Can you think of any films that are based on a book where the final movie product is WAAAAY different from the book?
I'm not talking just a little different...I'm talking where the film is NOTHING like the book at all.
One that I can think of is "The Relic".
The book is AWESOME! It is one of the most pulse pounding tales of fiction I've ever read.
The film however, uhhh......well........you get my drift.
The book has characters that aren't even in the film.
In fact, the man who kills the museum beast (Special Agent Pendergast) isn't in the movie at all!
And Greg Kawakita, (the Asian guy) Margo Greene's main rival for the financial grant for their dept. gets munched by the museum beast in the movie but is instrumental in the sequal to The Relic which is called "Reliquary". (A fantastic read should you decide to check it out sometime...I've read it twice)
Without Kawakita,, Reliquary could not exist. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.
Using a makeshift laboratory in an old abandoned warehouse , Kawakita takes the drug from the leaves in the first film, isolates the rheovirus (I think that's what it was called) in them and concocts a new drug from it and sells it to druggies & bums....creating a s**tload of monsters who take to the sewers of New York. (sounds like C.H.U.D. I know, but it's way better!)
And Dr. Frock (the old guy in the wheelchair) who dies in the movie....well...let's just say that he lives in the original book and his role in the sequel....dare I say is extraordinary!
I won't spoil it for you!
Trust me...It's GOOD!! Go read it!
You'll be blown away!
They altered the screenplay from the original source material so badly in the first Relic movie that I doubt the sequel could ever be made.
What films based on a book can you think of that are RADICALLY altered from the original source material?
Post Edited (11-06-03 17:29)
The James Bond films tend to deviate quite a bit from Ian Fleming's books. For example, Moonraker, which was written shortly after the war, was about Nazi war criminals building a missile to destroy London. Besides the title, the only resemblance between the book and the movie about stolen space shuttles and eugenics is that the villain is a rich guy named Hugo Drax. The movie was a completely new story. In hindsight, I don't suppose Fleming's story would have worked in the 80s, even with modifications. Still, it seems sort of dishonest to use the title.
One thing that was taken from the Moonraker novel, but used in a different movie (can't remember which), was that scene in which Bond plays cards with the villain early in the story, and takes him for a lot of money. He's told to "spend it quickly."
Post Edited (11-06-03 07:07)
"Enigma", the movie, completely re-elaborates the last third of the book or so, and for good. I like Robert Harris work, but his novel is a bit stale. Needless to say, screenwriter Tom Stoppard is the one to "blame" for the result.
Other brutal variations from book to film would be any Lovecraft or Poe adapted to the big screen (specially the Corman movies based on Poe's short tales) or the first two Jurassic Park movies.
Moby Dick (1930) (http://imdb.com/title/tt0021149/) in which Ahab not only gets the girl, but gets the whale as well.
Any given Frankenstien/Dracula movie. Especially the Hammer movies.
DONNIE BRASCO - The movie completely ignores the first 100 pages or so of the book. The remainder of the movie is about 20% faithful to the book. In real life, the Al Pacino character went to prison (I believe that he is still locked up). The murders that Donnie witnessed in the movie do not appear anywhere in the book.
GOODFELLAS and CASINO are also highly dramatized versions of the non-fiction books that inspired them.
I don't mind this, by the way. I enjoyed the books as books and the movies as movies. That's the way it should be.
I don't mind changes, either, as long as they are for the better. A subjective opinion, I know, but still...
Lawnmower Man. I think the film uses about five lines of dialogue from Steven King's rather interesting (but not especially scary) short story. Other than those few lines of dialogue, there is absolutely no resemblance between the two works.
Oh, wait - I forgot about murder-by-lawnmower...
And let us not forget the end of Hannibal... Or the rest of the movie for that matter.
Then there's Manhunter - Which leaves out significant details and long strings of events in from the book it's based on ("The Red Dragon"). The most painful part about that movie is the potrayal of Hannibal Lecter. The Hannibal in the book creeped the schtuffinz out of me. The one in the movie was annoying, not creepy. The photography was spectacular, and the movie itself is pretty good, if a little slow-moving. Still, it's the best adaptation of the book you can find.
