tv series rather than film but: The Dresden Files
worst change? everything
harry’s staff – carved from a lightning struck tree from the property of his mentor, iirc, and carved with various runes – is replaced with a hockey stick
bob the skull – a constructed sprit of intellect bound to a skull – is now a ghost of some guy
they made lt murphy a brunette
probably more idk I didn’t get more than an episode in and that was years ago
Didn’t even know it got adapted, must have been terrible if the studio didn’t even bother to market it
i regret burdening you with this knowledge
class A amnestics should be freely available from your local [redacted] should you desire
At least I loved the series enough to start reading the novel, so that’s a good thing.
well that is an upside
Literally everything about World War Z. Absolute travesty. The book is a unique and genuinely thought provoking new take on the zombie genre. The movie is an insult to every bit of world building Max Brooks created.
I thought the movie was pretty enjoyable but it shouldn’t have been named after the book. It would have been a decent zombie movie on its own.
I agree. Its a fun movie but is the literal opposite of everything in the book. My favorite chapter is where the crashed pilot outwalks the group of zombies. There’s something so organic and absolutely terrifying about that. Humans are persistence predators and it was such a unique way of turning the tables on our evolutionary successes. Brilliant stuff. The movie may be fun, but its anything but brilliant.
I say this to people and then always have to clarify:
It’s not that the World War Z movie is a bad adaptation of the book, it’s that it’s NOT an adaptation of the book at all. Other than the name, and the fact that it has zombies, there are literally no similarities between the book and the movie.
The characters are different, the settings are different, the format is different, the plot is different, the way the zombies act is different. Literally EVERYTHING.
Calling it an adaptation is like if you took The Neverending Story and changed its title to The Lord of The Rings and called that an adaptation.
I read somewhere that this is basically Max Brooks’ take on the film.
Something about breathing a sigh of relief when he read the script, because it was such a distinct story that there was nothing left of his book to be butchered.
Yeah, this one is the big one.
I feel like World War Z would have been better adapted as a TV show given that the book was episodic in nature.
Very well put. I couldn’t agree more.
Maybe not the worst, but this one’s personal: Edge of Tomorrow’s take on the fantastic All You Need Is Kill (spoilers ahead).
- Making the movie PG-13. In chapter 2 of the manga, there is a brutal death scene showing how Keiji can’t escape the Mimics wherever he goes. The series was quite bloody, and used that to its advantage.
- Casting Emily Blunt as “Rita Vrataski”. One of her defining character traits was that she was unassuming, and that you wouldn’t expect that level of combat skill from her appearance.
- While Keiji was in love with “Rita” in the original, it was unrequited–the change felt actively detrimental to “Rita’s” character.
SIDENOTE: I feel like changing this was sort of unimportant, but you’ll notice I’m using quotes for “Rita”. That’s because, in the original, her real name is unknown. She took someone else’s identity.
Surprised to see this one here, but this is also my answer. Been awhile since I read the book, but I seem to remember the other big point being the whole blood transfusions thing from the movie wasn’t there, that was all made up bullshit. In fact, “Rita” had not lost her power, they were going through overlapping loops which is so much cooler, but I guess was deemed too confusing for audiences so we got that schlocky Hollywood ending instead.
To be fair, I wouldn’t expect an elite combatant when I look at Emily Blunt.
I did not know the movie was based on anything. It’s one of my favorite scifi flicks, I always viewed it as based on a game player’s grind to get through a game by trying different moves after each death to succeed.
I Am Legend
The ending was completely and utterly different than the book, which destroyed the gut punch at the end of the book that was kind of the whole theme of the book.
I don’t even remember the book as a whole. But I remember the ending. Then they Hollywooded it and it was awful.
The Lawnmower Man
In the book, an unassuming everyman stumbles upon the fact that a local landscaping company is actually a front for a demon who has an arrangement that involves making human sacrifices of those that discover his supernatural nature.
In the movie, a Cyber Virtual Reality 3D Battles ON 3D CYBERSPACE Stunning Effects 3D Internet Pierce Brosnan Warfare Nineties Futuristic VR Headset Technology BATTLE In 3D Mind Expanding Guns, and one of the characters is a man who has a lawnmower.
