Book Vs. WAY Different Film

[trekgeezer]

Peter Jackson has done an excellent job with LOTR, by staying with the spirit of the book.

All I look for in an adaptation is that the film maker and writer stay with the spirit of the book. Adapting any book is very difficult, some more than others. Stephen King hates the Stanley Kubrick  version of  The Shining because Kubrick missed the entire point of the book, a man's fall into darkness. Jack Nicholson was nuts from the very beginning of the movie.

Dune is another example of this. Most people have to read the book more than once to understand it.  So much of  it is intenalized  with the characters that it is very hard to be faithful to the source material.  The SciFi miniseries did a much better job of this than the Lynch movie  did.

As long as they stay with the spirit of the story and the characters is actually all you ask. The two mediums are hard to interchange.

[raj]

Well put Trek_geezer.  Books and film are different media, they need to tell the story differently, and I'd rather have the spirit of a book put onto film than a slow, plodding word for word "faithful" adaptation.

[JohnL]

The first Howling is quite different from the book. The basic idea is the same, a couple going to a small village where everyone turns out to be a werwolf, but everything else is different. I've only read to the second book, but it had *NOTHING* in common with the movie.

The only thing Watchers had in common with the book was the creature/dog pairing. All the characters and situations are completely different.

[Eirik]

Just wanted to mention the film version of Catch-22 in this thread - Though I loved the book, I thought making a coherent watchable film of it would have been a total impossibility.  Turns out the film does the book justice.  Recommended.

[dean]

i agree that the spirit of the book should be what we consider in an adaptation sense.  i love ian fleming's novels, but i like the bond movies seperately,  such as you only live twice.  very different, from the book [which is one of my favorite books in the series] yet the movie wasn't that bad.

what annoys me sometimes is when directors go out of their way to try and be faithful to the fans.  for example, in lord of the rings, there are lots of little things in the movie that only people who have read the book will get properly [like how frodo can cover himself with that elvish cloak in two towers]

its actually not that bad, it's nice to be thought of, just sometimes they sacrifice cinematic fluidity just to cater to fans of the book.

for instance, in lord of the rings, i liked how the ents made the decision to go to war by seeing the destruction.  it made the scene way more dramatic.

i also liked the kubrik version of the shining much better than the king version, even if it wasn't really that faithful to the book.

[Shounen Kakumei Pikachu]

Neverending Story:  Great book begat good film.  But then they realised there is more to the book than Atreyu's journey so they put Bastian back in and have him duke it out with Xayide.  We also get to meet the Empress a second time and Bastian does not take the throne to the Ivory Tower.  Which, given how great Lothlórien looked in LOTR, could be done more faithfully today (it's not a tower, rather a collection of buildings that just happens to look like a tower from far off)

And that Old LOTR...UGH!  Why did they have to do it as two films?

[Ellie]

I really enjoyed Stephen Kings "It". Then I saw the made for TV movie and cried. The two are very different. What a shame.

[Cash Flagg]

One of my most frustrating movie-watching experiences has been with the film version of Communion by Whitley Strieber. The book, whether you believe it's a "true story" of alien abduction or not (personally, I don't), is a horror classic. But while watching the movie, I kept waiting for something I remembered from the book to happen, and it never did. I found this really strange, considering Strieber wrote the screenplay. (In addition to that, casting Christopher Walken as Strieber was a huge mistake---he's freakier than the aliens.)

Blade Runner bears very little resemblance to Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Some of the character names are similar, and the basic premise of a man hunting down androids is the same, but that's about it. Both the book and movie have serious flaws, but overall I prefer the book version.

[AndyC]

Cash Flagg wrote:

> But while watching the movie, I kept waiting for something I
> remembered from the book to happen, and it never did.

This was what I find most frustrating any time a favourite book is made into a movie. I generally think books and movies are apples and oranges, but I can't help but be disappointed. Michael Crichton's "Sphere" comes to mind as one of the more frustrating examples. I thought it sucked royally. Without preconceived ideas of what it would be, who knows? I might have been more forgiving.

Same with Jurassic Park 2. That was a p**s-poor adaptation that missed the whole point of the book, along with some of the best parts. I think it used almost as much unused material from Jurassic Park as it did material from The Lost World novel. And the entire last part of the movie was added.

Movies were not kind to Crichton's work in the 90s, although I liked the first Jurassic Park.



Post Edited (11-10-03 18:39)

[raj]

Cheer up then, Timeline should be different.  When I read the book I kept getting the feeling that it was nothing more than a movie script.

[Eirik]

In Eastwood's "Bloodwork", they changed who the killer was... to a character who appears in later books!  

I also understand there was some huge digression from the book in the film version of "Bonfire of the Vanaties" that totally changed around the entire meaning of the story.  Didn't see the movie though.

For those interested in an excellent and faithful film adaption of Crichton, look no further than Andromeda Strain (1960s or early 70s) - very well done in my opinion.