It's funny how Silence of the Lambs managed to avoid gigantic changes, but both its predecessor and its sequel suffer major alterations... And Silence of the Lambs was critically acclaimed and a major success, while Hannibal and Red Dragon got panned and did poorly. A lesson for Hollywood, perhaps?
The film "Naked Lunch" changed from the original book by trying to have one somewhat linear story line with the same characters, a necessity of mainstream filmmaking. The book has some of the same characters and common elements (bug powder, mugwumps, "Agent" Lee making "reports", Interzone, etc.) but there are no typewriters turning into talking bugs and Lee only briefly appears.
"Semi-Tough" added the plot line about one of the two football players trying to marry the owner's daughter, the whole "est" spoof cult and the subplot that went along with it, and turned the guys' female rating system around (a one was perfect in the book, a ten was in the movie, but both claimed that a perfect woman was impossible).
"Soldier In the Rain" is a cute Steve McQueen/Jackie Gleason comedy about two hustlers/scroungers trying to live the easy life in the army and talking about "their" big dreams of the real easy life with lots of "No Time For Sergents" style hijinks thrown in. McQueen's character is almost like an overgrown kid who finally matures somewhat and gets some focus after Gleason's character dies saving his neck. In the book there is less comedy, and McQueen's character learns to defy authority of all kinds when his pal dies, by going AWOL (IIRC) and driving his soft top car through the middle of a raging thunderstorm with the top down, lightning strikes all around him, and looking up to the clouds and calmly saying "f**k you." to God.
"Starship Troopers" has little in common with the book other than alien bugs vs. marines
"Dracula" - I'm reading the original book right now and so far it bares only a passing reference to the Bela Lugosi movie of the same name
FearlessFreep wrote:
> "Starship Troopers" has little in common with the book other
> than alien bugs vs. marines
>
> "Dracula" - I'm reading the original book right now and so far
> it bares only a passing reference to the Bela Lugosi movie of
> the same name
You forgot the overall "Facism is GOOD" theme...
You forgot the overall "Facism is GOOD" theme...
I left it out because the book seems to offer at least a serious look at it but the movie is more a comical parody devoid of any thought
Try the Jess Franco version "Count Dracula" of Bram Stoker's novel, he gets the character of Dracula somewhat right. Christopher Lee portrays him as an old man and the scene with Harker and the brides is good, but the movie is so murky and slow. What a waste of a great cast Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski as Renfield.
Lee has said it was the most faithful portrayal of the Dracula character. To a degree he's right. but the lack of a decent budget hurts the movie since there were no special effects they can't travel beyond the few basic sets and locations used, and I'm not a fan of Franco although I've only seen a few of his films.
The Lugosi DRACULA was based on a stage play.
The conversion from book to film is really quite difficult to understand. Their is always a point where something from the original written material will be changed for the script form, usually because it either "doesn't fit" or "cannot be done" (whatever these two mean). While they come off as excuses, this is all standard practice. George Pal's version of H.G. Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS changes everything from the original book, from characters to locations. But, the reason for this was because of the higher-up's saying that the Victorian Era would not read well with the modern 1950's audence, so it was updated. The result wasn't bad at all and it worked, but one wonders if the film would have been better if Pal was able to make it take place in it's original setting with original characters.
However, their have been cases where few scriptwriters read only the title of the book and the books short synopsis of what the story is about, and therefore go from that rather than read the entire book. While not all films go by the book standards, this kind of practice that I mentioned comes off as very half-assed and an example of not reading the full material before making changes. Why? Well, what if their is some interesting moment that the scriptwriter could use, but misses his chance because he didn't read the whole book?
Still, their are some good films that do not follow the whole book. THE GODFATHER is one of them, as mentioned earlier by somebody else.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is WAY diffrent from the book.While the first movie stayed pretty true to the book with the exception of taking a few things out to save time, the second movie Peter Jackson completely screwed up on.Half the stuff in the movie never happened in the book.First Aragorn is not knocked over cliff and thought dead,second Frodo and Sam do not go to Osgoliath, third the Ents make there decision about going to war during the meeting not after Tree Beard sees all the destruction, and the list goes on with that movie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I really enjoyed Stephen Kings "It". Then I saw the made for TV movie and cried. The two are very different. What a shame.
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.
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)
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.
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.