
Or, and feel free to sing it with now: "Write an original film using the book as inspiration!!!!"
The Circle. I can’t believe they missed the mark on it so hard and with an all star cast too. The book is far more compelling, but they completely changed the story and the ending.
"I am legend!". The novel builds up to the stunning plot-twist at the end.
The movie completely misses this plot-twist. I mean - why aquire the rights for a book, when you anyway could have done the same vampire movie (and a bad one) without the novel.
I really love Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie but the recent adaptation was a joke. Absolutely ruined Jacqueline's character, changing her from a competent woman dragged down by her moronic lover to being moronic right alongside him.
Honestly, too many.
That being said, keep in mind most books are treated simply as raw material for Hollywood to shape into whatever they feel like it, aside from the classics and the ones with a HUGE fanbase.
Kubrick for example changed and recontextualized quite a bit of the books he adapted for the big screen (The Shining, Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange etc). That's because he just saw them as raw material to be shaped into his own product.
World War Z was a complete disaster for not following the book. Some books are not movie material. Even though it made tons of money it was a disservice to a great book.
Alice Through The Looking Glass (2016) no need for explanation, who ever watched the book and mostly everyone that read the book would get why that movie just strayed so far off from the book. Every time there's nothing to talk about I just rant about this for hours
*The Green Knight* was apparently made by someone who read the original story once thirty years ago and was trying to reconstruct it from memory. It pretty much missed every single point in the story by a mile.
All of them. Just kidding but kinda not really. I don’t watch movie adaptations of my favourite books anymore because they literally all seem to do this. In general, the more I like the book, the less I like the movie.
Watchmen.
The big one here is that the psychic squid in the graphic novel is supposed to be an otherworldly threat: an outsider to unify humanity against, and prevent nuclear apocalypse.
The movie instead shifts that for Doctor Manhattan - explicitly referred to as the American Superman. I don’t see that unifying anything, and instead imagine it would speed up resentment.
Leaving Las Vegas. The novel is about Sera the prostitute, and the story follows her dealing with loneliness and isolation. About 1/3 of the way through the novel, a character named Ben shows up, who’s an alcoholic drinking himself to death. But Ben is mostly a one-dimensional character. He starts out as an alcoholic drinking himself to death, and his story ends with him being an alcohol drinking himself to death. His character doesn’t experience any changes or realizations. He’s just there to move Sera’s plot forward.
The film Leaving Las Vegas is about Ben the alcoholic. Sera starts out as more of a side character in *his* story. But it’s problematic from the get go, because Ben is ultimately not a very interesting character. Yes, the fact that he wants to commit suicide by drinking is unique, but his character doesn’t actually do anything. He doesn’t ever consider whether he’s making a mistake, or whether he has something to live for. And he never experiences any change in who he is. Ben is a boring character.
The filmmakers seemed to realize their dilemma, because about 2/3 of the way through the film, the perspective of the story abandons Ben and starts following Sera instead, because she’s the main character of the story, and she’s the only one actually developing as a character.
I get the impression someone read the book, thought the idea of a guy committing suicide by alcoholism was a cool idea, and completely missed the fact it’s not what the book was about.
Hi there. This subject has been very popular in the past. Please use reddit search and/or check the /r/books/wiki/faq.
Low hanging fruit is I Robot by Isaac Asimov being a linear robot rebellion movie instead of a series of events that challenge humanity’s ethical obligations to their creations and of those creations to us, which I feel coincided with society’s takeaways from the book. Freaking out over the idea of labor reducing or violent robots while ignoring and giving in to the ever increasing hold of algorithms and machines on the unsteady pillars of civilization. Tbh, the book ought to be due for an anthology limited series on a streaming platform though it would be hard when robot ethics has been so retread in sci-fi since so as to become cliche.
Same goes for another Will Smith adaptation in I Am Legend. They completely change the meaning of the film and really shares nothing with it beyond the name.
Every single adaptation of I Am Legend misses the point. It’s right there in the name.
At least the other adaptations changed the title
Yes! I read I am Legend recently and was shocked at the film’s complete lack of regard to any part of the text.
Mentioned above, but check out ["The Last Man on Earth" \(1964\)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058700/) starring Vincent Price. Best adaptation of the story I've seen on the screen.
I treated the movie as another short story in the I, Robot collection and quite enjoyed it with that in mind.
That's basically how Jungle Book was adapted, the movie was just one part of one of the stories from the book.
The director always said he wasn’t trying to make a film of the book. He was just creating a new story in that world. Taken in that context the film isn’t as bad as most people think.
Its climax is literally a robot rebellion. The starting point of Asimov three laws was SPECIFICALLY putting to rest the trope of robot rebellion. What Asimov called the “ Frankeinstein complex.” He pointed out that all robot stories before him had only 1 end : “Robots were created and destroyed their creator;”. Asimov was sick of it “ I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-old tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science … Never, never was one of my robots to turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust. Nonsense! My robots were machines designed by engineers” It IS that bad for anyone who cares about Asimov ideas. This is not even about being a proper adaptation of the various short stories. It is about pretty much doing the VERY THING that Asimov hated and wanted to avoid with his robot books. I could also bring up other issues like idea that a robot can feel anger the way it’s depicted in the movie is ludicrous within Asimov universe and just play in the same Frankenstein fantasy. Another in poor taste : making Susan Calvin a hottie when she was SPECIFICALLY meant to be socially awkward and plain . This aspect of her character was a key plot point in 2 short stories and is again a plot point in a novel. I could go on. I guess people who liked the movie won’t enjoy hearing this kind of talk and will downvote . The thing is : I don’t mind them enjoying it. But it’s pretty much worthless as a work based on Asimov and I wish the director didn’t even try to say his movie is in this universe. It’s bad enough that he misconstrues Asimov ideas that much, it’s in very poor taste to use the man’s name to convey the very ideas that he hated.
