I actually loved the film The World According to Garp. I thought the foreshadowing and callbacks actually help tie the film together, I especially liked how Garp’s story was illustrated cryptically, with the gloves and the falling piano. (Jenny: “I don’t understand it, but if that’s what it’s about, I like it.”)
The book didn’t have any of the circularity of the film, which is OK, but it did have pages and pages of Garp’s actual story, The Pension Grillparzer, which violated the rule of “if you have a genius artist character, don’t actually show his art, because it will never live up to its in-story reputation.” In the book, you can’t tell if Garp is supposed to be a bad author, or Irving actually is.
Plus there’s the whole last third of the book detailing how every character died. Yes, yes, we all die. But what did it add? I’m glad it was excised.
Apparently with the amount of awards it got, the newest All Quiet on the Western Front fits here. I disagree because the book and 1930 Best Picture winner were phenomenal.
The movie Gorky Park left out a lot of the rambling complexities and subplots in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel, and was far more effective for having done so.
I also liked both the book “All Quiet on the Western Front” and the 1930 movie, whose fighting sequences are phenomenal for the time. I’ve wondered if a subsequent F. Scott Fitzgerald short story has anything to do with the movie. In that story a prima donna actor is raising a fuss on the set about his role in a WWI-based movie, and the fed-up director shoves him into a trench and calls out “Action!”. The actor’s ranting at his treatment and vain attempts to climb out of the trench are incorporated into a realistic-seeming battle scene.
Thankfully the book’s obsession with owning sheep or a goat as a status symbol was almost completely ignored. There is a brief reference to the owl when Deckard visits the Tyrell Building in the movie, but that’s it. Harrison Ford constantly obsessing about sheep would not have done the movie any favors.
I think that the novel and the movie were trying to do very different things. To be clear: Blade Runner is my favorite movie. I have a tattoo of the origami unicorn. But I do not think it makes sense to declare it superior to the book when they had very different aims. Blade Runner is a social nightmare concerned with the philosophy of mind. Androids Dream is a social nightmare concerned with absolutely everything - consumerism, overpolicing, mass media, religious brainwashing, income inequality and the deleterious effects of living in slums… and theory of mind. It’s also an allegory for Dick’s own schizophrenia, a sort of self-eulogizing. Blade Runner is sorrowful, melancholy, mournful. Androids is terrifyingly manic. I love them both.
My own nomination for OP’s question is the Darabont film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. It has the most monstrously sickening rug-pull of an ending I’ve ever seen in a movie. I adore it. Vastly better than King’s milquetoast non-ending.
There’s the famous example of Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man being adapted for film…or rather they used the title on a movie that had zero to do with the story except for there being a lawnmower in it. He sued to have his name taken off of the flick.
Not that Ready Player One was a great film, but it wouldn’t have been improved by watching the characters go through a D&D module, play the Zork text adventure game or re-enact War Games. Picking flashier challenges for the film audience was the right choice.
No adaptation of Les Miserables needs a lengthy digression about the history of button manufacturing or the potential use of human feces as fertilizer in Parisian-area farms.
I was going to say almost all the Philip K Dick adaptations (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc). They took the awesome sci Fi idea and left the bonkers weird Philip K Dick narrative style.
The exception being Through A Scanner Darkly, which is not a terrible movie definitely captures the Philip K Dick bonkersness.
Quoting these because I think they make a very fundamental point about adapting novels into movies: novels are too damn long!
I liked the rambling complexities and subplots in Gorky Park - which I read after watching and loving the much tighter movie. But @Jackmannii’s completely right - an attempt to port the novel over wholesale would have made a terrible movie, which would either have crammed in plot at the expense of character and pacing while still being too dense to follow, or been 4 hours long.
If your source material is even approaching novel length, something has to go. You can do that well by trimming sub-plots and excising minor characters; or by pickimg one key theme as with Androids/Blade Runner and adapting freely around that. You can do it badly by leaving out too much plot, or ignoring key themes so that you end up with something either incoherent or soulless… And you can in the extreme just keep the title and change everything else. But teh worst thing you can do is try for a page by page remake of teh novel because different art forms are different.
I can’t be sure because I haven’t read the source material, but I assume that the significant changes to Who Framed Roger Rabbit made it work much better on the screen.
This is my nomination for the thread, as well. Bombadil is an odd character, and doesn’t really fit into the rest of Tolkien’s legendarium; the entire sojourn with him in the book does little to move the story along.
In the movie? Probably–I am not sure if that was supposed to be the same character as in the book. Like I said they dropped any reference to Sonny’s large penis or the bridesmaid’s large vagina for the movie.
Fair point. Given that, I submit a different section from the LotR books which was omitted entirely from Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, but which was more significant: The Scouring of the Shire.
In the movies, destroying the One Ring ends the threat, and when the four hobbits return to the Shire, they discover that it’s essentially the same as it had always been, while it’s the four of them who have changed and grown.
In the books, the hobbits are eager to return to their comfortable homes, as they believe that the threat is gone. But, when they get there, they discover that Saruman (a threat whom they had believed to be vanquished) has taken over the Shire, and is transforming it into a mean, industrial place. The four of them rally the other hobbits, and are able to quickly defeat Saruman and his lackeys – it demonstrates just how much their experiences have transformed them, but it’s also an unexpected additional problem to be dealt with, dealing with a smaller (but still powerful) villain after the BBEG has been dispatched.
I think that omitting the Scouring sequence makes the film work better, but that’s just IMO.
I, Robot definitely wasn’t an adaptation. It was based on an original screenplay that wasn’t related, at all, to Asimov’s work, and the studio bolted on a few references from Asimov to justify using the title; the credits read, “as suggested by the book I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.”
That’s how the 1997 film Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven was made. It was originally its own film but was re-written when someone noticed it was similar to Robert Heinlein’s novel.
