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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 4350685" data-attributes="member: 32740">I read Dune yonks ago and of course have seen the David Lynch adaptation a half dozen times on cable, but recently after seeing it on cable again I reread the book.  I was quite shocked at some of the changes and omissions.  I actually LIKE the movie for what it is, but it is far from a noteworthy adaptation.  It deserves credit for making a watchable movie out of a long book with a lot of internal dialogue. I, Robot, I had also read yonks ago, but I knew from the trailers that it was going to have almost nothing in common with Azimov's collection of stories except the title and 3 Laws.  It doesn't make it a bad adaptation because, really, it DIDN'T adapt anything from Azimov.  It just borrowed the title and the concept of the 3 Laws for a summer, blockbuster action movie.  Nothing wrong with that.  I have NOT reread Azimov's original stories, but from what I vaguely remember, I don't know that they would have made a good movie anyway. Great written fiction does NOT always translate to film.  Look at War of the Worlds.  A classic piece of fiction from H.G. Wells that has had two major movie adaptations and a number of other attempts.  But the original story has characters and scenes that just DON'T translate well to a movie.  The part with the "artilleryman", played in the recent blockbuster by Tim Robbins, is talky, slow, and generally a huge dead spot in the pacing.  The ending to the story (and thus the movies) is somewhat abrupt and anti-climactic.  Adaptation to film can be DIFFICULT - more difficult than simply writing a new screenplay from scratch.  I find it quite difficult to nitpik to a significant degree that an adapted screenplay varies fro mthe original material - even wildly. A lot of the rest of the list are not so much bad adaptations of books so much as BADLY WRITTEN - PERIOD, such as This Island Earth, and When Worlds Collide.</blockquote>

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