Movies: Novel Adaptations That Failed To Keep True To The Novel

[David Howery]

well, if you want to see a movie that is very faithful to the book, check out the Pendragon version of "War of the Worlds"....


... and then promise not to kill me for having you watch something so awful...

 

[Desdichado]

I say watch the Asylum version with C. Thomas Howell. Despite coming from a notorious b-movie studio, it's actually somewhat intelligent.

Plus, because it comes from a notorious b-movie studio, it's got a fair amount of gratuitous topless women.

 

[Rackhir]

Holy cow. Seriously? The entire movie was rife with ham-handed satire. Like I just said, it didn't work because it was quoting so much directly from the book, and the book largely resonates with the philosophy that permeates it. Just because you suddenly put your monologuers in Nazi uniforms doesn't mean that you've made your point that the philosophy their espousing in any way resembles the Nazis. But Voerhoven (or however you spell it) isn't nearly subtle enough to actually pull that off.

Except that the only character wearing a Nazi outfit is Neil Patrick Harris and he's in only a handful of scenes. The MI uniforms aren't even vaguely Wehrmacht or SS.

 

[Desdichado]

No, all of the officers had very Wehrmacht like uniforms. Doogie Hauser was the only one who had a Gestapo type uniform, I'll grant you that.

The grunt fatigues also weren't very Wehrmacht like either.

 

[Pbartender]

"To Kill A Mockingbird" is the best book to film adaptation I have ever seen.

I agree whole heartedly.

I'd also suggest that Charlton Heston's 1990 version of Treasure Island is right up there with it.

 

[Desdichado]

With Christian Bale, before he was famous, even.

 

[frankthedm]

Two words....Starship Troopers. Book was WAAAY better. Makes me cringe at the idea of Stranger in a Strange Land being adapted to the big screen.

Adaptation Decay - Television Tropes & Idioms
The film version of Robert A Heinlein's Starship Troopers completely removed the philosophical questions of the book while transforming the all-male power-armored Mobile Infantry who go to extreme lengths to recover their own wounded and dead into a co-ed showering Redshirt Army who see nothing wrong with ''killing'' their own wounded. Director Paul Verhoeven subverted the entire book, seemingly in order to satirize what he (and a great many other readers) felt to be Heinlein's fascistic tendencies. Whether adaptations that parody their source material really count as Adaptation Decay is a question for another day.

* Verhoeven admits that he never got more than a few chapters into the book, which raises the question of whether lazy adaptation can count as parody.
o The reason Verhoeven never bothered to read much of the book is that the film wasn't actually intended to be an adaptation or parody of Starship Troopers itself, but instead a satire of that kind of gung-ho militarist Sci-Fi. The studio optioned the rights to Starship Troopers and made Verhoeven change character names.
* The main enemy, the "Arachnids", was, in the book, a highly technical race. In the movie, they are just bugs who breed into missile throwing mutants. It's never quite explained how they manage to be a real threat to humanity, how a planet based species manages to send asteroids across light years to hit Earth without technology is never explained. It's perhaps worth noting here that it's implied in the movie, however, that the bugs are merely scapegoats and it's in fact the humans who are the evil invading aliens.

 

[Andre]

The most successful adaptation of a book that also stayed remarkably close to the source material: the first Harry Potter movie. I read the book just before seeing the movie and I was constantly surprised how closely they kept to the original story, while still taking advantage of the different medium. The other Harry Potter movies have suffered from the fact that the later books are much longer than the first one, so whole swathes of material have to cut out.

I agree that the LotR movies are mostly faithful adaptations, but I still don't get why they changed some things, other than a suspicion that Peter Jackson, et al, actually believe they can write Tolkien better than Tolkien.

A bad adaptation that I felt was better as a movie is The Postman. Granted, I don't have a knee-jerk hatred of all things Costner, so that helped. But mostly I found David Brin's book to be incoherent, with a horrible ending.

Another bad adaptation that was a fun movie is I, Robot. Though I'd still like to see the original stories turned into a movie or short series, as the stories are good, classic Asimov. (Or better yet, the Foundation series.)

Amazingly, The Omega Man (bad as it is) is a much better adaptation of the original story than Will Smith's I, Legend. But Smith's is the better movie, IMHO.

 

[Mallus]

The most successful adaptation of a book that also stayed remarkably close to the source material: the first Harry Potter movie.

See now I didn't like the Harry Potter films until the third, when a really talented filmmaker (Alfonso Cuaron) got involved. The first movie might have been more accurate, but that didn't stop it from being hack-work fantasy.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

OK, I will admit right off the bat that I ENJOY the book Battlefield Earth.

The movie, however,.....

[can't even finish my thought]

DS