The Hobbit. Like, all of it
vaguely gestures at World War Z
I think they would have gotten away with that movie if it wasn’t for the ending. Like yeah they completely destroyed the source material, but at least it’s possible to have an interesting movie. Except like the last freaking third of the movie is just boring. Crushingly boring.
Much like there has been no Dark Tower movie, there has also been no World War Z movie.
They don’t count.
I thought it was an entertaining movie, but I haven’t read the book. Ima go download it right now.
The movie isn’t very interesting, but it’s not outright bad - unless you were hoping for a faithful adaptation. The book has a MUCH more interesting storyline.
I was hoping for a faithful adaptation instead of just another zombie flick.
As was I. It felt like such a generic, by the numbers zombie movie with only some rare nods to the title.
WTF was that movie? Did they buy the rights to the title, but not the content?
I had no experience of the original book and enjoyed the movie.
It’s a fun, enjoyable zombie movie, but the book was never going to transition well to being a movie. It’s a collection of fictional interviews with varied persons’ experiences surviving the zombie apocalypse (from a nuclear submarine captain to a blind man in the Japanese wilderness). Ideally it should be a mini-series with each episode focusing on a different character’s story as they are interviewed.
Oooo as someone who has seen the movie and never read the book, any sales pitch for me for the book?
The book is wonderfully written, and actually fairly insightful from a disaster preparedness and policy standpoint. It’s been a while since a read it so forgive me if the details aren’t exactly correct. Its written from the viewpoint of a journalist traveling the world post zombie apocalypse. He is collecting stories from survivors of various major events that happened during the zombie outbreak. Each chapter details a different event conveyed by a different witness, so it’s not a cohesive single plot story. More like working notes of someone preparing to write a history of a major global disaster. It highlights some of the mistakes made and lessons learned as events unfolded.
The audiobook is also quite good. It’s fully cast, so each section is voiced by a new actor who writes the letters in the collection.
The Dark Tower. Good movie in its own right, especially if you like Idris Elba.
First, they took 8 Stephen King books, some of which were like 2" thick, and decided to turn it into a 90-minute PG-13 film. A single film.
Second, because the racist element was so offensive (a Black woman taken out of the 1970s, who has personally experienced racism toward her, is taken to a foreign world, an alternate reality, where she basically is led by an old white man (modeled after Clint Eastwood) and naturally she feels a certain type of way about that) they decided they were going to change it up. Make her white, and him Black. Hence casting Idris Elba as a guy based on Clint Eastwood. Then they dropped her character entirely. I will argue that Elba made a hell of a Gunslinger, but the reason they cast him was because they wanted to turn the whole racism plot on its head. For no good reason. It was fine in the books (this would be The Drawing of the Three, and The Waste Lands, the second and third books).
But for all that, it was an entertaining action flick with a bunch of Stephen King references. I quite like it. As a reader of the books and a fan of Stephen King, I shouldn’t, but the movie itself was good.
Honestly that the movie exists at all is the worst change, though.
I love the Dark Tower series and hadn’t seen the movie yet. They dropped Susannah out ENTIRELY? Seriously???
Yes, her and Eddie both (and Oy). His only companion is Jake.
I only read the first three or four books, but the movie didn’t include a single thing I remember from thee early books that I liked. No crab taking fingers, no giant robot bear, no talking train, or anything else. It seemed to me like they had some other script and slapped a Dark Tower veneer on it.
I realized there was trouble when the producers were being interviewed and stated they had a hard time finding an entry point to the universe and I was like “Bitch, FIRST LINE - ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.’”
Stephen King - Dreamcatcher
In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.
In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.
TV adaptation of Wheel of Time was just fucking awful. Like every stupid character change and story change was done literally as stupidly as possible and seemingly with a view to ruin the actual story as it was written.
I genuinely think the showrunners hadn’t read the series to the end by most of the changes they made and canned it when they caught up and realised how much they had fucked the story that was still to come.
Book and TV spoilers
Tower in exile run by Siuan mentoring Egwene who is aes sedai by virtue only of being elected Amyrlin? Nope, Siuan is dead and Egwene was made Aes Sedai so I guess that arc is dead.
Moiraine thought to be dead and later rescued from the tower of Ghenjei by Matt and Thom? Nope, she never got “killed”, and never went through the doorway.
Min, Elayne and Aviendha all accepting the situation and bonding with each other as sister wives and sharing the bond with Rand through their own connection? Nope. Min is shacking up with Matt (maybe? Either way doesn’t gaf about Rand) and Elayne and Aviendha are shacking up with each other instead.
Having Rand kill Turak with the power instead of entertaining his challenge was a little funny but completely outside of both Rand and LTT’s code of honour and especially LTT’s massive ego.
The first one that me swear out loud was killing Uno and making him Gaidal Cain. Like… I guess Uno won’t be leading armies in the last battle then, and Birgitte won’t be wondering where Gaidal was woven into the world as a young child…
Oh god I forgot they gave Perrin a wife and had him kill her for literally no reason…
So many stupid changes made for no conceivable reason. Not little things to make a character easier to write for TV or more relatable, but sweeping giant story changes that make great chunks of the original canon impossible.
I genuinely implore anyone who even got the slightest amount of joy out of the show to read the books. Learn the original and really very good story, and experience Jordan’s writing, rather than Judkins’ made-up-as-they-went-along shit erroneously accepted as passable work.
I read the books and liked the TV version. They were just different things. I am not sure I’d even enjoy a very faithful TV adaptation.
