The Hobbit. Probably not the worst movies with not the worst bastardisation (that’d be The Dark Tower for me), but I simply can’t wrap my mind around the overbloated monstrosity that the Hobbit TRILOGY is. Like why would anyone do this, it felt like it’s in the bag, they got Peter Jackson, they already made LotR to great success, why do we suddenly need wacky wheels with cartoon CG goblins in 48 FPS for some reason… It doesn’t even match neither the tone of the book nor the tone of LotR movies.
peter Jackson was dragged in kicking and screaming years after preproduction started. it was destined to be a studio driven mess from the start
If you watch the behind the scenes stuff it honestly is pretty impressive how competent the movies ended up being. Yes, they are terrible, but they could have been a lot worse. Peter Jackson made them watchable, at least.
The hobbit movies should have fleshed out the dwarf characters better with all that extra time, give each of them a substory spread out over the trilogy so they would be more memorable. They did that with only one of the dwarves and it’s a silly love triangle that barely goes into the character of said dwarf. With the movie we got, ask any average person directly after seeing the movies to name the dwarves, i bet hardly anyone can.
Grumpy, Doc, Sneezy, I definitely forget the rest though.
Not only does the love triangle not make sense, but it really only serves to erode the significance of friendship of Legolas and Gimli. They were supposed to be first friendship between an Elf and dwarf in a long time
Warner Bros didn’t want to make the Hobbit. They wanted to make another Lord of the Rings movie, and had to use the Hobbit for it. The Hobbit is very much NOT a Lord of the Rings story, despite the shared setting. Square book, round movie.
Also, they knew there wasn’t enough content, but Warner Bros had to split the profits of the first movie five ways. They didn’t have to do that for the second movie, and then they added a third to squeeze out even more.
See, I think the high frame rate would look great if what you were looking at was real. But what you’re looking at is a room of actors in nylon beards and Martin Freeman in rubber feet.
And where did the spare barrel come from?
Full CGI ruined the hobbit for me. The costume and make up work was so good in LotR. That and the whole movie operated as if in a physics-free zone. Nothing made sense.
I never watched the other two, I imagine they are just as bad.
Those didn’t happen. Go back to the animated movies.
Have you seen the early 90s Finnish Hobbit?
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They lost me at what they did to my boy Radagast.
In defense of The Dark Tower… it isn’t an adaptation of the books. It’s a sequel. It continues the story in a way in which Roland finally breaks the loop.
“I Am Legend” has been made into 3 or more movies, none of which have anything like the book’s ending.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is dull and misses the point almost entirely, but almost manages the title line. Not quite.
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
I Am Legend (2007) almost gets it. The vampires are competent. Will Smith’s smarter than Neville of the book, but crazier. But then both endings fail to treat the vampires as a society.
The original cut of the 2007 ended with Will Smith’s character realizing he had been abducting and murdering conscious, aware creatures. The ending has the vampires doing a rescue mission, visibly terrified of Smith, and then he allows the one he abducted to rejoin her society.
Test audiences apparently didn’t like it or didn’t understand it
Test audiences apparently didn’t like it or didn’t understand it
It’s funny the irony of I Am Legend, it is an allegory to an older society having to make way to a newer one, and somehow every time that’s the story they can’t do.
I read the book on a whim in high school. I think it was one of those random Barnes and Nobles finds. The ending was an amazing horror twist, with Neville realizing he’s the monster and the audience realizing that they’ve been rooting for the villain The whole time, and the acceptance of the transition to the new society.
The only adaptation I’ve seen was the Will Smith movie which was generic zombie movie nonsense.
Days Gone (the game) did a better job than the “I am legend” movie, imo. Approached a similar plot from a different angle.
Were the zombies not killing any human in sight in the book?
They weren’t zombies, they were vampires in the book. Like talking, civilized people.
I only know of Will Smith version of “I am Legend”. There are more?
Omega Man is a fun movie though.
the 1964 one at least has vincent price in it
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
Appropriate, as the star of that movie usually did too.
