Bad Book to Film Adaptations - or I expected nothing and I’m still let down

I hate that they made Ellie the kid that dies and not Gage. There's something infinitely more fucked up about having a sweet little toddler that barely even began to live turning into this murderous hellspawn undead monster. Ellie's job in the book is to spout cryptic vision shit a la King's penchant for having psychic children.

...This adaptation looks like wasted shit.
I want my career buried
in a Pet Sematery
I don't wanna collect a paycheck again.
 
I hate that they made Ellie the kid that dies and not Gage. There's something infinitely more fucked up about having a sweet little toddler that barely even began to live turning into this murderous hellspawn undead monster. Ellie's job in the book is to spout cryptic vision shit a la King's penchant for having psychic children.

...This adaptation looks like wasted shit.

It doesn't even look as gritty or bloody as the 80s movie. What's the point of this remake? It's not even one of Stephen King's more popular novels.
 
The movie for Filth by John S Baird.

The murder that gets the story going is changed right away to be less insensitive or some nonsense which would be fine if it stayed consistent with a characters motivation to commit the act, but they don't so it really undermines that characters story. Instead of really showing how much of a wretch Bruce is it either lightly implies things or completely ignores them. How they treat is health is fucked up too, in the book you're told about his shit diet, drug abuse, and general cleanliness which leads to him mostly being limp dicked on edge and with a horrible rash and tapeworms. Instead you get him getting a refill on anti psychotics to just slap you in the face with BRAIN PROBLEMS rather than letting people come to the conclusion that hes kind of fucked in the head by his actions.

They also change the ending majorly
Bruce decides to call his ex-wife who he left because she cheated on him with a black man, and get her to go to his place. He's mostly come to the conclusion that he is irredeemable and that only caring for himself has led him down a shit path with that partly being the fault of her. He sets up a noose and chair by the front door while wearing a shirt that says "YOU CAUSED THIS" waiting for her to come. He hears a key go in the lock and jumps only to have his daughter open the door followed by his wife and he realizes he really wanted to live and love them still while they're screaming and crying trying to save him. He gets the victory he thinks he wanted but he immediately regrets it. Instead you get the only characters he's shown any warmth to opening the door and Bruce making a joke while he hangs himself.
 
With the exception of "The Hunt for Red October", all the other Tom Clancy adaptations are utter shit.

Clear and Present Danger: Book Felix Cortez would have spat in disgust at his film version (who did things Book Cortez explicitly considered idiotic like killing your own information source). Harrison Ford was stuck trying to stay loyal to Jack Ryan's character while still having him do a lot of scenes that went to more appropriate characters in the books, and the ending misses the point of the book. I could go on, but even Clancy hated it, as the original draft of the movie stayed reasonably true to the book.

The Sum of All Fears: Barely resembles it's source material and some of the most ridiculous changes (swapping out Islamic terrorists with Neo Nazis) basically missed the point of the choice in terrorists the book reasonably explained.

Patriot Games: Replacing the Prince of Wales with a stand in replacement was fine, but they basically tried to make an action movie out of a story where the whole point was that the real heroes were the intel pros who zeroed in on the bad guys for the action heroes.
 
With the exception of "The Hunt for Red October", all the other Tom Clancy adaptations are utter shit.

Clear and Present Danger: Book Felix Cortez would have spat in disgust at his film version (who did things Book Cortez explicitly considered idiotic like killing your own information source). Harrison Ford was stuck trying to stay loyal to Jack Ryan's character while still having him do a lot of scenes that went to more appropriate characters in the books, and the ending misses the point of the book. I could go on, but even Clancy hated it, as the original draft of the movie stayed reasonably true to the book.

The Sum of All Fears: Barely resembles it's source material and some of the most ridiculous changes (swapping out Islamic terrorists with Neo Nazis) basically missed the point of the choice in terrorists the book reasonably explained.

Patriot Games: Replacing the Prince of Wales with a stand in replacement was fine, but they basically tried to make an action movie out of a story where the whole point was that the real heroes were the intel pros who zeroed in on the bad guys for the action heroes.
I'm gonna throw in two more along these lines.
Those two being the planned adaptations of Without Remorse and Rainbow Six.
First they cast Michael B. Jordan as John Clark so you've got some good old fashioned Black Washing right off the bat.
Without Remorse because Hollywood is never going to portray killing drug dealers in Baltimore positively.
And Rainbow Six will probably get fucked over because Hollywood will decide that EcoTerrorists and IRA offshoots aren't "relevant" anymore, and Jihadists are too uncomfortable, and change the bad guys to Alt Right Militia men or some shit like that because Woke.
Maybe I'll end up pleasantly surprised but I'm not holding my breath.
 
This
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Both sources were bad though
 
I haven't read the novella Hellbound Heart, but i'm sure it's movie counterpart Hellraiser falls into the same adaptation trappings even though Clive Barker directed it. It's about demons into extreme forms of bdsm, but it couldn't show the racier sex that was in the novella considering at the time apparently spanking wasn't seen as very vanilla as it is now also being torn to shreds with chains might up the rating. Not to mention the titular demons don't make an entrance til the latter half of the movie. Then Hollweird proceeds to fuck it into the dirt with countless sequels even more asinine and shitty as the next and not because of the effects I like 80's/90's b horror especially The Evil Dead.
I haven't read the novella but Hellraiser is excellent and from what I've researched made all the right moves for an adaptation.

On the subject of the OP, I'd say Jurassic Park: the Lost World. Crichton wrote the novel solely because Spielberg asked him to, and then Ol' Steve ignored 90% of it. Granted, the novel itself was probably too dour and technical to make for a good faithful adaptation, but that doesn't mean it had to turn into this weird tree-hugger/monster mash hybrid.
 
"More immediately evil" then. You know what I meant.