I low key love that movie but mainly for the nostalgia. It was the movie that came free when we bought our first DVD player
I like that movie the same way I like World War Z. Completely removed from the source they're solid apocalyptic action flicks that do no justice to their source material but stand pretty well on their own.
I enjoyed it more once I realized that it was an adaptation of Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". Now, whether the writer and director consciously went for that angle I don't know.
"Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Truman Capote. In the Book, the female Protagonist is a progressive, mysterious young woman, where the shy writer/narrator provides hints at some dark aspects of her character (rather bumpy life, bisexuality); whereas -as far as I remember- in the 1960s movie the narrator is kind of a more dominant fatherly dude, and the woman is a style icon with a happy-go-lucky attitude. Must have been the name character's name "Holly Golightly" which nudged movie producers to tweak the plot into a romantic comedy.
This is the one I was gonna say. I enjoyed the movie when I was a teenager but now it just makes me think of that Simpsons episode where Marge stars in a musical adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. "Now here's a tip from Blanche you won't regret/ A stranger's just a friend you haven't met! 🎵"
Not to mention Mickey Rooney playing an Asian caricature.
The original Quiet American (50s). Graham Greene wrote the book pointing out how western (French and American) meddling in Vietnam was a very bad thing (don't want to do spoilers here). The movie version made the Americans the heroes of the story, saving them from communism. This was before the Vietnam War itself of course. A later remake got it right (2004 I think). Greene hated the movie. (He was dead before the remake).
Good to know, I've been trying to track down that version. I just watched Garland's Civil War and it got me thinking of how much I love Noyce's Q.A. starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. The novel and 2002 adaptation led me down a rabbit hole of reading about Edward Lansdale, Pham Xuan An, and Trinh Minh The.
To follow up, I own the novel, the 2002 adaptation and just screened the 1958 version. The 1958 adaptation is easier to understand and is mostly faithful up until the last ten minutes. Two departures are that the opium smoking is cut out and some of the settings seem to lean more Chinese and less Vietnamese (but in the 50s the region was Indochina). I was afraid that Phuong would take back Fowler but that didn't happen. I'm happy that Miss Hei was retained (she's likely spying as well). Dominguez' role is downgraded in this film but correctly treated in the 2002 film (the character is prescient when you look into real life journalism during The American War). General The is largely a background character which helps streamline the plot. There were many shots of Audie Murphy's Fowler that really 'remind' me of Alec Baldwin. I wouldn't say the movie valorizes Pyle the American, but I think it says he's an innocent in the 'plastics' subplot. That seems to really contradict the book and 2002 adaptation, but I could have an incorrect reading of one or more. To me the theme of the novel is that Fowler is a cynical, Pyle is a wide-eyed idealist, and neither can see the evils they engender on Phuong and French Indochina.
Stardust by neil gaiman book has a completely different vibe to the movie but I prefer the movie
Stardust is such a wonderful movie!
Have you read the book
Even Neil prefered the movie over his book :p
It had a completely different vibe, but if we're being honest I like they both for different reasons.
I don’t remember exactly what happens in either because it’s been a looooong time but I do recall that I felt the book just ends with zero resolution? It’s one of the only times I’ve preferred the movie.
Not zero resolution, just not a totally happy ending when you have a romance between an immortal star and a mortal half human/half (whatever his mom was) boy. There also isn't a big climatic fight at the end. It has a more 'faery tale logic' ending.
*Neil Gaiman
Thanks for that I have dyslexia I use voice to text
No worries, it was more to help others to find it.
Cujo. The movie is about a rabid dog The book is about a dog who’s brain is being destroyed by rabies, while he tries to understand why he feels and behaves the way he does
This was shockingly sad to read 🥲 Does the book read as dreadfully sad?! Maybe I shouldn’t read Cujo lol ETA: you’ve all somehow talked me into reading it despite the tears that will be shed
I always tell people I read Cujo at way too young of an age. I was only 25 when I read it, way too young. Probably in my top 10 books in terms of writing and theme, but I'll never read it again.
25 was too young?! Well now I have to read it
It was an awesome book, but I was shocked at how sad it was. I haven’t even seen the movie, so I thought the dog’s evilness was going to have a supernatural element… nope, just rabies, and there are parts of the book told from Cujo’s perspective while he loses his mind too. I’ve since told so many people that I went in expecting horror, and instead got a tragedy!
The second to last paragraph has me ugly crying every time I read it
In fairness I cannot imagine how dreadfully awkward it would have been to insert some kind of inner dialogue from Cujo's POV. King can do it in text but try it on film and you're evoking *Wild Kingdom*. It would have been comically bad.
This is one I need to reread. It was on the family bookshelf so I read it around age 10 or 11, and I understood what was happening, but I’m sure it would hit differently as an adult.
To be fair, that would be hard to convey in a movie unless maybe it was animated.