Not a classic book, but Artemis Fowl. Disney managed to confuse fans of the books and newcomers to the series alike by adding a McGuffin that was unnecessary, bringing the antagonist from the second book into the movie on the first book, and mangling the relations between the two main protagonists beyond recognition.
Somewhere deep down I think I remember that book as great, the movie has to be horrible
Butler… is the comic relief.
oh god I remember this nightmare
World War Z. Not a classic book, but still…Wtf.
World War Z has NEVER been made into a film!
Was it that bad?
It’s a perfectly fine zombie movie, but it only takes small elements from the excellent book. The book needs to be a TV series, made in a documentary style. I just pretend the movie is unrelated; it’s enjoyable as just a standard action movie with zombies in it.
Yeah, 10 part mini series! Could be amazing.
World War Z is absolutely a modern classic. You can just tell when people are going to be talking about a book a hundred or so years later.
Shit-ass politics though.
I agree on the basis that classics are defined by reception and not if they are any good or not, like how Birth of a Nation was for a while considered basically the best movie ever.
It would have been so easy to do a straight up adaptation of the battle of Yonkers, narrated by Mark Hamill, his two following parts, and a few of the smaller stories here and there to flesh things out, too…
At least it got the perfect audiobook adaptation.
I, robot.
Asimov: “The ‘robots take over the world’ plot is overdone. I think humans would make robots intrinsically safe through these three laws.”
Movie: “What if the robots interpreted the three laws in such a way that they decided to take over the world??!?”
The only good part of that movie was when Will Smith’s sidekick was like “this thing runs on gasoline! Don’t you know gasoline explodes?!”
A running theme of Asimov’s Robot stories is that the Three Laws are inadequate. Robots that aren’t smart and insightful enough keep melting down their positronic brains when they reach contradictions or are placed in irreconcilable situations. Eventually Daneel and Giskard come up with the Zeroth Law; and if I recall correctly they only manage that because Daneel is humaniform and Giskard is telepathic.
spoiler
And the robots do take over, eventually!
There were flaws, yes, but they never rose to the level of attempting to destroy humanity that I recall. We had a sort of plot armor in that Asimov wasn’t interested in writing that kind of story.
I’m getting this from a forward he wrote for one of the robot book compilations.
Oh, sure, the robots never want to destroy and replace humanity, but they do end up taking quite a lot of control of humanity’s future.
Wasn’t there books that he wrote that were about flaws in the Three Laws?
Flaws or interesting interpretations of them, but he rarely if ever approached the “robots destroy humanity” trope even if it was technically possible in his universe because he thought it was boring.
Are you saying the book does not have a blatant commercial for All Stars?
I don’t know what you’re talking about, there has never been a movie adaptation of the book! Never!
In fact, there hasn’t. It was an original script called Hardwired with an Asimovian paint job.
Ah, the Starship Troopers effect.
Yup. However I’d say ST succeeded and IR failed miserably.
ST didn’t succeed in it’s day, it just retroactively got a cult following from people who didn’t read the book.
And it didn’t succeed at showing the only part of the book that mattered, power armored space marines with shoulder nuke launchers!
If it was a good criticism of Heinlein’s weirdo militarism it’d have been another thing, but the most damning criticisms of it are made up because Verhoeven couldn’t be bothered to finish reading a short novel.
See the thing is that Heinlein wrote about a lot of different societies, some of which are completely antithetical to the militaristic selective democracy in ST.
People often say “oh this author thinks this or that” but if multiple of their works contradict how can you tell what is and isn’t their personal views?
That being said, yeah most of what Verhoeven “criticized” wasn’t even in the novel, there was no propaganda because they didn’t actually want people to enlist lol if only he’d made it to the second chapter where the anti-recruiter gave his spiel about the military industrial complex and it’s continuing growth due to the benefits tied to service…
I think Heinlein was actually much more against militarism than people give him credit for, hell he wrote “if this goes on-” about half a century before the problem became acute, he saw the religious authoritarianism from the US right wing coming miles away. I can’t imagine he wasn’t also critiquing our GI bill system of service for education, and the increasing dependency of military contractors on our economy with the novel.