Edit: Shit, okay, I just read this on Wikipedia and nearly wet myself:
A feature film, The Lawnmower Man, starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, was released in 1992 by New Line Cinema. This film used an original screenplay entitled “CyberGod”, borrowing only the title of the short story. The film concerns a scientist, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Brosnan), who subjects mentally challenged Jobe Smith (Fahey) to virtual reality experiments which give him superhuman abilities. The film was originally titled Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man. King won a lawsuit to have his name removed from the film, stating in court documents that the film “bore no meaningful resemblance” to his story. King then won further damages in 1993 after his name was included in the home video release.
Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!
The only thing I remember about that movie was thinking mecha Godzilla looked like shit. Then the one from Godzilla vs Kong took notes…
Amen! !!
Dune.
Turning the Bene Gesserit power of Voice into some weird gun was fucking stupid.
and the rain at the end
Ugh yeah
I assume you mean the 1984 version?
Yes.
Yeah, the 80s version took a lot of liberties, most of which didn’t work out. The ending specifically.
But I still like the visuals and the music and the actors more than the new movies. Yeah, I know the new ones have crazy CG visuals, but the set designs from the 80s version were just more…unique in my opinion. That made the world feel more interesting. And I liked the 80s Baron way more than the new Baron, despite really respecting Stellan Skarsgard. Kenneth McMillan played a really psychotic Baron.
As a Dune lover, I have a soft spot for the 1980s version. The thing I tell people before watching is, “this isn’t Dune, this is a fever dream David Lynch had about the idea of Dune.”
Don’t actually remember that scene, refresh my memory please?
In the book, the power of voice was him singing.
I mean, how was it different in the movie? As I recall it was still a vocal thing. They could have done a better job explaining where it came from but I don’t remember it being egregiously different.
Voice is not a weapon like a gun or knife. Voice commands people. It’s like speed hypnosis/mind control achieved through voice manipulation.
Like I said, I don’t really remember instances in the movie of the voice being used in a way inconsistent with that description. I’m not arguing, I’m asking for examples to jog my memory.
Oh, the confusion might be from there being at least 3 different versions of Dune in cinema. I am talking about the first adaptation from 1984.
Ah ok. That’s the only version I haven’t seen, hence my confusion.
I Am Legend. Just the whole thing.
Oh, I quite liked the film but didn’t know there was a book. What did they mess up?
In the book (short story?) the protagonist dies and the reason he is legend is that he was the last human and was like a boogeyman because of his hunting and killing them.
Going over the wikipedia article as a refresher and I totally forgot about how he (author Richard Matheson) had some cool biological explanations for the vampirism.
From Wikipedia:
Neville additionally discovers that exposing vampires to direct sunlight or inflicting wide oxygen-exposing wounds causes the bacteria to switch from being anaerobic symbionts to aerobic parasites, rapidly consuming their hosts when exposed to air and thus giving them the appearance of instantly liquefying. However, he discovers the bacteria also produce resilient “body glue” that instantaneously seals blunt or narrow wounds, explaining how the vampires are bulletproof. Lastly, he deduces now that there are in fact two differently reacting types of vampires: conscious ones who are living with a worsening infection and undead ones who have died but been partly reanimated by the bacteria.
Oh interesting. Does indeed sound different from the film. Might give it a read.
The Passage tv series. To be fair, I got about 10 minutes into the first episode before I decided there was no way they read more than the book blurb before they wrote the script, but maybe they pulled it back in?
Also Game of Thrones. The drift from source material started small but got pretty wild as they went on. I feel like Martin was pretty clear what the “Game of Thrones” was in the books and I don’t understand how a show with him as one of the key production members was able to miss that almost in its entirety. The show didn’t need a clear end, that’s the game of thrones, it never ends, the same cycle happens just as it always did.
I wouldn’t even say the drift from The Source material in Game of Thrones started small. In the second season they already make at least one huge massive shift in a story plot.
The color from outer space.
It wasn’t glowing purple. It was closer to a dull grey.
I’ll give them a pass because it’s hard to film lovecraft books. How do you film a new color no one has seen before? Or monster that drives you crazy just to loook at?
I feel like Annihilation ended up feeling more like a film version of Colour Out of Space than the COoS film did.
A purply pinky pallette is often used for cosmic horror. I don’t know if this is because of magenta ‘not existing’ or if it’s just a coincidence but it’s a good choice anyway
TV adaptation of Wheel of Time was just fucking awful. Like every stupid character change and story change was done literally as stupidly as possible and seemingly with a view to ruin the actual story as it was written.
