I Am Legend. Just the whole thing.
The Hobbit. Like, all of it
The color from outer space.
It wasn’t glowing purple. It was closer to a dull grey.
I’ll give them a pass because it’s hard to film lovecraft books. How do you film a new color no one has seen before? Or monster that drives you crazy just to loook at?
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.
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.
I like the Bilbo edit that removes most of the crap, and keeps the story shown to be from only what Bilbo sees. Gets the 3 movies down to 4 hrs I think.
I’ve seen that edit. Much improved, but unfortunately there are some continuity gaps that are inevitable when cutting up a film like that.
I, Robot.
Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of “robots take over humanity”. To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. “Robots take over humanity” was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.
Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data’s character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.
The only thing that advertisement masquerading as a movie has in common with the Asimov work is the title.
I, Robot was about as far from the source material as you could get.
Shouldn’t be called an adaptation, really. They only dressed it up a tiny bit as Asimov for marketing reasons
From what I heard, they got the rights to I, Robot, grabbed some script about a robot uprising that they already had optioned, and slapped a few things on it.
This is apparently fairly common. If there’s a Hollywood movie based on something that doesn’t really align with the original, there’s a good chance that this is what happened. Starship Troopers was the same way (though that’s a whole different ballgame on whether the Hollywood version is good on its own merits).
Robots take over humanity has been around since literally the first robot story. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is where the word robot was coined.
Question for fans of the Russian film/books “Night Watch”:
The first movie was amazing, it adapts roughly the first 1/3rd of the first book, I thought it was very well done. Went out, bought the books and caught up.
“Day Watch” comes out. I can’t tell if it’s legitimately a shitty movie or if it’s just shitty compared to the books?
p.s. The author is now problematic because of the whole Russia/Ukraine issue, but the books were completed before even the Crimea invasion in 2014.
Saw the movies and liked the unique story. I hope I get my hands on the books.
When you consider the first movie adapts the first 1/3rd of the first book, and the 2nd movie kind of fucks up adapting the 2nd 1/3rd… there’s a TON more material. 6 books total and it all comes to a very satisfying conclusion.
HBO could get 6 seasons of television out of this if they wanted to and unlike Game of Thrones, it’s all done!
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.
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.
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.
I watched the movie first. The only good thing about it is it inspired me to read the book to see what the movie missed. Upon reading all the books, I think the vest way to adapt them to screen would be an animated series that is beat for beat faithful to the books.
My biggest issue with the film is, if they didn’t want a villain protagonist, why adapt a book with a villain protagonist?
I hated the fact that the movie steered away from the fact that Artemis Fowl was a frigging criminal mastermind and instead made him a mid rebel with a relatable motivation… Have the same grouse about Ender’s Game too
Maybe not the worst, but this one’s personal: Edge of Tomorrow’s take on the fantastic All You Need Is Kill (spoilers ahead).
- Making the movie PG-13. In chapter 2 of the manga, there is a brutal death scene showing how Keiji can’t escape the Mimics wherever he goes. The series was quite bloody, and used that to its advantage.
- Casting Emily Blunt as “Rita Vrataski”. One of her defining character traits was that she was unassuming, and that you wouldn’t expect that level of combat skill from her appearance.
- While Keiji was in love with “Rita” in the original, it was unrequited–the change felt actively detrimental to “Rita’s” character.
SIDENOTE: I feel like changing this was sort of unimportant, but you’ll notice I’m using quotes for “Rita”. That’s because, in the original, her real name is unknown. She took someone else’s identity.
I did not know the movie was based on anything. It’s one of my favorite scifi flicks, I always viewed it as based on a game player’s grind to get through a game by trying different moves after each death to succeed.
Wanted. It’s a completely different story, in the movie it’s about a loser guy discovering destiny murders that are ordered to kill people by a Loom. The comic is about a loser guy discovering a secret society of super-villans because he also has a superpower.