Was RAH a weird dude? Absolutely. I think people are too quick to judge his personal values and beliefs based on one novel out of dozens of conflicting ideologies. Hell go read “beyond this horizon”, the good guys are communists and run an automated economy with no standing army lol try and make that fit with the society of Troopers.
Imagine if they did an anthology series… /drooling
For now I’ve got Pluto to look forward to.
Pluto? I never finished reading the manga, but it was looking promising. Is there a movie made or coming up?
There’s a Netflix anime getting made!
Oh oh interesting interesting!
… should I finish reading it first…?
It’s a great story, but that’s up to you! I ended up reading scanlations of it years ago.
I was so disappointed I just forgot of its existence until now.
I thought for sure this would be the top comment.
Because no one is going with the classic, I can mention Eragon.
When I went to community college, I’d arrive early to one theater class, and sitting there already (from a previous class, I believe) were two girls/women who somehow managed to fill 75% of their conversation, every time, with “Eragon was such a bad movie adaptation.”
Which taught me that the movie was so bad they it genuinely hurt fans of the novel.
The Eragon movie is like the last season of Game of Thrones, but with none of the context of earlier seasons.
The first tome of Dragon is 600 pages, it’s hardly a novel.
Yeah. I guess this post is now about bad movie adaptations in general.
You are 100% right about the Eragon movie. I loved those books as a kid and I was so excited for that movie and it was just so bafflingly terrible. It was like they didn’t even try.
I was going to read Eragon with my kids, but then remembered how bad the movie was - and knew that they’d want to watch it after reading the books. So I haven’t read it with them. Might get around to it eventually.
That was my first movie as a kid where I thought “wow, the adults really fucked up the retelling of the book, if this is what this is supposed to be”
The Wheel of Time. I waited for reviews before watching it, so glad I never wasted a second of my life watching that piece of blasphemous garbage. Just stick to the source material, how fucking hard is it??? Apparently too hard for modern directors, they have to “fix” everything and make it appealing for a “modern audience.” Bitch, I am the modern audience, and fuck you.
They even ignored Brandon Sanderson who offered free advice on how to write the story FFS. Even the show runner had the gall to say he’s a fanboy of the series.
Hard disagree here. I’m a rabid wheel of time fan who has read the books at least 6 times.
Ir would be downright impossible to “stick to the source” for book one (or really, any if them) and have it be good on film. It just wouldn’t work on film, there is too much going on. The story would feel like it drags and is being forcefully stretched out, because the book is rather repetitive. That repetition works in a book because you are getting to read the characters inner thoughts, and in paper it adds tension that, for example, Rand and Mat are unsure whether the next place they stay will be full of dark friends.
But after the third time they get chased out by dark friends a TV audience would be like “OK they did this already get on with it.” Repetition on TV gets boring FAST.
And the magic system is all kinds of messy in the books. They’re diving into it a bit more now, but it’s still got Tobe simplified for screen. You can’t convey characters thoughts on screen, which basically neuters the whole system. The book is VERY exposition heavy, and that gets boring real quick on screen. Look at the LOTR theatrical VS extended editions. There is a reason that Bilbo talking about Hobbits at the beginning got cut. I like that scene, but it also is too much exposition to drop on the viewer right after the intro, which is also exposition. EOTW is like half exposition, and most of the books are at least a third exposition. That all has to get cut or reworked to be actually fun to watch without being super preachy. It’s
Listen to Brandon Sanderson talking about the adaptation of Mistborm he has been working in for ages now. He has said that he had to make big, fundamental changes to the characters and story to make it work on film. He said his first draft was closest to the book, and that it was quite bad.
The biggest fuckup season 1 of the show did was not including the prologue. Idk why they cut it, it’s such a good intro. Besides that, I thought they did alright. Season two has been much better so far, and has shown that they really do understand the core of this story and all of the characters in it.