I genuinely think the showrunners hadn’t read the series to the end by most of the changes they made and canned it when they caught up and realised how much they had fucked the story that was still to come.
Book and TV spoilers
Tower in exile run by Siuan mentoring Egwene who is aes sedai by virtue only of being elected Amyrlin? Nope, Siuan is dead and Egwene was made Aes Sedai so I guess that arc is dead.
Moiraine thought to be dead and later rescued from the tower of Ghenjei by Matt and Thom? Nope, she never got “killed”, and never went through the doorway.
Min, Elayne and Aviendha all accepting the situation and bonding with each other as sister wives and sharing the bond with Rand through their own connection? Nope. Min is shacking up with Matt (maybe? Either way doesn’t gaf about Rand) and Elayne and Aviendha are shacking up with each other instead.
Having Rand kill Turak with the power instead of entertaining his challenge was a little funny but completely outside of both Rand and LTT’s code of honour and especially LTT’s massive ego.
The first one that me swear out loud was killing Uno and making him Gaidal Cain. Like… I guess Uno won’t be leading armies in the last battle then, and Birgitte won’t be wondering where Gaidal was woven into the world as a young child…
Oh god I forgot they gave Perrin a wife and had him kill her for literally no reason…
So many stupid changes made for no conceivable reason. Not little things to make a character easier to write for TV or more relatable, but sweeping giant story changes that make great chunks of the original canon impossible.
I genuinely implore anyone who even got the slightest amount of joy out of the show to read the books. Learn the original and really very good story, and experience Jordan’s writing, rather than Judkins’ made-up-as-they-went-along shit erroneously accepted as passable work.
I read the books and liked the TV version. They were just different things. I am not sure I’d even enjoy a very faithful TV adaptation.
Well it got canceled due to poor viewership so they failed and made it even less likely a fair adaptation ever gets made. Everybody loses.
True enough. I do not like their Tolkien fantasy series, it’s clunky in some way, or the actors are not right, something is off. WOT, I quite liked most of the casting, loved the sets and landscapes and costuming and took the edits in stride, thought of it as an “inspired by”.
My hope would be an animated series.
And as a William Gibson fan, oh I am used to disappointment.
And they did the right thing by calling it Rings of Power and treading new ground instead of warping old stories.
That’s what they should have done with WOT.
“Another Turn of the Wheel” where we see a group of young people mentored by a grizzled Moridin(see where I am going here) after their village is raided by Trollocs that haven’t been seen for 500 years.
I would watch that even after seeing what they did to WOT.
Just finished reading the books. But i started book one and season 1 together and quickly saw they were completely different. But i watched the show first and it cemented how characters looked which is what i wanted before i read it.
After finishing all 14 and now on new spring im glad the show gave me direction to imagine a lot of them.
Yeah the casting and costuming was pretty good for the most part with the very slight exception that I felt Rosamund Pike was a bit tall for the diminutive Moiraine. Apart from that I loved how faithful they were to the characters’ descriptions even if they did go wildly off the rails with the story.
Not a movie, but a show. “Foundation”.
Look, I get it, if you want to tell your own sci fi story that has nothing to do with Asimov, great! Good for you!
But don’t pretend it’s Foundation.
It’s three shows intertwined into one, and it feels as if three teams wrote them independently. They are completely different, the only thing in common is reusing Asomov’s Foundation names. It totally sucks.
The coolest part of the show is the genetic dynasty stuff that wasn’t even in the series
Legitimately, if they had just done a “A Foundation Story: Empire” and then just did the genetic dynasty stuff, I don’t think any of us would be mad.
But I don’t think general audiences have read much Foundation these days so they would have struggled to set it in that universe without an established Foundation Cinematic Universe.
Anyways, I’m super excited for Tue Foundation super cut that’s just Empire.
Eh. I’ve been watching it, and I think it’s a decent adaptation. Entirely faithful to the original? No. But the core trilogy of was written in the 1950s, and it’s absolutely a product of its time. I for one am glad they left the misogyny back in the 1950s where it belongs. Also, the original books were very much in the “our friend the atom” era of nuclear power, the era where they were predicting power too cheap to meter and no one had ever heard of a nuclear plant meltdown. The inclusion of the genetic dynasty was an inspired choice. And frankly, I’m glad we’re not depicting a far future where everybody is white.
But I think the TV series is faithful to the core themes of the books. It still explores the contrast between the “trends and forces” and “great man” theories of history. It still explores the fascinating concept of predicting the future mathematically. It still shows the slow and inexorable decline of a great galactic empire. And the Mule in the show is every bit a force of malevolent evil as the Mule in the novels.