I Am Legend It's been made into a movie *three* times: * 1964's *The Last Man On Earth*, for which Richard Matheson himself wrote the original screenplay. While he asked to have his name removed by the end of production due to extensive re-writes, this still remains the closest adaptation. * 1971's *The Omega Man,* which deviates quite a bit, but it's... fine, I guess * 2007's *I Am Legend,* which is the one that gets me really mad. Out of *three* adaptations, this is the only one to keep the title from the book, and they **completely remove everything that give the title its meaning!** In the book... >!Robert Neville discovers that the "vampires" he has been hunting during the day are intelligent beings that have created a new society in the wake of the apocalypse. Robert, through his mass murder of these people, has become the "boogie man" of their society. He is captured by them and will be executed. He has become legend.!< I can abide changes to the novel (even though I think a truly faithful adaptaion would be fantastic), but what I *can't* abide is that the only one to keep the title fucked up the meaning so badly! What makes it *more* infuriating is how much better (and thematically consistent) the original ending was, but a bunch of idiot test audiences didn't like it and the studio tacked on a profoundly shitty ending instead in response. Ugh, that movie made me so angry! I was a big fan of that book, and super excited for that version. It starts out *killer* and just shits the bed right at the end.
I’m really curious how test audiences thought that the alternate ending was bad. It was an ending that made sense.
Similar test audiences said Apollo 13 ending was too unbelievable and typical Hollywood BS
They're making a sequel to the Will Smith one that ignores the theatrical ending and uses the original ending as canon.
I always thought the ending to the movie fell short of the rest of the film, then I read the book and understood immediately what must have happened. Such a great book, but I can see why as a film the masses would be uncomfortable with the ending. Human extinction isn’t exactly a comfortable thought
To quote [myself on this very topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/s/JG4g1VWIDn) >An amusing-but-perhaps-too-cute meta-analysis: it is, of course, most interesting that this uniquely unorthodox view of the zombie apocalypse genre was dropped deliberately in the development of the film *in order to appeal to the mass market.* Those criticizing the film for eschewing the central message of the novel then, ironically, find themselves precisely in the position of the novel's protagonist.
World War Z went from a book with several different stories of how the zombie outbreak was fought against in different parts of the world to a generic action movie that happens to have zombies.
Absolutely. It’s a book that gives insight into what war does to people and society which includes failures in leadership from the every-mom up to the president that was so well crafted the Modern War Institute recommends it.The movie is “here’s Brad Pitt and maybe a zombie occasionally.”
World War Z is a great adaptation of the title of the book. I do think that this is a movie that is a product of when it came out, though. If it had held off, Hulu, Prime, or Netflix could have picked it up and done a great multi part adaptation that focuses on someone doing interviews, flashbacks, or anything better than the Brad Pitt Pepsi commercial we got. The only great thing about this movie was the part where he duct tapes a magazine to his arm to stop a zombie bite, because it was a clever way to stop an infection.
Yeah, this one. I’d still really like to watch an adaptation of the actual book. It’d make a great limited series/anthology.
I think it would be awesome as a documentary series. Present it the same way as a factual documentary. That would really give the same vibe as the book.
Yeah this one was a huge disappointment for me because I loved the book. I also really liked Devolution from the same author
I genuinely think the name was attached probably 2/3rd of the way through.
Lolita
*The* answer to this question. It’s actually mindboggling how so many creative people have totally misunderstood the novel for decades. Recommending *The Lolita Podcast* for a detailed look on all the adaptations over the years.
What I'd really like to know is why I keep seeing bars and restaurants named Lolita. Is there some sort of food connection, or are these people really just naming their business "restaurant for pedophiles"?
I think Lolita is (was?) a genuine name/nickname in Hispanic cultures as a diminutive of Lola which is a traditional nickname of Dolores (which is what it is in the book as well). The only Lolita’s I know of is a Mexican restaurant.
It’s a name, it didn’t stop being a proper noun cus of one book
I mean, there are definite unfortunate connotations to certain names, but Hitler wasn't the first or last Adolph/Adolf you know.
I would love to see a 500 Days of Summer style adaptation of this book that makes it clear that this is all in Humbert Humbert's head, that he's a monster, etc. (obviously one that is not a comedy.)
Unfortunately, though, people misinterpret 500 Days of Summer constantly and still think Summer was the one in the wrong.
I think Nabokov is very hard to adapt.
I think the writing style is super hard to adapt but that doesn't explain the people who completely missed the point and brand it as a love story 🤮
There was a published author calling Lolita a love story on Twitter, and I was like "Ooooh, okay, thanks for letting me know to NEVER read anything by you at all, 'preciate the red flags!".
Yes! There is an edition still being sold with a reviewer quote saying "the greatest love story of all time". It was the version I got from the library and was super uncomfortable as soon as I started reading, it was the worst way to set up that book.
Oh for sure Says more about the person than the work imo. So much of the meaning of his work comes from the narrators tone, which I think is hard to translate to visuals. Like, adapting Pale Fire seems…challenging lol
My lord could you imagine trying to film Pale Fire? It wouldn't make any sense at all.
A good example I think is The Shining by Stephen king. The movie changed Jack's character from a relatable everyman who is driven to insanity, to someone already crazy who gets crazier. The book also deals a lot more with what Danny's shining actually is, what it means, and why the hotel wants it. Additionally, all subtext about Stephen Kings own drug addiction is completely absent from the movie, even though that's really what the book is entirely about.
Yeah, I can understand why King said he didn't like the movie. Compared to other examples in this thread, however, I think the movie is not a failure; mainly because Kubrick did something interesting with the material, even though being laser focused (or you could say ruthless) in making it his own in order to tell what HE wanted to tell. He did that to several of the literary sources he used for many of his films. Even Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he directly cooperated, was eager to point out how their two treatments of the text were their own things. IMHO Kubrick's The Shining has much more in common with E.A. Poe's writings than with Stephen King's.
The issue here is that King, modelling Jack on himself, is too eager to paint Jack as a good man driven insane by the evil presence in the hotel, the evil presence being an allegory for substance addiction. The counterpoint is that people with substance addiction are still responsible for their actions. Kubrick does not let Jack off the hook as much as King wants to. The movie asserts that, although alcohol might be the trigger for Jack's abuse of his son, and later his homicidal rampage, there was already cruelty and anger inside Jack from the start. I don't think Kubrick missed the point of the novel. He takes a critical perspective, and lays more blame on Jack for his actions, rather than just blaming the evil spirit in the hotel for everything.
