For me it’s definitely the Dark Tower, but the Golden Compas was also a huge letdown.
- Dune (the old one, not the new one)
- Dark Tower
- Eragon
- Ender’s Game
- The Witcher (a real shame, it could have been such a good IP for Netflix)
Most adaptations suck, these are just some from the top of my head.
What about the middle Dune adaptation?
The mini series is fantastic. It’s a lot closer to the book and handles the pacing extremely well.
I like at least the first season of Witcher, though it could’ve been more linear
The old Dune was just lol what the fuck
What’s so bad about enders game. I don’t remember that being a bad adaptation, but it’s been a while.
It wasn’t a bad movie, I actually liked it a lot - but the book is significantly better and the movie left out a lot. If I had read the book before watching the movie I would probably have hated the movie tbh.
Also even picking that book to make into a movie was a mistake, enders game was only written to give backstory for speaker for the dead which is much better than the enders game book but never made it to becoming a movie itself
That’s the story of adaptations most of the time.
I read the book first and enjoyed the movie enough to buy it.
Honestly, I fucking hate the new Dune. The old Dune at least has charm for how goofy it can get. The characters and editing choices I have huge problems with. It’s a very pretty movie and most scenes made it in but the characters just aren’t there. Also the world isn’t established properly. They don’t even mention the Landsraad until the tailend of the movie but they’re important to know about because they are why the Emperor takes the strategy he does.
Oh God, I remember how disappointed I was when seeing the Eragon movie. After having read the trilogy I was having such high hopes, it could’ve been a LOTR alike trilogy, but instead we got this half baked… Stuff. At least the actors gave their best.
Kind of in the same line with the golden compass I guess?
I really enjoyed the Eragon books as a kid but they aren’t great themselves. It’s a mediocre book series adapted to a bad film.
Oh yeah for sure, they were great to child me, I haven’t read them in years.
I just thought of another example to the theme: I also really enjoyed the vampires assistant thirteenology or so, but the movie was horrendous!
Haven’t read it but I hear Eragon was absolutely shat on. Without reading it, the movie was pretty ehh for me, great acting but weird plot
The movie isn’t anywhere near the same as the book.
And it shouldn’t be thought of as the same story - it’s not an adaptation but an interpretation of the first book.
Though in doing that it ruins a few key points needed to link the sequels, which never received movie sequels because the movie was just that bad.
The only thing I can complement is some of the actor choices. Particularly the choice for Brom Murtagh, and galbatorix (though the mad king doesn’t appear in the books till the last book at the final showdown)
It was pretty fucking awful. But also the books really lost me around the 3rd/4th soooo xD
Have you seen His Dark Materials on HBO? From what my wife tells me it’s a lot closer to the books than the movie.
Was going to say the same, the BBC/HBO Dark Materials series is really excellent, beautifully made.
That just reminded me I need to watch the 3rd season.
I haven’t, but I will
Not seeing Ready Player One listed here. There were some choices made in that movie that might seem fine to someone who hasn’t read the book, but the huge number of absolutely unnecessary discrepancies was just gross.
I’d say Foundation, but the show has been so far away from the books since literally episode 1 that the name might as well be a coincidence.
I agree but a direct adaptation of the books would not make a good TV show.
The books are a series of vignettes spaced decades apart with no continuing characters and each is a separate short story. While they work in the written form, they would not on the screen.
It could be done as a series of vignettes, for example, as 6 episode series, with each series centred around each crisis. That would give you 4-5 hours - or 2.5 Mrs Doubtfires - to do what Asimov does in around 60 pages (depending on crisis).
I don’t understand the argument that this is impossible to do, pretty much every film you will have ever seen will have had a shorter runtime than 5 hours, and handled all aspects of character introduction, motivation, conflict, growth, and resolution, within than time too.
I am not saying it has to be identical or a word for word adaptation - I have no issues what so ever with gender swapping Hardin - but as another poster points out, having Seldon live on (other than as recordings getting increasingly divorced from reality) directly rejects the core premise of the book, which is a refutation of the great man hypothesis.
I think the closest you get is B5’s Deconstruction of Falling Stars.
I don’t have Apple TV, and I was irritated that I’d be missing Foundation. The more I hear about it, though, the less irritated I am.
