Wonderful, magical short story.
Terrible, brutal hollywood crap.
[This message has been edited by arriki (edited February 16, 2007).]
Edit to add - David Lynch's 'Dune'. It makes no sense! It has Sting in it! They ruined the ending!
[This message has been edited by Annabel Lee (edited February 16, 2007).]
"I, Robot" had nothing to do either with Asimov's robot short stories, or even Eando Binder's single story from which Asimov and his then-publisher swiped the title.
Any Tarzan movie.
The first film followed the book quite well but the second one was almost an entirely diferent story. As for the ending to the third film. How long does he spend on the hobbits and gandalf smiling at each other? I know it seemed like half an hour without a word spoken when I saw it at the cinema.
(Almost as long as King Kong takes to die at the end of Peter Jackson next film.)
One of the biggest deviations from the books of LOTR was when Faramir took Frodo to Osgiliath! Not to mention Frodo coming face to face with a Nazgul.
"Inspired by..." sounds like an excuse to try to suck some SF fans into the audience for a typical nihilistic Hollywood hack-em-up-hack-em-up explosion-explosion keep-things-moving movie job. Still the original "I, Robot" source material is still there to be taken advantage of. (There's also a Harlan Ellison screenplay of "I, Robot" kicking around---though, really, I thought it would make about as bad a movie as the one they did make.)
There's a movie just out that's a filmed version of "Bridge to Terabintha" (hope I'm spelling that right). The ads are promoting it as a fantasy...from what I remember of it, it's not a fantasy, really, though it has fantastic elements.
Resulting in a lot of parents taking their four year olds to see it, thinking it's a happy movie about magic and giants - and thus traumatising them.
quote:
However Peter Jackson made a huge thing out of insisting that he would be completely faithfull to the book. If he hadn't made such a ridiculous promise I wouldnt have been anywhre near as bothere about the divergance of the films.
True dat. For a more faithful version, try the BBC radio that starred Ian Holm as Frodo---though that, too, leaves some things out (like Bombadil), it doesn't really change much of anything...
BEOWULF&GRENDEL
THE DA VINCI CODE
TROY
I thought the SciFi Channel's Miniseries version of DUNE was pretty good--except for Baron Harkonnen rhyming every time a scene ended with him. They made a few changes, but stayed true to the book's integrity. Now, the CHILDREN OF DUNE that SciFi did was not only a hack job of Children of Dune but Dune Messiah as well.
ERAGON was Hacked to pieces. My Seven- and Ten-year-old both came out of the theater complaining. My Ten-year-old son told me how they "crucified" it. My Seven-year-old daughter said, "Daddy, that wasn't how it was at ALL."
The Original THE SHINING
THE BOURNE IDENTITY
THE BOURNE SUPREMECY
and I'll probably hate THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM too. It's impossible to get that one right, when the wife died in the second movie, but he's protecting his wife and kid in the third!
And I think bourne identity was quite a good film. To take such an intensive book and boil it down into a film that worked was well done.
As for the third film not being able to be based on the book because they killed his wife off, what about the fact that the opponent in the third book (Ie: carlos the assasin) being killed in the first film? I think that that is a bigger problem for them to overcome if they want to base the third film on the third book. The bigest problem with turning bourne identity books into films was the fact that the main plot was about which of his identities he would keep, jason or david, and that is much better shown in a book then a film.
Add me to the list of those annoyed by the movie treatment of Eragon. Did John Malcovich ever leave that one stone room with the tapestry on the wall? Seriously, why bother having a big name in the movie at all...no one must have mentioned to him that the bad guy is featured in name only in the first two books! I found that one in a long list of annoying deviations from the story that, to me, were completely unnecessary! The Shade and the bug-dudes were scary enough bad guys. The way they made a big deal out of showing the Brom character being gruff and grumpy was just way overdone. I hadn't read the second half of the book when I saw the movie and I couldn't make sense of the second half of the movie. Not a good sign!
At any rate, I found the whole thing frustrating because it seemed like such a filmable book. I like books from movies and movies from books, though I have to read and watch, then read and watch again. While I understand the frustration with the HP movies, I also was confused by much of movie 3 and some of movie 4 (I watched before I read the books) - now that I've read the books and watched the movies again everything makes sense. I love how they have some details ready in the movies now for things that don't come up for another book or two - I think it was HP3 that shows the horseless carriages taking the kids to Hogwarts at the beginning of the school year. In HP5 is when Harry can see the therestrals (though I think Rowling forgot that Harry saw his parents die at age 1 and should therefore have been able to see the beasts all along...but that's not the point I'm making, LOL.) I think that kind of attention to detail is nifty.
The other book/movie that I remember from a long while back being really disappointed in was I think House of Rising Sun, with Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery. The movie plot diverged in unneccessary ways, in my opinion.
I think there is an unreasonable tension between making a movie "true" to the books, and making concessions to adapt them to the screen. A movie is not a book, and when you try to make it a book you wind up with an unnatural contortion of things that attempt to keep certain supposed essentials of the text that do not fit well with the hopped up drama on the screen. Not to mention how other things suffer (like character development) by trying to fit everything in.
In most cases (not all), I think it has to be settled that you are going to write a completely new story that simply resembles the one in the text in order to get something reasonable and natural for a movie. That means, in order to honor a book properly the writers need to carefully consider the strongest themes and intentions of the book, and rewrite the story to reveal those themes and intentions in a new way.
One example was "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." I don't think the screenwriters really took the time to understand the book. Instead of writing something that captured the feel and meaning of the book (another way to be "true" to it), they tried to fit in too much, tinkered with things they shouldn't have for effect, and completely sacrificed any reasonable amount of character development. The result was a movie that had only a vaguely superficial resemblance to the book. (Some of the things they tinkered with clearly contradicted the spirit of the book.)
The Harry Potter books adapted well to the screen because they are written much like a movie, and they don't carry as much meaning as LW&W or LOTR. They are filled with simple ideas that are closely tied to the action.
Eragon is similar to Harry Potter, but they just botched some things in making the movie. It wasn't so awful bad for what it was. Besides - my nephew loved the baby dragon.
Peter Jackson did some things well with LOTR, but he completely lost sight of the nature of Tolkien's characters, and transplanted it with a lot of gazing. The Tolkien themes were also largely unrecognizable in it. He completely butchered the ROTK, and I believe it was due to his desire for grand effects rather than being true to book and character. I don't think he or his writers made any good attempt to understand the work they were trying to represent.
It will be very interesting to me how our benevolent host's Ender movie turns out.
just to name a few...
looking back, I guess that some changes where unavoidable, but NO DWARVES AND NO URGALS, NOT TO MENTION THAT SAPHIRA HAD FEATHERS!!!