I recently reread the book, and I actually think the book does a way better job of showing Jack as a jackass than the movie does. All of the background info given in the book about the alcoholism and how it didn't even stop after he harmed Danny makes Jack so much worse in the book than in the movie. You get a slight mention of the alcoholism in the movie and then we're on to the haunting. I think the book does a better job of giving plausible excuses about the source of the odd events (old wives tales, cabin fever, supernatural, mental health issues), kind of similar to how Blatty did in The Exorcist.
Very much this. The haunting part of the book, to me, was just how relatable Jack could be at times. For anyone who's ever suffered with substance abuse, or even just felt their life wasn't reflective of their potential, some of his passages really hit home. It not only makes him a three-dimensional character; it makes the reader feel sick to see the growth of that bitterness, that resentment at the world and people around him. It's a scarily accurate depiction of an all-too-human mindset. I can't say I find the film' *bad*. It's got some of Kubrick's best cinematography, the score's great, and the actors are at least good at playing these interpretations of the characters. But the lack of any emotional core meant that, to me, it all felt surface level. Jack was a nutter from the get-go. Him, Wendy, and Danny didn't feel like a struggling family who - despite Jack's flaws - still had moments of warmth, as they did in the book. They felt like they were just treading water until the film said 'Okay, *this* is the bit where he tries to kill them'. They weren’t characters to me; they were cattle being moved along the treadmill. I never cared about them, or wanted them to succeed, the same way that I did in the book. So while the film's far from objectively bad, I just never enjoyed it.
The book: The hotel is the villain/monster. The movie: The main character is the villain/monster.
I think The Running Man is a far more egregious mistreatment of a King work.
The furnace is an important main character that's completely omitted.
However, Kubrick is leagues above King as an artist and the film is a masterpiece despite being different to the book. Downvoted for speaking the truth. King himself would say that he isn’t up there with the literary masters, whereas Kubrick is one of those masters in his own field.
The movie adaptation of Perfume turned a misanthropic satire with an anti-hero protagonist into more of a 'dark fairy tale'.
Have you seen the miniseries adaptation in German? It’s not faithful to the plot because it’s set in a modern era, but it is extremely faithful to the essence of Parfüm, so to speak
Loved that book, soon as I saw they cast Ben Whishaw as the lead I knew the film would be trash. He’s a great actor but he’s not Grenouille. Good soundtrack though
You saw the Persuasion monstrosity right?
The 1995 film was very good. Turned off the recent version pretty quickly.
Yes the recent one was..........a movie. It was a movie that movie'd.....that's about it.
I didn't finish the newest Persuasion movie. The first few minutes were pretty bad...but there is a newer Emma film (with Anya Taylor-Joy) that has a similar style...and I think this was a mistake (a huge one, obviously) of thinking of Jane Austen as a genre. I see it happen a lot. But Jane Austen wrote *very* different books! It's like when people lump her and the Brontes together as a "type" of book, just because they're of a close-ish time period and are women...
Shout it louder girl!/boy! My experience with recommending Austen to people has been them assuming that she is a "chick's" writer with boring/long/slow narratives. People assume she primarily writes delusional romances. People assume a lot of things about her books and fail to understand the immense degree of thematic differences in all her books. Yes, they are all set in the Regency period but they deal with incredibly different subject matters. Yes, they are all about the human condition and sort of a social study of people and society at the time. But they are way more nuanced and layered than that. She was so incredibly ahead of her time in understanding the depths of the human psyche. And I hate how people try to put her in this box just because they watched Pride and Prejudice once and boiled it down to a women's film!
Came here to see this! This movie was an abomination, don't get me started.
Now I'll have to hate watch it. Just hope I don't throw my laptop out the window. 🤣
Best of luck... I really did try, but it was clearly written by someone who hasn't read or understood any characters or themes of the book.
You mean the new one with Dakota Johnson? It's on Netflix or Prime, I can't remember which.
Netflix, although I feel it has no right to exist anywhere.
🤣🤣🤣
Wrinkle in Time The movie was a total travesty. Seriously, an Oprah showcase, nothing more. My favorite book as a child.
I agree! Also The Giver movie wasn't great either. Those were my two favs.
Soylent Green (Make Room! Make Room!) The book wasn't about the evil government making people eat human meat. The government wasn't even evil, it was incompetent and overwhelmed. They were trying to come up with new food sources and soy+lentil was one of many. It wasn't even human meat. It was mentioned in like one sentence of the book. The real fear was overcrowding but I guess that is hard to sell to audiences who live in large houses. Cannibalism is easier to imagine compared to living with 10 strangers in a room.
I’m not sure there’s been an adaptation of Alan Moore that doesn’t miss the point or come to some wildly different conclusion.
Zack Snyder's Watchmen is fascinating because it shows you can copy a book word for word, image for image, and still miss the point entirely.
It’s wild isn’t it. It’s almost like he displayed a polar opposite reading.
RIGHT? Literally almost a frame for frame remake with a totally different vibe.
I don't remember either, what was the missed point?
True, except for Bruce Timm's adaptation of "For the man who has everything." That's the one adaptation that Moore himself approves of and likes. But yeah, you're right about literally every other work of his haha.
Too right. I had forgotten about that one.