Agreed, there is a ton of internalized exposition in the books which can’t be done on the screen without it getting awkward. I have also generally enjoyed the show so far, and I think the pacing is actually pretty good. There are definitely times in the books where we are getting “scale” via brute force word count, and the visual medium definitely opens some things up in that regard.
I’ve never read the books, although I’d really like to. I only know two things: Its fucking awesome and really, really long and convoluted. Someone told me that getting into it is hard, but there is nothing quite like it and its worth it. I watched the series while drinking beer and hanging out with my father. We both like fantasy, needed something to binge and I heard of the source material. We thought the series (only seen the first season) was pretty cool. Knowing the infamy of the books it was clear that they had to cut vast parts of the books, but for someone uninitiated it was a fun watch. At the same time I already thought it had to be unbearable for fans of the book for the same reason.
I liked it, as long as I looked it at as an interpretation rather than an exact translation.
I like this! Maybe the book is a telling of the story as it happens and the show is a retelling centuries later with the information available to them. They don’t have the inner monologue of the characters, they don’t know all the exact details (ok, so Perrin wasn’t married? Eh, his early life wasn’t super clear in the written histories).
Just watch the Prime “x-ray” animated shorts. That’s the perfect preamble to the books reread.
To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.
And don’t get me started on black unbearded female dwarves who have no need for melanin underground… what the fuck.
There’s no dwarves in the Wheel of Time.
And it’s not a problem for LotR either, lol.
Among other things, the setting isn’t just creationist, there are elves running around in the show that remember it.
Well actually, the dwarves were created by the smith god Aulë deep in darkness under the mountains of Middle-Earth, made to be strong and unyielding. I don’t think he cared much about their reaction to the sun, it stands to reason their skin would mirror the materials used by the god that created them - clay and stone. A darker skin tone makes more sense to me frankly.
Ooo nice take, I like this. I could totally get behind this if it was all dwarves being darker skinned, but unfortunately in the show it isn’t.
The many adaptations of the Iliad, none of them is gay enough.
“Do Androids Dream of Eletric Sheep”
You’ll probably recognize it as Blade Runner but the film took so much liberty the author allowed a good friend to write three sequels in order to harmonize the book with the movie.
Also “Starship Troopers”.
I can give Starship Troopers a pass though. Making it into a satire of fascism works better than it being straight up fascist propaganda. The book is basically a social experiment and people who read books will most likely get the point. People who don’t read on the other hand…
No, Starship Troopers was not a direct endorsement of fascism. This is exactly why it wasn’t a good adaptation, largely because Verhoeven famously didn’t even read the very short novel he wanted to criticize but he’s convinced a horde of fans of trash movies that the novel says things it simply does not.
The movie made up the majority of its criticisms of Heinlein’s fictional society, including misrepresenting the process of “earning” citizenship, the most suspiciously fascistic element that in the novel is much more benign, and throwing out a completely fabricated plot hint that Buenos Aires was a false flag, as well as portraying the Pseudo-Arachnids as simple space bugs when they’re a technological species, but he didn’t bother critiqueing all the time he spent on malding on modern military officers being hyper-responsible warrior-poets.
And that’s, like, the bad part! Which he’d have fuckin known, if he’d read the fuckin book!
Heinlein is best described as a militarist liberal, and eventually a neoliberal when that became a thing. He literally ran for office as a Democrat in the Reagan years.
Everyone who’s read one Heinlein novel thinks they know exactly what Heinlein’s real-world political views must have been, because he wrote characters who expound on theirs. But the politics of Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the Lazarus Long stories aren’t the same, just to pick a few examples.
The terror mission in the opening of the book would have been a very interesting introduction to the political and military dynamics in the universe. Shame it doesn’t seem to show up in any Starship Troopers media.
Electric Sheep is the first book I thought of when I read the thread title.
I’m pretty indifferent on Blade Runner. It’s got a great soundtrack and aesthetic, but as an adaptation of my favorite SF book of all time I can’t stand it.