But I would also like to present a counter-example. Watchmen, the ending is different from the comic to the movie, and I much prefer the movie ending. In the comic the plan by the villain is to make an alien-like monster appear out of thin air, because this will make humankind unite, in the movie his plan is to blow out the major cities in the world and make it look like Dr. Manhattan did it because then humanity will unite both out of fear and trying to stop Dr. Manhattan from doing it again. I never questioned the comic, but after watching the movie I got the nagging thought of “why would an alien appearing unite mankind? They don’t know if the alien destroying stuff was purposeful, them thinking Dr. Manhattan did it is better because they know it was intentional and done by someone who knows who they are”
All the adaptations of I Am Legend are bad, but 2007 movie was insulting. It gave the illusion of following the book, but then did a u-tutn and completely changed the meaning of the story and the title itself.
In the movie the protagonist becomes a legend because he sacrifices himself to cure vampirism.
In the book he is the last man in a world of vampires, he kills vampires, and understands that he is like a legendary monster that kills people in their sleep. He is then executed.
In case you haven’t seen the alternate ending for I am Legend, it puts a very different perspective on the whole movie. Apparently it was the original, but didn’t screen well with viewers.
The most telling moment for me is the infected slaps their hand on the glass and draws a butterfly as the last words the protagonist’s daughter ever said to him, “Daddy, look a the butterfly!” echo is his head and he realizes that the infected he has captured has a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder. He even makes a note of it in the capture and experimentation scene claiming that the infected exposing himself to sunlight is a sign that “social de-evolution is complete.” when instead the infected just witnessed a monster kidnap his daughter and drag her into a dangerous area that he cannot follow to do unknown experiments on her to change her into something else.
Instead the ending negates everything built up to the point and ends with a boring action-movie cliche.
It gave the illusion of following the book.
Have you actually read the short story? Because I am baffled as to how anyone who has read the story would say that.
The movie was in no way an adaptation of the short story at all. It never even pretended to follow the short story.
Just like iRobot the only thing I Am Legend has in common with it’s written work is the title.
He is then executed.
No he wasn’t. He committed suicide.
As I recall it, he is locked in a room awaiting execution at the end of the book and while he is there he observes the vampires creating a spectacle out of his death which causes him to realize that he has been the boogeyman of their society - that he has become the stuff of legends.
Yeah, the book vampires were much more fleshed out. In the movie they were just barely-sentient beasts, primarily running off of instinct. They only seemingly had some basic higher-level reasoning. His primary struggle was surviving while surrounded by bloodthirsty animals.
In the book, they were a full blown society with their own culture. When the people around him changed, he was suddenly a stranger in a brand new culture. The point was that in the old society, vampires were the thing that went bump in the night. But in the new society, he was the monster that parents told their kids to watch out for.
I want to take this opportunity to remind the audience that 2005’s Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey exists. The second of two utter failures to adapt a Clive Cussler novel to the big screen.
It wasn’t a good movie because of the studio and because of legal clashes with Cussler. I think you could have gotten it done.
Plot wise, I think making Dirk obsessed with the ironclad from the beginning was an unwise choice. They both made that a bigger factor in the overall plot, and yet diminished the whole point of it by removing its Very Important Passenger. They put so much shit in the runtime about the ironclad that the actual main plots of the gold mine and the waste disposal plant had to be pared down.
Also, casting. I actually think the movie is very well cast, McConaughey and Cruz were good, William Macy was an excellent Sandecker, Rainn Wilson was pretty good as Rudy Gunn, Lambert Wilson was the objectively correct choice for Massarde, and Steve Zahn was utterly incorrect for Al Giordino. I was about to say at least they didn’t get Seth Rogan or Jack Black but Jack Black might actually have worked.
This movie was the last hurrah for old school adventure movies like The Mummy, I wish it got popular enough to get good sequels
Remind?
I wasn’t even aware that this movie existed until this very second. I’m looking at the trailer right now, it’s impressive this never even made a blip in my radar, I was into this genre of adventure movies in my teens.
It’s…okay. Cussler himself hated it.
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.
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.
That’s when Aragorn rode back to Rivendell when they were almost at Mordor, and then back to Mordor again, right?
Just pick a scene from The Hobbit movies and there’s your answer. Any scene.
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.
I was hyped for a 3 hour hobbit film. I noped out the second I learned it was a trilogy.
I could read the entire book in less time than the films. How are they managing it? Cba finding out.