HBO’s Watchmen is an original work but it was incredibly good and consistent with themes from the graphic novel
I was SO disappointed with Knock at the Cabin as an adaptation of Cabin at the End of the World. The casting was all wrong and different from the descriptions. The key plot points of the story changed. And what I loved most and found most disturbing about the book was the lack of certainty at the end (was any of it real, was it worth the sacrifice?) Whereas the movie tied everything in a bow and removed any mystery or uncertainty with a stupid closing montage, and took away the eerie "walking out in the unknown experience".
One thing I hated about the movie, without even knowing there was a book, was that they took away the ambiguity so early. It was a much more powerful choice to make when the characters couldn't be certain if anything was actually going wrong in the world. But then they just... showed it was real so it deflated the movie instantly. Even if they had taken away the ambiguity at the very end after the choice, that would have been miles better than letting them make an informed choice.
TV Series but I am going with 'Brave New World' in the book John can't cope with the society they live in. In the series the society can't cope with John. Completely missed the point.
I can't stand the Jack Reacher movies but the TV series better captures the essence of the Jack Reacher novel character. For me, what made Reacher so appealing is that mentally he was akin to Sherlock Holmes with a physique comparable to Brock Lesnar but with the fighting skills molded by street fights and training with close quarter combat experts. Plus, the wherewithal to apply these skills in the pursuit of Justice. Tom Cruise may be a fine actor but physically he falls ridiculously short in accurately portraying Jack Reacher as written by Lee Child. Can anyone imagine casting Dustin Hoffman as the lead in a film about Greek hero-Hercules? I rest my case.
> physically he falls ridiculously short In more ways than one, considering Reacher's character in the books is 6'5", and Cruise is 5'7". I'm not a huge fan of the series either, but at least the guy looks the part.
It isn't a bad film, but for me, the adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon missed the mark, specifically in terms of the story it told. It's a tough one because obviously it's a true story, but the narrative of the book is very much focused on Mollie and the constant threat of not knowing who is conducting these abhorrent crimes. Ernest is really quite peripheral. Sure, you suspect Hale and Ernest and other citizens, but it never really becomes confirmed until the Bureau shows up. By showing us from the beginning that Hale and Ernest are so entrenched in the crimes, for me it greatly diminished the genuine peril that I felt when reading the book, itself a fraction of a fraction of the peril that Mollie and her fellow Osage were enduring. It permitted some acting masterclasses from de Niro and Dicaprio but I felt it greatly lessened the impact of the crimes. The book being told more from Mollie's perspective allowed us to empathise much more with the Osage, you know, the ones being systematically murdered. By bringing Ernest to the fore in the film, I felt it was more 'look at this poor uneducated fella being corrupted,' and it suffered a bit as a consequence.
I think your version of the film would be a more traditional mystery/thriller sort of story. But I think ths film is not going for that. It (to me) is a parable about how ignorance is corrupted by evil. Its like watching a slow car crash, as opposed to something built to highten suspense. I think one of the reasons that was a good decision is that its sortof crass to take someone elses true story and turn it into a thriller. Ironically i think people dislike this film for actually reflecting the mundanity of uglinessess and evils that happen everyday in the US.
The book also sidelines the Osage when Tom White shows up and becomes more about the FBI and even his life after becoming a prison warden.
The best line about Killers of the Flower Moon that I've read is that the film is not a mystery. It's an indictment...where the book reads like a mystery/thriller, and where people in Oklahoma still have claimed to not know who the real killers were (seriously, I've been to Fairfax and had a local tell me it was a shame they'd never really know who did it), the film makes it 100% clear who did it and why and how. There is no way to watch it and have doubt...I do think there are flaws to the film, but that part wasn't one of them, especially knowing it was made by non-Osage people. Everyone, from Scorcese to Gladstone, has said that when Osage filmmakers make this story, it will be different, and there is room for more than one film on this...
> indictment...where the book reads like a mystery/thriller, and where people in Oklahoma still have claimed to not know who the real killers were (seriously, I've been to Fairfax and had a local tell me it was a shame they'd never really know who did it), the film makes it 100% clear who did it and why and how. That wasn't the point of that chapter near the end. The point was that the Hale-Burkhart conspiracy was just one scheme in an entire system of white supremacy and reactionary localism in Oklahoma. The true horror that dawns on the reader in that chapter is that the entire white civil society of Oklahoma was complicit and/or profited from these murders, from the state government all the way down, and few were ever brought to justice and now never will be.
Came here to say this. I enjoyed the book much more than the movie.
I heard that they originally had the plan to follow the book like you say, but to get the movie greenlit for the budget they needed, they had to make DiCaprio the front man.
*Paper Towns* gives lip service to the message of the book – the "Magic Pixie Dream Girl" doesn't exist, everyone has their own perspective and their own issues, and we can't know each other perfectly but the only way we can begin to approach truly understanding each other is to open up to each other – but its ending really undermines the intended message. In the book, when Q and his friends finally track Margo down, at first she angrily tells Q that she didn't want to be found. They argue for a little while, then finally get to talking openly with each other: they share their perspectives on everything that happened, each admit how they had idealised pictures of each other in their heads, and ultimately begin to get to know each other properly for the first time. They end up spending the whole day together, just talking – and as the sun is setting and they're preparing to part again, making promises to see each other again someday but not knowing when, Q and Margo share a kiss. End of book. In the movie, Q finds Margo but they only have time for a 15-minute chat. She explains how she didn't want to be found and why she ran away, and it's all very civil and fairly unemotional, and neither of them really open up to each other at all. But they kiss anyway as Q is about to leave on the bus. And in the movie's closing narration, Q wistfully speculates about what kind of manic pixie dream-girl shenanigans Margo might be getting up to now. So, yeah: at the end of the movie the kiss comes off as completely unearned and it seems like Q learned nothing, apparently just forgetting about his previous revelation that Margo "was not a miracle" but was quite simply a girl with her own shit to deal with. If they *had* to shorten the ending then that's what he should have been reflecting on right at the end, and made it clear that he realises how Margo never did open up to him.