The Navidson Record
As a fellow HoL fan, dig your response.
OK, here’s the thing. Overall, Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy is extremely good. I think it’s the best Tolkien adaptation we’re likely to ever get.
HOWEVER.
The random “Arwen is dying!” subplot was incredibly fucking stupid and while it didn’t ruin the movies for me, it did dampen my enjoyment of them. There had to be a better way to get more screentime for Liv Tyler, surely.
I love the lotr movies but even the extended editions can’t fit in the nuances of all the supporting characters. this gets worse the later you get in the trilogy, the biggest victims probably being the ents, faramir, denethor and pippin.
my own personal pick is probably one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, where they change McMurphy’s crime from battery and gambling to statutory rape. that did not engender sympathy
For me it’s elves at Helm’s Deep. Totally unnecessary.
Although I always laugh out loud when Sam says “We shouldn’t even be here” in Osgiliath.
My devil’s advocate argument for the elves being there is that there were a bunch of battles in the north that didn’t make it into the movie and only get mentioned a little in the books, and one of the important themes of LOTR is that all these disparate groups had to band together to fight Sauron. So having elves be at Helm’s Deep is a way to show the different people fighting together in a movie series that was already pressed for time. Necessary? Maybe not. But it doesn’t bother me as much as some of the other changes, because I can at least see a rationale for it.
The thing is that the elves were explicitly leaving and staying out of the conflicts. It makes no sense for them to help out at Helm’s Deep but piss off for all the rest.
Literally everything about World War Z. Absolute travesty. The book is a unique and genuinely thought provoking new take on the zombie genre. The movie is an insult to every bit of world building Max Brooks created.
I say this to people and then always have to clarify:
It’s not that the World War Z movie is a bad adaptation of the book, it’s that it’s NOT an adaptation of the book at all. Other than the name, and the fact that it has zombies, there are literally no similarities between the book and the movie.
The characters are different, the settings are different, the format is different, the plot is different, the way the zombies act is different. Literally EVERYTHING.
Calling it an adaptation is like if you took The Neverending Story and changed its title to The Lord of The Rings and called that an adaptation.
Yeah, this one is the big one.
I feel like World War Z would have been better adapted as a TV show given that the book was episodic in nature.
I read somewhere that this is basically Max Brooks’ take on the film.
Something about breathing a sigh of relief when he read the script, because it was such a distinct story that there was nothing left of his book to be butchered.
Very well put. I couldn’t agree more.
I thought the movie was pretty enjoyable but it shouldn’t have been named after the book. It would have been a decent zombie movie on its own.
I agree. Its a fun movie but is the literal opposite of everything in the book. My favorite chapter is where the crashed pilot outwalks the group of zombies. There’s something so organic and absolutely terrifying about that. Humans are persistence predators and it was such a unique way of turning the tables on our evolutionary successes. Brilliant stuff. The movie may be fun, but its anything but brilliant.
Can I flip the script? Black Hawk Down was the most faithful adaptation of a book I’ve ever seen. As to the book, the author wanted to tell the story of the Battle of Mogadishu, faithfully. He had unprecedented, at the time, access to Defense Department files, interviewed everyone involved, strived for perfect accuracy.
When those guys are on that street corner, that’s what happened.
This is going to sound super nitpicky but even the first time I saw it, the modern body, ahistorical Aimpoints seen throughout the entire movie bothered me. It’s only because they are so unavoidably prominent and because the rest of the movie’s props are so well done that they stick out.
Aimpoints?
The Hobbit
From the shitty shoehorned romance to wholesale elimination of plot points in the original story. Yeah, there was definitely some drama in the whole production of the film, but nonetheless it was crap.
We demand our Tom Bombadil!
The Dark Tower by Stephen King. It was the book in name alone.
Ditto the vast majority of Stephen King adaptations.
Nah, there are some solid adaptations. Green Mile comes to mind. The two Pet Semtary’s aren’t off the mark. The Shawshank Redemption was brilliant. Plenty more. But we will not speak of The Lawnmower Man.
The Mist’s film adaptation has a better ending than the original story. King himself thought so.
Just pick a scene from The Hobbit movies and there’s your answer. Any scene.
You don’t remember in the book when Gandalf did a kick-flip 720 to a backside rail slide down the goblin king’s decapitated body?
Nononono, the singing dwarfes were absolutely true to the book. And Gandalph looking at Galadriel like a Schoolboy with a crush on his friends older Sister was definitely not in the books, but I loved it.
I was pretty hyped when the trailer had the dwarves singing in Bag End. Then the movie shit in my pants.
The Passage tv series. To be fair, I got about 10 minutes into the first episode before I decided there was no way they read more than the book blurb before they wrote the script, but maybe they pulled it back in?
Also Game of Thrones. The drift from source material started small but got pretty wild as they went on. I feel like Martin was pretty clear what the “Game of Thrones” was in the books and I don’t understand how a show with him as one of the key production members was able to miss that almost in its entirety. The show didn’t need a clear end, that’s the game of thrones, it never ends, the same cycle happens just as it always did.
I wouldn’t even say the drift from The Source material in Game of Thrones started small. In the second season they already make at least one huge massive shift in a story plot.
Please don’t fuck up project hail mary… please don’t fuck up project hail mary…
The most egregious that i remember must be Artemis Fowl.
I remember liking the book quite a lot for making fairies into the opposite of pushovers. It also had a mean edge to it that other teen fantasy lacked.
The movie is just… Not that.