I tried to watch Foundation, mostly because Asimov is one of those writers whose style I can’t stand in his actual books (his characterization is really flat–you could tell he was far more interested in his ideas and the characters were just pawns on a stage), and I’ve had a few cases where books I couldn’t finish were very watchable on screen. Also, I was following Jared Harris from the Expanse to Foundation in the hopes of seeing something awesome.
But what I saw, and what I remembered from the books, didn’t add up. Nor did it suck me in on its own merits, like some other adaptations have.
They very much lampshade that with the whole outliers thing. Events spin off in wildly different directions.
If you want a direct translation of the books, no dice, but damn the shit they’ve pulled out of whole cloth with the Cleons is amazeballs.
The Cleons is literally the only reason I continue to watch the show.
Did some good stuff with Riose as well.
Not looking forward to them fucking up The Mule tho :/
It feels more like an addition than an adaptation (it isn’t, but it’s the only perspective in which the show can be good). I’m a big fan of the books, and I’m also enjoying the show so far.
The show is so well done I don’t even mind that it’s not like the books
Even by itself, the show makes no sense.
From the first season I thought the Trantor stuff was awesome but the Terminus stuff sucked. Never have I had a show where I was more divided.
I was this close to skipping the Terminus stuff, I just couldn’t give a shit about it and was constantly waiting to see Trantor and the beefcake to do some boss shit
i mean lee pace fighting ninjas completely naked is a helluva plus, ya gotta admit.
Mandatory The Witcher mention. They simply started to make shit up because they didn’t like nor repect the books.
Damn shame, a faithful adaptation would’ve been amazing. Hope we get one some day
Pretty much every movie based on a Crichton novel except the first Jurassic Park and the original 1971 adaptation of The Andromeda Strain. Every other one has been awful (including The Lost World which is so far from the book it shouldn’t even get to be called “based on”).
Edit: After sleeping on it, I don’t know if the movie adaptations are objectively awful or if I was just unimpressed because I read the novel first for all of them.
I’ve never watched Disclosure nor finished the book, but it seems like one of the few they should have been able to get right.
I enjoyed Sphere, but I haven’t read the book and watched the movie close enough to compare them.
I’ve never read Congo, but I enjoyed the movie.
The movie may be ridiculous, but it is also fabulous.
I’ve read it but never seen the movie. lol. Based on the other bad adaptations, I assumed it was one as well. Will check it out sometime!
Haha. I was hoping you could comment on the movie. Oh well - I hope you do enjoy it!
Going to have to second The Dark Tower. To say it was a letdown is nowhere near enough.
The Witcher show starts off pretty well but quickly gets worse and worse. That’s probably my number two.
I also thought The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie was pretty disappointing, though not the worst of the worst.
I could probably think of a lot more if I browsed my book collection. Rare is the adaptation that meets the quality of the book. That would be a much shorter list. If we were looking at that question, the first movie that comes to mind is The Amityville Horror because that book had some of the worst writing that I have ever subjected myself to.
I don’t know how you could do HGTTG well, because the nonsense narration is pretty much the whole point, and I kind of liked what it was, but it was definitely a letdown still. Zaphod’s heads bothered the absolute shit out of me.
The Dark Tower being such a train wreck was a real shame too, because I thought Idris Elba was an inspired, unexpected choice for Roland.
I really thought he would make an excellent Roland. And he probably still would, if he were given a decent script and director.
Wwz. Still salty. It would have been spectacular if done along the same line as Supervolcano - the after fact interviews intercut with events as they happened was practically made to order for it - instead we get another shitty paint by numbers grab.
The best rendition of wwz is the full-cast audiobook
Starship Troopers. The book is great, but the movie is like if someone wrote a short summary of the cliffs notes of the book. I guess they both had bugs.
Funny you say that- that isn’t far from how it was made. Someone wrote a spec script about a human war with space bugs, independent of starship troopers. When one of the production people read the script they brought up the point that there was a book that they remembered that was kind of like it. When they checked, no one had the film rights to it so they bought it for cheap. They then did a quick rewrite to slap in the character names and basic/cheap/easy things from the book to make more of an appeal to the book fans. Then when the director came on board he was a fan if the book but also wanted to do his own thing. So you now had at least 3 different directions the story was going and it was simply held together by the loose premise of starship troopers.