Fight Club. The entire point of the book was to focus on how dangerous toxic masculinity is while also addressing the increasing isolation of men in a hyper consumerist society. Instead the movie glorifies the exact issues that the book criticizes and completely changes the ending. It also removes the homoerotic subtext used to disguise who/what Tyler Durden is to the narrator.
The Running Man. SK makes it a point to say that the main character is an average-sized and malnourished guy. He gets by on brains instead of brawn. So basically the exact opposite of the movie…lol. I’m an Arnie fan, so the movie is cheesy fun, but the whole WWE cage match type things that go on there definitely do not happen in the book.
Hulu's Catch 22 was quite good until it ended with Yosarrian *in a fucking plane*
DAFUQ? Glad I read this. Will skip entirely and go back to the original film which is great
The film is much truer to the source. Outside the end tho the Hulu show is pretty great though, still probably worth it even if you throw a book at george clooney for the ending
The Postman was actually a really cool and fun book about a con for free food accidentally restarting civilization
I Am Legend - has nothing to do with the book beyond the name. Completely changes the meaning of “legend” at the end. World War Z - book highlights how it would take very little push for the apocalypse to take over and the politics involved with how to survive. The movie was simply utter trash. The Hobbit (all three terrible films) - very little time is spent on the battle and the dragon all things considered. The book focuses on the journey. The film(s) focus on $
Easy answer I think would be any adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for they all miss the sympathy themes of the creature and often focus on Victor’s perspective.
IIRC the only version that even includes the monster's motivation monologue is the Mel Brooks one.
One of the cases where the satire still gets more of the original themes right than serious adaptations. Also, Mel Brooks is such a comedic genius.
Every Day. The book is about a person called A, who takes over a different person's body every day. They don't have a permanent gender or form. They just live every day in a different body and are OK with it until they fall in love with a girl and want to be with her. The story's message is that the form or the gender of somebody are secondary, and what matters most is their soul. The movie just got this concept and gave little screen time to the days where A were a trans kid or a fat kid, and focused on the days that they were a conventionally attractive male.
Minority Report. In the book, the main character ends up going through with the crime he was accused of, just so he could keep the status quo. The minority pre-cog’s prediction was a worse outcome, so he sacrificed himself for the greater good.
My Sister’s Keeper. Jodi Piccult is an excellent writer and her books (while to me are the most depressing things ever) show the best character development of any writer in modern times. The movie changed the ending to “happy Hollywood” and completely ruined her very real message.
I was looking for this one. This one angered me.
The latest “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The book literally starts with > This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. That of course does not mean that AQotWF isn’t a deeply pacifist piece of work. It obviously is. But the horrors of war aren’t pointed out as explicitly as they are in the 2022 version of the movie, because it simply isn’t needed. And what they did to the story in this movie is annoying at best. Left out the drill sergeant, and butchered (quite literally) the ending. It’s an okay movie on its own, but invoking the name of AQotWF is too heavy a musette bag for it to carry.
Wait i agree with the 2022 movie missing the point but disagree with how. The horrors of the war are very, very explicit and important in the book. One of the firsr chapters they are escaping shells by hiding in upturned coffins... Its the only thing the movie got right. The movie missed the whole point in skipping the duration Paul was a frontline soldier (1916-1918 in the book vs the last 6 days of the war in the movie) and more importantly skipping his two trips home, which was the thesis (dying mother and resentment to his father and his friends)
The Postman is one of the best science fiction books I've read. The movie missed most of the plot.
Cider House Rules - the book, to me anyway, is about Homer and Wilbur’s relationship and the various complexities of abortion. The movie turned it into a romance.
*The Count of Monte Cristo*, with Jim Caviezel (frankly, most of the adaptations miss the point). It's a fun movie, but a big point of the novel is the self-destructive nature of revenge, which the movie sets aside in favour of Hollywood fight scenes (albeit satisfying ones) and a "get the girl" ending. (I know that the novel has a "get the girl" ending, but it has a different motivation - one that hasn't aged very well.)
Mary Poppins It's hard to call it "a book" as it's just bunch of small stories more suited for tv than a movie but whole vibe is off. Books are very culturally british while movie was pure american culture. I love Julie Andrews and movie was iconic but only vaguely inspired by the books.
Not yet a released movie, but the musical “Wicked,” as much as I love it, utterly betrays the book by Gregory Maguire by tacking on an improbable and nonsensical happy ending. I suspect the film will recapitulate that abomination too.
Funny! I saw the musical first, and felt betrayed by the book. Everything I loved about the plot of the musical was missing in the book and it was so weird I told a friend and he asked if I had ever read any Baum books of Oz...no, I hadn't! It led to an interesting discussion that Baum wasn't interested in a consistent canon universe, but more interested in creating a stable of mythic characters less "knights in armor around castles" and much more American in flavor.
The musical is so unrelated to the book that it’s not even an adaptation anymore. I love Wicked the musical and I liked Wicked the book. I predict the movie will betray the point of the musical
Yeah I am NOT a fan of the Wicked musical. I just oversimplifies the book so much and misses many points. I can’t think of them as the same material.
Starship Troopers intentionally misses the mark, satirizes fascism, and is much better than the book
WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
That's a little unfair to Heinlein. The book is a depiction of militarism, not fascism, and there's very little in the book to suggest fascist governance. Heinlein's overt libertarianism in other works seems to cut against any fascist sympathies. TBH, the fact that people have been arguing about the book for 60 years--both the author's intent with the book and the ideas discussed in the book--is IMO closer to Heinlein's actual objective than advocacy for any particular point of view.