Overall, is it a perfect one-to-one adaption? No, but that was never going to happen for a book like Foundation. It was long considered unfilmable. But some minor adaptations have allowed them to create a good series that explores the core themes of Asimov’s work.
The core concept of the books was, that Hari could predict the future of societies in really broad strokes. Essentially how masses behave in certain situations. In order to actually make the gamble, he forced a situation where he put a group of people that could only behave in a certain way because they were lacking resources.
But, in all of the books it’s quite clear that Hari couldn’t make predictions for single people within a group, because there’re too many variables (Asimov even created an example where Hari deliberately predicted the choices of a single person that exists in the present, and why that doesn’t work for other purposes).
In the books, Hari cannot make any decisions for other people, because the solution can only come from those people (though because he setup the foundation colony like he did, the outcome was always predestined).
In the show, they don’t care about the core concept. In the first season they show how psycho history is supposed to work, and partially adhere to it, but soon ignore all the limitations that it should have. It’s like Hari plays those 1000 years on a musical instrument, manipulating people and situations. He tell’s people the solution to the problem. He (because he’s an AI) constantly interferes. That’s not the idea of the core story.
Imagine it like this, in the books, a “creator” setup the world in a way where people can still make individual decisions, but only in a way that leads to a predestined outcome. Personal choices may lead to a different way to the outcome (see the mule), but in the end, it’ll always come to the intended solution.
The show just has an omnipotent god that is reborn and moves people like chess pieces, constantly adapting to changing situations.
The fact that gods and magic also seemingly exist really fucks me up because its explicit in Tue original book that god is just a tool for smarter people (Foundation) to manipulate dumber people (everyone else).
Obnoxious atheist take? Sure I guess.
But it feels as if someone rebooted harry potter and made the kids saying something nice about trans people or Jews.
The religion of technology was something that I especially enjoyed in the books. There were many highlights that Goyer chose to ignore.
Does it get any better after season 1? The terminus plot was just incredibly stupid so I lost all interest. Empire was great though, especially as he didn’t exist in the books
It’s not a show that I wait for with bated breath, but I will usually watch the episodes and they’re alright. As someone who only read part of the first book, there’s nothing there to be ruined for me.
The Mule stuff is kind of interesting. I think the genetic dynasty stuff is the coolest part, and apparently that wasn’t even in the books.
Couldn’t agree more, it’s not exactly a faithful adaptation, but I feel they did a damn good job conveying the overall message and story.
Foundation is getting a pass because they’re being extremely clear on one thing - in fact the entire serias is predicated on it, which is in and of itself a solid book callback:
A single person can throw the whole damned thing into chaos
that aside, you can’t claim the series has “nothing to do with asimov” when it absolutely bloody does
The Navidson Record
As a fellow HoL fan, dig your response.
The book Annihilation centered on a “tower” that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.
For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like… that was half of the point of the book - a “tower” that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?
I know we’re not into Harry Potter now, but the past is the past and I can’t forget how annoyed I was when the movie based on the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, came out. I was a very disappointed teenager.
It was a whirlwind story to me at the time. I remember exactly where I was when I read it, as the moment that revealed the friendship between Harry’s father James, Professor Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and the alleged-murderer, Sirius Black, became seared into my brain. It was such a pivotal part of the overall story to me, that that twist alone made it my favorite in the series. So when the movie came out, I expected the use and development of The Marauder’s Map to be a key highlight. It was a huge deal in the books, after all.
Yet in the movie, the map is just a neat thing Harry gets to use. Nobody mentions that Harry’s own father helped create it. The movie never even tells who the Marauders are, even though the reveal of their backstory was the key emotional crux of the Shrieking Shack scene. To omit their story entirely felt like a gut-punch.
I didn’t understand at the time why the director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to straight-up change everything that made that story so compelling to me and my friends. To this day, I still don’t understand.
Yet subsequent movies mentioned the nicknames Wormtail and Padfoot. A lot of things in the films must have been confusing to people who didn’t read the books. Another weird thing I’ve noticed is that in the fourth movie, Barty Crouch Jr steals from Snape to make polyjuice potion and he blames Harry. But those who only watched the movies and didn’t read the books wouldn’t have known that Harry and his friends stole from Snape to make polyjuice potion before.