Was my first thought, as well. I saw the movie first and hated it, glad I stumbled across the book at some point and found one of my now favourite authors.
I’m beyond the debate over the Starship Troopers book vs movie. Both are very much being their own thing, and I am able to enjoy them both.
The knife training scene in each summarizes the different approach they have.
I highly recommend scifi fans read Starship Troopers and Forever War back to back. I consider them complimentary books regarding the nature of war, and government.
Easily “World War Z.” What an utter waste of the source material.
Related in name only. I loved the book and got curious about the movie.
What a boring useless mess of tropes. Brad Pitt travels the world and saves everyone. There, I just saved you 90 minutes.
It’s not even a bad movie. But it’s only very tangentially related to the source material.
Yeah I thought that too. I saw the movie before I’d read the book and I was like “that was fine, I dunno what everyone’s fussing about.” Then I read the book and was like “…oh.”
It’d be great to see the book done properly. I know everyone says it but a multi-part HBO-type show would be amazing.
It’s a wonderfully stupid movie.
The plot is nonsense, everything is forgettable, and I’ve easily watched it a dozen times both because of, and in spite of, all that.
I would say Rings of Power, then again it has basically nothing to do with any books and seems to be based on bad fan fiction.
There’s a book for rings of power??
It is very loosely based on the appendages to the
SilmarillionLOTR.Appendices to LOTR*
They legally cannot use the silmarillion
They try to sneak some stuff in anyways though.
Like, the whole “master smith discovers alloys” thing was a way to show the three elven rings being made of the different metals without directly referencing the Silmarillion describing them. When they pour out the “alloy” to make the rings they’re clearly made of different metals.
But like, who was that for?
Real huge lore nerds you just pissed off because Sauron wasn’t supposed to know about their existence or take part in their making? Him not knowing is why his plan didn’t work!
Yes you’re right. Thank God they don’t have access to that
But the thing is, Rings of Power is incredibly fun, because it completely ignores source, steals just enough character names & places to get Lord of the Rings fans excited, but it’s not boring. Lord of the Rings is about thousands of pages of walking.
Galadriel is a WOMAN and therefore according to Professor Tolkien is useless. Show makes her the one badass in Middle Earth.
I did hate the not-yet-Hobbits, that was not a good invention.
Possibly controversial, but I thought the movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a huge disappointment.
Luckily there’s the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)
I partly expected that this particular movie would come up in such a thread, as most people seem to be quite disappointed by it. Sure it was different from what everyone expected, and it could have been much better. I still appreciate it though because, like all adaptations/versions of H2G2, it tells a slightly different story, with the same humour and satire that is characteristic of Douglas Adams. And the effects were quite nifty IMO. Too bad DNA did not live to see the completed film…
Luckily there’s the radio series, books, TV show, comic, play, and game to get me through :-)
Don’t forget the BBC TV series, it was not bad either ;-)
That was the TV show I meant :-)
Sorry, my bad :-)
It’s all hoopy, my frood :-)
Do you sass that hoopy itsraining? Now there’s a frood who knows where his towel is
It’s a mess of a movie, but it’s also the only version of the story where some bits of Adams’ original material actually ended up being seen — namely Humma Kavula and the Point-of-View Gun.
I agree. Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel really didn’t pull their weight. Zaphod with only one head nearly the entire time was lame. The whole thing felt too “American” to me.
Bill Nighy was fantastic though.
Zooey was definitely meh, but Mos Def was amazing imho. Especially considering it was his first acting role iirc.
Mos was about 7 years into his acting career by that time.
He’s always good though.
I’m just the opposite. I enjoyed the movie but not the book.
I’ve not read the book. I swear theres some weird curse on my copy, because every time I sit down to read it some major shit hits a fan.
But I loved the movie, and the only disappointing thing with regard to it is that it didnt do well enough to get the sequels made.
It was terrible!
I found the book over the top and a cringy “penguin of doom” “I’m so random” style of humour. I don’t get that series
The foundation series by apple is pretty bad.
How bad? The absolute best part is a part not present at all in the books (the Cleons). Everything related to the book is bastardised, imo.