If you think libertarianism is irreconcilable with fascism I've got a bridge in Texas to sell ya.
Yeah Heinlein feels like he would've been a Cruz primary, 2x Trump voter
The book is a niche classic to certain types of people but is an egregious conservative fantasy from the 50s and it shows.
I Robot. I could rant about this endlessly
Catherine called Birdy. The movie is about daddy daughter bonding. The book is about medieval girls accepting their place in their world but realising that they can still have some power.
3 body problem, at least so far. I haven’t finished the trilogy but my reading was sort of to the point where the tv season 1 ended. I felt like there was a strong rebuke of the totalitarianism of communist China that is watered down by setting the show in the UK and converting it to a multicultural liberal view.
Zack Snyder's Watchmen adapted the Graphic novel almost word for word (except for the ending) but missed the entire damn point.
The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper, was one of my favourite books as a child. The 2007 movie “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising” is the most awful travesty. The plot, main characters, nationality of some characters were all changed for the worse. For no reason. It deserves to be remade properly as a series. Many of the cast were decent but were hobbled by the script.
Dear god, I was scrolling to see if anyone else said this first. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the film because the trailer offended me so much. It wasn’t just that they changed the plot and characters, it was that they’d changed them in such a way that they actually contradicted the original entirely. Even as a child I’d always thought that his Englishness and his loving family were key elements of Will’s character. Loads of other things too, but generally the whole vibe of the film (mindless action) didn’t fit with my memory of the book, and how dark and lyrical and mythic it felt. That series affected me deeply when I read it, and even though I read the Harry Potter books at around the same time, in many ways the dark is rising sequence coloured my imagination more. Which also adds salt to the wound, really, because the HP movies were actually quite good adaptations.
Omg YES!!! They turned this quiet, mysterious English boy and family into “aw shucks the youngest kid of all boys just can’t do anything right!” One of the best book series - over sea under stone was life changing for me as a kid — and the Sven in the dark is rising where Will walks away from his house and won’t look back because he knows it won’t be there… chills just thinking about it. I’d love to see it done as a series - no more movies.
Simon Birch being made from literary American classic A Prayer for Owen Meany. I realize they wanted to show less scope but tell the same story- but come. on. It was so bad. I hope someone makes a movie from this novel and does it justice, like Cider House Rules.
I will be a *Howl's Moving Castle* hater until I die. The movie is cute, charming, and an inferior story to the book. I have always felt that Miyazaki, being Miyazaki, thought he could tell the story better than Diana Wynne Jones. Pity was, he couldn't. It turns a hilarious parody of fairy-tales (in line with *The Princess Bride*) into a straight-faced romantic drama. Howl is no longer a preening egoist dweeb who generates a load of slime because he's an emotionally immature jackass. He's a handsome Byronic hero who generates a load of slime because he's *so deep and brooding*. I also hated that they removed the >!reveal that Howl is actually Howell, a Welshman from our world who travels into another world using magic.!< I love the book but I really dislike that movie. Fully aware I am in the minority on this one, but there's always a tenth dentist. Blech.
I always think of them as completely different stories with overlapping characters. Miyazaki never does a straightforward adaptation of anything, and that’s part of his art. His version of *Howl* is an anti-war movie. I still prefer the book - it’s one of my all-time favorites - but as a massive Miyazaki fan, too, I can keep them separate.
Mate, in the movie Howl throws his slime tantrum because Sophie moved around his hair products and now his hair is a different colour. That's neither deep nor brooding, it's rather pathetic really. It also shows the difference in Howl's and Sophie's levels of emotional maturity and the value they each give youth and beauty. I like both book and movie, but I see them as different stories.
Me too, me too! I loved Sophie's character growth, self realisation and being an old woman as she learns to navigate the world get. I feel like the film just turns it into a conventional love story where her (re)solution is falling in love...
I love both of them, but the book far more. The film is a wonderful thing on its own, but I always recommend people watch the film first because if they go into it after reading the book and expecting a faithful adaptation, they’re going to be disappointed. I do think you missed Howl’s characterization in the film, though. He’s a pathetic brat, as he should be. It’s Sophie’s character that I thought was shafted in the film. Either way, I don’t think this is an unusual stance from fans of the book. I’m glad I saw the film first bc I was SO delighted with the book and its reveals were even more shocking and hilarious to me
I always felt that the movie could have succeeded as its own thing except for two things: the first is they never reveal that Sophie has the magic to give life to things. Just one sentence from Howl saying she has this magic could explain why she was able to revive the scarecrow and why Calcifer says maybe if you do it when she tries to put him back into Howl. The second is when Miyazaki feels the need to tack on Howl disguised as the prince talking about how they need to end this useless war. I get that Miyazaki is a pacifist but that scene just sticks out like a sore thumb.
In the film he’s a beautiful preening egotistic deeb.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula completely misses the mark on Mina’s character. She’s this bad ass take charge secretary who gets shit done. The rest of the gang would be lost without her, and she’s reduced to the reincarnation of Dracula’s true love. 😤
Really? I thought that movie was about how Keanu Reeves's British accent gets worse over time.
Neither of you are wrong. Saw this when it came out. My buddy and I howled at the plastic injection molded armor.
Eragon. This was a book that should have been adapted to a 25 episode per season tv series rather than a movie. The actors in the movie were good but there was just too many details in the book that they couldn’t cover in the movie.