I was going to post Dune then, Dune the miniseries and Dune forever will be a bad book to film adaptation.

If only because people don’t get that Dune is a not very subtle deconstruction of the usual story tropes all the while directly employing those tropes.

Paul as the Chosen One is a Bene Gesserit psy ops meme that he’s leveraged and he eventually destroys who and what the Fremen are.

Duncan Idaho is usually an easily manipulated twit no matter how much he shrieks and postures about how no one can tell him what’s what.

No wonder no one liked what Herbert wrote after the first book.
 
Necroing this thread, but how did nobody mention I, Robot? I guess everyone just forgot it existed and it’s an adaptation in name only, but slapping the name of one of the best works of science fiction ever written onto a stupid action movie is pretty gross.

I also wasn’t happy with the adaptation of The Goblet of Fire. The book’s one of my favourite in the series, so I was always going to have issues with what they did because there’s no way you can cram even half that book into a two hour film, but some of the cuts were just jarring.
“Let the Quidditch World Cup begin! Psych! We’re going to cut to later so you don’t see any of the match!”
Why bother including that if you’re just going to fast forward past? Why not just start with the Death Eater attack? I was so disappointed when I saw the film in the cinema.
Agreed. His Dark Materials in general comes off as Pullman trying to write an atheist version of The Chronicles of Narnia without any of CS Lewis's talent or charm.
It’s actually worse than that - Pullman’s been very vocal about calling the Narnia books religious propaganda. You might say that’s a fair charge, since the parallels to biblical narratives are obvious to anyone paying attention and Lewis was a noted Christian apologist. However, Lewis never intended to incorporate Christian themes into the books originally (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe started with the image of a faun in the snow), but he was a recent convert to Christianity, so he wrote what he knew and they just happened to seep in. The thing is, you can enjoy the Narnia books while completely ignoring the Christian parallels because they still work fine as fantasy stories in their own right. I’m one of the staunchest atheists around and they’re still some of my favourite books.

Pullman on the other hand explicitly set out to, as you say, write an atheist response to Narnia. As such, His Dark Materials is far more guilty of propagandising than Narnia ever will be and the atheistic themes are far harder to ignore. So not only is Pullman a less talented writer than Lewis, he’s also a colossal hypocrite.
 
It got mentioned before in the thread but I have to second I Am Legend.
I love the book's ending with Robert in the cell musing about how he became the evil that the new vampire society would fear, that he's killed so many of them that his death is not only inevitable but necessary for this new form of civilisation to flourish.

While them movie wasnt terrible (I've seen a lot worse, but I apparently have a soft spot for Will Smith since I also liked Wild Wild West so I could be biased) it did drop the ball on the vampires. Though I enjoyed Robert slowly realizing that they're actually intelligent, capable of love and willing to wage war against him to get back their...what even was she? alpha bitch? group fucktoy?
 
Congo by Michael Crichton.

The book is actually pretty great, I hate that the embarrassing movie is all anyone knows, with the talking gorilla and shooting gorillas with laser beams and "Stop eating my sesame cake!", none of which was in the book.

And to a lesser degree Sphere, although that movie was just mediocre and not as infamously bad as Congo, still a poor adaption of a better book though.
 
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a stand out because it's completely different from the source material. I might be able to write an autistic essay about it if I rewatched it, but I don't want to do that. Basically everything's watered down or completely changed and the plot is changed completely to make it some shitty B action movie and part of an attempt at a Universal CU before Marvel had even really entered the fray.

Troy was pretty shit.

Atlas shrugged was somehow even worse than the book.

The modern BBC adaptation of Watership Down completely fucks the plot by taking a female character with them toward the end. Also instead of making the bird a foreigner they can barely understand he's just Scottish (insert joke from English Kiwi about Scots being foreigners they can barely understand)

The Resident Evil movies were basically 'theme park' versions of characters from the games.

Call of Cthulhu: I really can't imagine a gay guy somehow escaping the cultists of Innsmouth then returning for any reason.

I think it was Angels and Demons but they replaced the Hassassin with some random european guy, which negates the entire point of having a middle eastern assassin taking out cardinals named "The Hassassin".

Necroing this thread, but how did nobody mention I, Robot?

Jesus don't remind me.

It got mentioned before in the thread but I have to second I Am Legend.
I love the book's ending with Robert in the cell musing about how he became the evil that the new vampire society would fear, that he's killed so many of them that his death is not only inevitable but necessary for this new form of civilisation to flourish.

While them movie wasnt terrible (I've seen a lot worse, but I apparently have a soft spot for Will Smith since I also liked Wild Wild West so I could be biased) it did drop the ball on the vampires. Though I enjoyed Robert slowly realizing that they're actually intelligent, capable of love and willing to wage war against him to get back their...what even was she? alpha bitch? group fucktoy?

I liked the movie as it's own thing but yeah as an adaptation it wasn't very good. It probably helps that I saw the movie first as a kid and then only read it a few years back, so they're pretty divorced from each other for me.
 
LoTR. The source material isn't even good, but the movies are unwatchable, especially the second one. The actors etc. are all good, but why the fuck would you think it's a good idea to give a fantasy epic the average shot length of an action movie (similar to let's say Terminator 2), and shoot even scenes without action like they are action scenes, and turn the franticness of it all to 11 by using unnecessary close ups through the majority of the movie... Yes I'm a long take slut, I can sit through 7 hours of Satantango and consider it peak entertainment, but the adhd of lotr is objectively a striking example of bad cinematography.

Salo. Shit movie, it absolutely does not, in any way whatsoever, reflect one of the greatest books ever written that it was based on. Even considered on its own as just a "fascists but also perverts" story it doesn't hold the comparison with works like Visconti's Gotterdammerung which is levels and levels better in every aspect.
 
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