I am forever bitter about Eragon…
The fucking Dark Tower.
What a complete waste of a great cast.And man that could have been a fantastic show spanning years. So many great storytelling opportunities.
It’s disgusting. There is so much story and world there why did they have to make it so shitty
I didn’t even recognise the story in the film. I did hear something about amazon making a series adaptation?
It wasn’t necessarily ‘bad’, but I think they could have done better with Ender’s Game.
As soon as I heard about the movie I knew they were gonna milk the laser fight scenes for far more than they were worth.
I know this is a total pipe dream that never would’ve happened, but I wish they either just focused on Bean or just made a philosophical epic out of Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide instead.
Ender’s Shadow would actually be an excellent way for them to soft reboot the series.
I think it would have been better as a TV series. They glossed over the battle school battles too quickly. And in making it a series, they could have done Ender’s Shadow at the same time.
Eragon never got a movie.
Atla never got a movie
These things are true.
Eragon was not a great book. It was a decent premise, the characters and story had potential. Given it was written by a teenager, it’s very impressive.
But Mr Paolini must look back on it and cringe so bad. I’d actually like him to go back and reboot it now as a mature author.
I mean are you judging it as the target market?
It was a young adult book. I refer to it as baby’s first high fantasy.
Do 8-12 year old boys that will love super long high fantasy later in life probably still love it? I would bet money.
But of course as adults we look down on the young adult book. Basically all young adult books seem not well made as adults.
I know a handful of exceptions, but they stand out in my head as remarkable because they were exceptions.
World War Z The movie only shares a name with the book. Everything else is bullshit.
The audiobook is really excellent and I sometimes get frustrated that they didn’t just add a camera and call it a TV show.
I should give that a try!
Wheel of Time is currently getting fanfic-ed into oblivion by the showrunners. I’m watching it anyway to see the characters come alive but some of it hurts.
It’s tragic really, I actually quite like everything apart from the script. I knew from the get that they would have to cut a lot of stuff and merge some books - which to be honest is fine, plenty of stuff that doesn’t need to go in - but I don’t understand their need to manufacture melodrama. It feels like every episode nothing happens but we’re still flying through the plot.
Just a complete failure to match the tone/cadence of the books. So much time should be spent traveling and exploring the world, but the show chooses to sit around and have overdramatic unexplained scenes that won’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t read the books. I’m still not sure who the target audience is.
I’m only on book 3 of WoT but decided to check out the first few episodes of the show anyways – I think some of the changes were wild and out of left field and some were very reasonable. Like skipping the first few towns of the journey makes sense, and introducing Tom at a slightly later point cause he’s kinda useless before that.
I did stop watching and had an existential crisis when they showed Waygates just being basically Minecraft Nether Portals haha Oh and channeling looks SO GOOFY in the show!
I gave up halfway through the Shadar Logoth episode (near the beginning of season 1).
I could overlook the individual annoying little details, such as Lan complaining that his bath’s not hot enough, but the big issue I have is the tone. The books have an air of romantic optimism which, on the screen, ought to play out much more like Lord of the Rings than Game of Thrones. The series just discards that, going modern grimdark grittiness, and as a consequence something essential seems to be lost.
World War Z.
Book: Absolutely brilliant “documentary” from the survivors of a fictional zombie outbreak. Goes deep in to the details of high command and front line soldiers about how their initial assumptions were flawed and the ethical nightmare they were faced on a day to day basis. From wondering if they are killing infected people that could eventually be cured to strategically letting uninfected cities be used as zombie bait giving them time to prepare defenses elsewhere. All told way after the fact when the charcters have benefit of hindsight giving them lots of room to be reminest, express regret and throw shade at each other on why someone ELSES arrogance got people killed. Super funny writing and a nice tide clever book overall.
Movie: Brad Pitt, playing a non-scientist, runs around and finds the cure for the zombie virus in like two days. Forgettable action movie that does nothing unique or interesting.
Audiobook: Full voice casted by A list names who absolutely nail it. Faithful to the original text and lightyears ahead of. the movie. IMHO, it’s the best audiobook experince around.
The North Korea section of the book was so creepy, I still think about that from time to time.
Fantastic book. Ok movie that seemed like it wasn’t related to the book at all. The scariest part is that the book accurately predicted how humans would react to an outbreak like Covid. Spoiler alert: not well.
Not the best Crichton novel, but Sphere. The book was a fun read but not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson could make the movie adaptation palatable.
I liked the book.
Before reading your last sentence, I was thinking Eragon.
We can hope for redemption. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/eragon-tv-series-disney-plus-1235325019/
Most of them? Lord of the Rings is the exception not the rule
There’s a list of great ones.
Shawshank.
Fight Club.
2001 (kinda cheating tho).
Green Mile.
The Godfather.
American Psycho.Since you brought up Kubrick I’d say pretty much his whole filmography is better, with the Shining being the lone debatable exception
Oh definitely. These were just of the top of my head, there’s plenty of other good book movies.
Kubrick…good adaptions
You mean Stanley “I didn’t even read the entirety of A Clockwork Orange” Kubrick? Mister “Actually let’s age up the girl in Lolita and spend time focusing on how sexy she is”? That Kubrick? Dude completely ignores the point of both books and does the one thing the authors very specifically do not want you to do
Yeah it seems like he just makes movies to his own crazy standards and doesn’t care too much about the source material.
I should’ve phrased that differently, Kubrick doesn’t adapt the work well but the films he made are, in my opinion, better and more interesting artistically than the work they are based on. And he did read Clockwork but his version didn’t have the last chapter, and having read the full book I still think the film is more compelling. And I’ll cite Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory as additional evidence, I also prefer his Lolita to Nabokov, even though he aged Dolores up, I’m pretty certain that’s because of standards and practices and he still managed to capture how rotten and disgusting a human Humbert is
Just my opinion but adapting a work of literature perfectly to the screen isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes it is I’ll happily concede that, but they are different mediums so some things are changed out of necessity and others because of differences in artistic perspective or even societal sensibilities
Plus Princess Bride. I actually prefer the film.
The book Jurassic Park is great, I’ll take the movie every time given the choice
But these are all still exceptions, adaptations are usually best when they are either extremely book accurate or handled by a competent artist and not a studio or group of producers
For kids books, I thought The Spiderwick Chronicles movie was unnecessarily shitty.
Animorphs. The show was atrocious, which is a crime because the books were amazing.
Catch 22
I thought the 2019 mini-series was pretty decent.
Trailer sure as hell looked better than the original which butchered that amazing book.
Di Vinci Code was butchered, and I’m sorry to say it but Hanks was the wrong choice for Robert Langdon.
Removed by mod
It should’ve been Van Damme. Then actione starred his way to the climax.
For some reason I always pictured Clive Owen for the role of Langdon.
I mostly enjoyed the book until the antagonist made such a huge error by revealing himself way too early that it ruined the whole thing for me. The other books in the series also had major issues that just ruined them as well.
I loved the Timeline book from Crichton, but one look at the trailer for the movie, I decided to not watch it. It looked really bad. 5.6 on imdb sort of backs that up I guess.
Indeed. I saw that movie and it was pretty bad. The book, like most of his novels, was a good read though.
I loved the book. The movie trailer made me ashamed of liking the book.
All Terry Pratchett adaptations. I think Hogfather is my favourite but still feels awkward. None have matched the tone, wit, and character depth in the books quite right and just feels wrong. To me, it seems like the perfect book series for a faithful multi-season adaptation, but has so far eluded those who have tried.