Given the background of those involved, it’s a downright savage pastiche.
World War Z is barely at all like the book, and does a lot of really fucking stupid shit instead of having some of the really fucking cool shit from the book.
Like instead of a blind martial arts master surviving the zombies, we get to see one of the main characters slip on a ramp and break his neck. 😬
I still hate how Max Brooks said “Now, it’s a little unlike my book, but still good in it’s own right!” Because it wasn’t.
Way worse than break his neck, he outright accidentally shoots himself in the head.
And then it was insane that the zombies can magically tell if someone is specifically terminally ill and then will actively avoid them.
Tbh the book does a lot of dumb shit too
Like instead of a blind martial arts master surviving the zombies
Imo like this. This is some cringy anime shit, it felt so out of place
I still hate how Max Brooks said “Now, it’s a little unlike my book, but still good in it’s own right!” Because it wasn’t.
Yeah. It really bugs me when people are like “it’s still a good zombie movie.”
It is a bad movie. Regardless of genre.
I honestly forgot that there was ever a movie made about the book because that movie just took the name and wasn’t about the book. Fantastic book. Let’s forget about the movie.
Battlefield Earth was my favorite book as a young teenager. Ignoring everything else about the author (which I didn’t know at the time), I thought the book was brilliant (especially the first half). It touched my imagination in a way no other book had before, and I must have read it about a dozen times.
I seem to recall the book cover saying that a major motion picture was coming out soon, but I guess time is relative. For me it was about eighteen years (which was more than half my life at the time) before the movie actually came out, and that seemed like an eternity.
I wish I could say it was worth the wait. The movie was horrible – it had bad acting, a bad script, and couldn’t carry the book in only two hours.
It currently has a 3% tomatometer score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 2.5/10 at IMDB. The movie also won Worst Picture of the Decade at the 2010 Razzie Awards.
To be fair, as a Sci-fi writer L.Ron was actually pretty talented. I feel like I could have actually gotten in to his writing if I hadn’t only ever known him as fucking L.Ron Hubbard the idiot father of Scientology.
That first Dune movie decades ago. Yikes.
Sting was great though
No one wears metal underwear better!
I’m a huge David Lynch fan, but yeah, that movie is insane. Has some good moments, but not many!
This movie slaps if you watch it high. Like really high.
True of a lot of Lynch’s work. He definitely produces material aimed for a mind in an altered state
Put a list of Ursula Le Guin works on a wall and throw a dart at one of them. Don’t know which one you threw a dart at? That’s okay, because absolutely none of them have gotten good adaptations.
The only exception, extremely ironically given I’m saying this, is Tales of Earthsea. The first half is alright but I guess they lost their train of thought during the second act (their words not mine) and it became a Legend of Zelda story. Still not terrible though, I can’t understand why people hate on it when the same people love Ponyo.
Tales From Earthsea is the 2nd worst Ghibli film after Ocean Waves (of the ones I’ve seen, which is more than half)
What was that bad about it? Most of the movies don’t even have plots.
What Ghibli films don’t have plots? Ponyo, Totoro, Arrietty, Poppy Hill and Marnie have plots. Whisper of the Heart? I don’t remember the plot of that one.
Tales From Earthsea’s problem was the predictability. The course of the story was formulaic. Ooh there’s this evil wizard who must be defeated, big deal. Ghibli characters are usually more complex. Villains should have something noble or beautiful about them to get some of the viewer’s sympathy. When the protagonist was imprisoned and then the friend came and saved him, it was just too predictable. The rescue could have been done artfully but it was not.
By a plot, I mean a structural one. None of the ones you mentioned except for the last two had plots. The studio is famous for going on record saying they go out of their way to make their movies scriptless, instead preferring pure improv, though it kind of shows in how freeform and non-rule-based it feels. To be fair though, it does help to have read the book it was based on, you get the context of where exactly the movie begins to lose its identity (and appreciate it was trying to have one).
The Wrinkle in Time movie, think Oprah was in it. Haven’t seen it, heard it’s horrendous.
It’s not terrible, it’s just incredibly underwhelming. It’s a movie where occasionally things happen. Sometimes fantasy things happen. But somehow in the most boring way possible. Eventually the movie ended.