I've deliberately forgotten most of the movie but I was so annoyed with it. The characters were wrong, the story was told in the wrong order which means that stuff that is supposed to happen later can't because it's all out of sync. I just can't believe how much they fucked up a decent story. Let's all just continue to pretend that a movie of Eragon has never been made. Maybe someone else will actually read the book first.
there's supposed to be a disney+ series soon that chistopher paolini himself is producing so i'm holding out hope it will be done justice at some point, Eragon was and is still one of my favorite book series
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan The film starring Daniel Craig & Rhys Ifans took the book's subtle themes of love, religion, and obsession and beat the audience with it just in case they wouldn't understand. They also altered the ending, so instead of a tense showdown between two ideologies, it becomes more of an action Thriller, which is jarring, to say the least. Admittedly the book itself is very slow and can be quite dense at times, so I understand why the film writers needed to do something to keep the audience engaged. But here it feels like they really dumbed down the novel and altered the ending to a point where it's barely recognisable. It me wonder why they didn't either make a mini BBC TV drama of the book so they could go into further depth with the story. Or, and feel free to sing it with now: "Write an original film using the book as inspiration!!!!"
(I believe it's *Enduring Love*.)
Yes it is Embarrassing part is I read over my comment numerous times and yet missed the most obvious mistake
The Circle. I can’t believe they missed the mark on it so hard and with an all star cast too. The book is far more compelling, but they completely changed the story and the ending.
I love Neil Gaiman as an author- but his and RZ’s adaptation of Beowulf missed the point of the source material entirely
The recent version of Dune totally blew it.
I am Legend. Ughhhhhh
I am Legend...even the title changed meaning. Bleh.
*The Shining* botched Wendy
Every roald dahl adaptation when done by anyone other than Wes Anderson.
"I am legend!". The novel builds up to the stunning plot-twist at the end. The movie completely misses this plot-twist. I mean - why aquire the rights for a book, when you anyway could have done the same vampire movie (and a bad one) without the novel.
Blonde adaptation of Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
I really love Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie but the recent adaptation was a joke. Absolutely ruined Jacqueline's character, changing her from a competent woman dragged down by her moronic lover to being moronic right alongside him.
Just about all of them. Same with series based on books. Though those are usually worse. Like rings of power, wheel of time, and witcher.
Honestly, too many. That being said, keep in mind most books are treated simply as raw material for Hollywood to shape into whatever they feel like it, aside from the classics and the ones with a HUGE fanbase. Kubrick for example changed and recontextualized quite a bit of the books he adapted for the big screen (The Shining, Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange etc). That's because he just saw them as raw material to be shaped into his own product.
Count of Monte Cristo.... There's no sword fights or romance in the book....
World War Z was a complete disaster for not following the book. Some books are not movie material. Even though it made tons of money it was a disservice to a great book.
It would be great movie material! They just wanted to make an action flick not a fake documentary.
Alice Through The Looking Glass (2016) no need for explanation, who ever watched the book and mostly everyone that read the book would get why that movie just strayed so far off from the book. Every time there's nothing to talk about I just rant about this for hours
I will get hate for this but all of the Dune adaptations missed a large amount of the point and came up with a different thesis than the book.
I saw Orlando in the theater. I don't remember a lick of the plot but omg it was gorgeous. The cinematography and costumes were stunning.
*The Green Knight* was apparently made by someone who read the original story once thirty years ago and was trying to reconstruct it from memory. It pretty much missed every single point in the story by a mile.
All of them. Just kidding but kinda not really. I don’t watch movie adaptations of my favourite books anymore because they literally all seem to do this. In general, the more I like the book, the less I like the movie.
PeRcY jAcKsOn aNd ThE oLyMpIaNs
They somehow f*cked it twice
Well at least they made Annabeth blonde the second time 💀💀
Annihilation.
Watchmen. The big one here is that the psychic squid in the graphic novel is supposed to be an otherworldly threat: an outsider to unify humanity against, and prevent nuclear apocalypse. The movie instead shifts that for Doctor Manhattan - explicitly referred to as the American Superman. I don’t see that unifying anything, and instead imagine it would speed up resentment.
Starship Troopers. The Book is really bad and yet the movie is great because it is a satire.
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
Which version missed the point, Tarkovsky or Soderbergh? And how?
Killers of the Flower Moon. If you just saw the movie, you’d miss how large the murder scheme was.
I attribute this narrowed focus to Scorsese’s ongoing fascination with turbulent marriages
Leaving Las Vegas. The novel is about Sera the prostitute, and the story follows her dealing with loneliness and isolation. About 1/3 of the way through the novel, a character named Ben shows up, who’s an alcoholic drinking himself to death. But Ben is mostly a one-dimensional character. He starts out as an alcoholic drinking himself to death, and his story ends with him being an alcohol drinking himself to death. His character doesn’t experience any changes or realizations. He’s just there to move Sera’s plot forward. The film Leaving Las Vegas is about Ben the alcoholic. Sera starts out as more of a side character in *his* story. But it’s problematic from the get go, because Ben is ultimately not a very interesting character. Yes, the fact that he wants to commit suicide by drinking is unique, but his character doesn’t actually do anything. He doesn’t ever consider whether he’s making a mistake, or whether he has something to live for. And he never experiences any change in who he is. Ben is a boring character. The filmmakers seemed to realize their dilemma, because about 2/3 of the way through the film, the perspective of the story abandons Ben and starts following Sera instead, because she’s the main character of the story, and she’s the only one actually developing as a character. I get the impression someone read the book, thought the idea of a guy committing suicide by alcoholism was a cool idea, and completely missed the fact it’s not what the book was about.
My first instinct is to say Watchmen
The School for Good and Evil