I love the series and I love the books. It’s just not for book purists but they’ve made a really good take on the universe and it’s also beautiful.
It’s amazing just how visually impressive the show is. If it was done with the best we had 30 years ago it still would have been good, but the vfx would have dragged it down. Now it raises it to a whole other level.
Do you think the show itself is bad or is it just bad as an adaptation of the book?
I’d say it’s a bad adaptation of the book. But as a sci-fi series, it’s quite good. I rate it at least 7 out of 10. Although I haven’t watched the second season because I’m waiting for it to be finished so I can binge it if I wanted to.
The show is based on the universe and some characters created by Asimov but it’s freely adapted. You’ll have to see the TV shows and the books as two entities, there are a few similarities, Easter eggs, etc. But they’re different and both great IF you’re not looking for a translation from text to screen.
The TV series is eerily beautiful, the story is better in S2 and more complex. Great cast too and on a “small” budget.
I enjoyed it so far as well and really like the development the Cleons go through. Maybe I’ll look into the books when the series is concluded
The Cleons aren’t even in the book!?? What the…
The original book spends almost no time with the old empire. Once the Foundation is established, the details of the empire’s fall are irrelevant to the story. In fact, the premise makes a point that the exact details of its fall don’t really matter.
Nah all the “downfall of the empire” stuff happens off screen.
Also the series is an anthology with each short story being hundreds or thousands of years apart.
I actually really like the show, but I’ve just decided to act as though it’s completely unrelated to the books, because besides the names of characters, and the initial events, it basically is.
The most recent episode had opened an interesting path of exploration. I’m hopeful, but they are bound to twist it somehow.
Not a classic for most people but zoomers will agree that Percy Jackson and the lightning thief was a tragedy.
Hot take but I kinda liked the percy jackson movies. Yeah they could’ve been done better but it was one of my favorite series and to see some parts of it visualized and on the big screen is a cool experience. Still, I’m very excited for what Rick Riordan has cooked up with Disney right now.
Yeah the new Percy Jackson series has a lot of potential and good young actors who are more accurate in terms of characters age.
Then Sea of Monsters ended up being worse somehow.
God, I forgot that even existed…
Yeah. They even got a second chance. Am opportunity to make respectable sequels for each book… But no. We can’t have nice things.
Not a classics, but:
- American Gods: they made unnecessary changes and introduced unnecessary filler plotlines until it felt like a drag to watch. The book already explored social issues, but the showrunners decided to dial it up to 100 and spoonfeed it to the audience at the expense of the actual plot.
- Ready Player One: they dumbed down the whole thing about hunting keys and portals, removed tons of important worldbuilding details, made pointless changes that ruined the spirit of the books. They should have made it into a series instead of a movie.
What made me mad at RP1 movie was they put the Easter Egg in Atari Adventure. Which is mentioned in chapter 0 of the book, and again in the fake town (not put in the movie) because it’s so obvious, nobody who cared about games at all would hide anything there.
And no Tomb of Horrors.
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he’s too senile to understand the game references.
And the actors are far too pretty for the “but you’re beautiful inside” plot.
Not to mention the bastardization of the entire plot.
I liked the book because it felt like the villains had actual capabilities to accomplish their goals. The protagonists did everything right and it still wasnt enough to get the bad guys off their backs.
In the movie the protagonists make stupid decisions and the villain helper character which didn’t even exist in the book just overhears them talking about it.
Fucking. Stupid.
And no Tomb of Horrors.
That’s because the novel was about nerd culture in general, while the movie was almost entirely about video games. All the D&D, Rush, Monty Python, etc. references were absent. The Shining was in there because Kubrick was Spielberg’s mentor.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HollywoodBeautyStandards
It doesn’t happen all the time, though
Ready Player One was a good adaptation of a mediocre book into a mediocre movie.
I won’t argue with the book being mediocre (I myself enjoyed it but many others didn’t), but it wasn’t a faithful adaptation at all.
Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn’t as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.
