What's the worst change made in a movie adaptation of a book?
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Personally, I'm still irritated at the end of Hannibal (the 2001 movie). Spoilers for the end of the film and book ahead:
In the book, Clarice Starling has gone as far as she can in her FBI career. She became famous for solving big cases, moved up the corporate ladder, but that glass ceiling kept her from advancing. Too many misogynistic "good ol' boys" at the top, who not only prevent her from excelling in her career, but take every tiny mistake and blow it up into a potentially career-ending scenario.
Enter Hannibal Lecter; the suave and highly intelligent cannibal serial killer. He's outraged that Clarice's coworkers and bosses are actively objectifying her and ruining her career.
Long story short, at the end of the book, Hannibal rescues Clarice and gives her misogynistic boss an impromptu (and tasty!) lobotomy. Clarice ends up running away with Hannibal, because she realized he's the only person who respects her as an intelligent human being and not a piece of ass.
The movie chose to keep her loyal to the FBI and combative against Hannibal, even though the FBI actively tried to destroy her life. Hannibal escapes alone and the film just kind of ends. It was a complete non-ending.
The whole point of Silence of the Lambs and its sequel, Hannibal, was that Clarice was a woman trying to survive in a "man's job," yet proved she could belong - and excel - through her own skill and intellect. Silence of the Lambs did a pretty good job showing that on the big screen, but Hannibal didn't get the point of the story and decided the hero shouldn't end up with a cannibal, period. They treated him as more of an irredeemable monster.
It's kind of the "man vs. bear" meme, except replace the bear with a cannibal serial killer, and the girl still chose the cannibal as the safer choice to her co-workers.
FFS, my unread list is long enough. Now I gotta add this series too. Thanks op
(but actually, thank you, that sounds interesting)
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vaguely gestures at World War Z
Can you imagine a mockumentary with photos, reenactments, Redeker interview, military helicopters recording a supply drop following the redeker plan and thankful survivors, a historian explaining the Pakistan India war, live head cam footage of the Battle of Yonkers as that soldier retells his experince. It ends with some Drill Instructor explaining the box formation and taking your time with shots. Cuts to a drone going up and showing survivors in formation and hundreds of zombies in a large circle around them.
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Not a movie, but everything about the wheel of time show was a travesty.
Haaard disagree. The books are dated as hell, and they were doing interesting things with that series. tugs braid emphatically
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I was hoping for a faithful adaptation instead of just another zombie flick.
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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.
Idris Elba was an unexpected choice, but I was all for it. Unfortunately, you’re right about the rest of the film. SO much wasted potential.
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EVERY SINGLE CHOICE made in Ready Player One. What a disappointment.
What a disappointment.
That's my thought on both the book and the movie. Perhaps its not the book's fault. There was so much hype surrounding it when it came out I thought it must be awesome. Instead I found the same simply story I'd read in a dozen other books, except this one drowning in a sea of 80s and 90s pop culture references. If it was a simply summer read without the hype I likely would have liked it for what it was.
I had similar disappointment when I finally read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". I read that same type of story a dozen times in other much better books but everyone was saying it was a groundbreaking book.
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Seek the truth, always.
I’ve been really liking Wheel of Time. I thought the books were really great world building but desperately needed some editing, and the TV provided some good editing. Sue me.
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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.
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WTF was that movie? Did they buy the rights to the title, but not the content?
And the tenth expert bit!
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If anything he made Chani less of rug to be walked all over and gave her a personality outside of "wife to the messiah". If you were going to bitch about anyone in the Dune movies I'd think it'd be The Lady Jessica because she is an entirely different character in the movies. I don't think that's a criticism because she serves the plot well, but that one is a more grounded argument
wrote last edited by [email protected]She's no "rug", but I can see why she "needed" to be changed in a 'modern' adaptation with a big budget and larger financial expectations.
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I’ve been really liking Wheel of Time. I thought the books were really great world building but desperately needed some editing, and the TV provided some good editing. Sue me.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Seek the truth, always.
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I thought it was an entertaining movie, but I haven’t read the book. Ima go download it right now.
I really liked the audiobook form. The story is basically told through an interviewer asking people what they experienced and the audiobook has different voice actors for all the characters.
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Please don't fuck up project hail mary.. please don't fuck up project hail mary..
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
If you want to read the books, it's 4 novels: Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising.
You can skip that fourth book if you want. It's a prequel story that shows how Hannibal grew up and what turned him to cannibalism. The author (Thomas Harris) wanted to keep him a mysterious character, but Hannibal was so popular, people kept demanding to know his backstory and Harris knew that if he didn't tell the story, someone else would. So he begrudgingly wrote an origin story.
You can tell he didn't want to write it. The writing style is completely different than his other books. It's very direct, like he's just dictating information instead of weaving a tale.
Red Dragon follows Hannibal in prison and the detective who caught him, using Hannibal's intellect to help catch a psychotic killer on the loose.
Silence of the Lambs is basically the same story as Red Dragon, except replace the brilliant veteran detective with an amateur FBI trainee, whom Hannibal takes an interest in.
Hannibal is a direct sequel to Silence of the Lambs, showing the FBI trainee's exceptional career and eventual downfall, thanks to the patriarchy.
The Hannibal quadrilogy is one of my favorite book series. I'm sad that the movie version of Hannibal didn't understand the point the books were telling. And the Hannibal Rising movie was a terrible B-movie plot about a young psychotic kid getting a taste for murder. Didn't really feel like a Hannibal movie at all.
I haven't seen the Hannibal TV series, although I hear it's pretty good. But it's an original story, so may not be very loyal to the book series.
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I was hoping for a faithful adaptation instead of just another zombie flick.
wrote last edited by [email protected]As was I. It felt like such a generic, by the numbers zombie movie with only some rare nods to the title.
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IIRC: The movie was written long before they slapped the title on it.
That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
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Not a movie, but everything about the wheel of time show was a travesty.
I feel the same way about Wheel Of Fortune.
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The Dark Tower by Stephen King. It was the book in name alone.
Ditto the vast majority of Stephen King adaptations.
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Oooo as someone who has seen the movie and never read the book, any sales pitch for me for the book?
Imagine the book as almost a Ken Burns style documentary made after the zombie war, going back and interviewing the people who were there and lived through it collecting their stories.
It's been a while since I read it, but each chapter is a different person being interviewed telling their story, more or less in chronological order. The stories don't really overlap directly with each other, but together they paint a great overall picture of the war from start to finish.
And it's a good cross section of different people, soldiers, scientists, ordinary people, an astronaut who was stranded on the ISS for the duration of the war, etc.
I think everyone who read the book really wants it to be picked up as a mockumentary miniseries in that sort of style with "archival" footage with people being interviewed giving voiceovers and all the other usual documentary trappings.
And the Zombie Survival Guide is also a fantastic companion to it that is basically done as a, well, survival guide, that was distributed during the war, and is referenced once or twice throughout WWZ
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I'd say Moonraker, which might be my favourite of the first books, but the movie adaptation keeps little more than the title and changes pretty much everything else (and as a result ends up being quite bad, receiving noticeably lukewarm reviews and nowadays often appearing in lists of worst Bond films ever).
