From what I recall, the movie Starship Troopers has a few minute differences in the book. I can’t think of any them offhand though, they’re pretty minor.
Did you spot my post above?
Especially with regard to children. In Cujo – the boy dies in the book. In the movie, mom manages to revive him.
I made that point in my post above about C.S. Forester.
it’s also evident, as I pointed out in the Time Travel thread, in the movie adaptations of Catherine L. Moore’s Vintage Season (filmed as Timescape/Disaster in Time, which definitely has a downbeat ending. The movie has a happy ending. And Moore and Kuttner’s Mimsy were the Borogoves has a bittersweet, definitely not entirely happy ending, whereas The Last Mimzy is all sweetness and light.
heck, in twilight Zone – the movie they actually stuck a happy ending on Jerome Bixby’s It’s a GOOD Life. Even the TV version didn’t do that.
In Watchmen, the horrible thing that Ozymandius does at the end is releases a giant telepathic squid on top of NYC, destroying everything. In the movie, he creates “energy flashes” or something all over the world to make everyone think it was Dr. Manhattan. I can see why The Comedian was screwed up after finding out about the squid, but not really about the other thing. Also, their last conversation included Ozy saying something like “I did the right thing, didn’t I? I saved the world forever.” Manhattan replies with “Nothing is forever” and goes away. That conversation should have been in the movie.
I’ve never seen an adaptation of Animal Farm that had the guts to keep the novel’s ending, though I admit I haven’t seen them all.
Wow…never saw all of the movie (just clips on television), but I loved Cujo, and the ending is part of that. It just felt real–like sometimes you do all you can and it’s not enough. And it just had this huge impact. Like this is real. Intense.
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is quite difficult to understand, especially the last part where Bowman leaves Discovery and goes elsewhere.
The appearance of the Starchild at the end is well nigh incomprehensible.
However, Clarke’s novelization makes some of these plot elements relatively easy to understand.
As an aside, did y’all know that the movie didn’t even get a nomination for Best Picture?
My problem with the movie ending is that it doesn’t actually work plot-wise - the reason it’s a giant squid in the book, and the reason they had to engineer one and all that stuff with the people on the island, is that it’s important that it obviously NOT be a terrestrial attack - that it can’t be something the Russians did. Instead, they did something that looked pretty much like a bomb, and totally like something I’d assume the Russians did if I were a decision maker with my finger on the button in the political climate in the comic book.
The movie I, Robot is not based on the book whatsoever.
Well, other than that it has robots in it.
I don’t even think that statement makes sense. How’s that different from saying the movie can be different from the screen play because they’re different art forms?
I also don’t think most people expect them to be identical. However if you’re going to re-tell a story; then you should re-tell the story accurately.
The difference is (to me anyway) is I agree that things like whether or not a character had a mustache is irrelevant. I also understand that you cannot put every word from a book into a movie.
But…sometimes the translation from book to movie is changed on things that are important to either the author or the reader. Stephen King made no secret about his dislike of the first The Shining (the fact that many people like it better than the book is an entirely different conversation). The Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay version of The Shining wasn’t nearly as well received.
Now for my own personal example of a difference between a book and a movie: The Godfather.
Widely considered one of the greatest movies around. It bugs the crap out of me that Kay Adams gets an abortion and that Fredo gets killed. Hell for that matter I hate how the movie portrays Michael as a maniacal revenge seeker.
The book (IMHO) portrayed Michael as being just like the Don. He kept his feelings to himself, he was cool headed. When he was exiled to Italy, he saw how/why his father was the way he was. He was also smart enough to know that the mafia as it exists was a self destructive force, feeding on itself; and that when you didn’t earn something of value it was actually of no value and often problematic. Look at Dr. Taza as an example. He was a terrible Dr. but passed his medical exam by paying off the right people.
In the movie Kay gets an abortion and leaves her husband. This was the 1950s. I think the book’s version was a lot more realistic. Kay converts to Catholicism and starts going to Mass every day to pray for her husband’s soul. She sure as hell never got an abortion.
In the movie Michael had Fredo killed. In the book, Michael wasn’t so evil. Fredo is warned never to go against the family again.
When I was a teenager, one of my favourite books was *The Power of One *by Bryce Courtenay. In retrospect, it’s a pretty clicheed book about a young man who overcomes adversity, but at least it still had its moments and what I think is still an awfully satisfying ending.
I’m convinced whoever wrote the screenplay read the blurb on the back of the book and decided that was all the info they needed to write their script, because the movie is absolutely nothing like the book.
They downplayed, changed or removed several major characters and events (including one of my favourite secondary characters, who actually plays a major role in the protagonist’s life in the book and is missing from the movie altogether), crammed in a female love interest just so they could make a ham-fisted point about apartheid being bad, and the ending… well, the less we say about the travesty of an ending that they decided to use instead of the perfectly good one from the film, the better.
(of course, my first clue the movie was going to suck hairy donkey balls should’ve been the fact that Stephen Dorff was cast as the lead… he can’t act his way out of a paper bag)
I don’t know that the abortion is unrealistic, just because it’s the 1950s. Lots of women after all were getting abortions, just not as publicly, and I’m sure a lot of those same women who’d had abortions went on to go to Mass. I think that Francis Ford Coppola had just a different view of Kay than Mario Puzo. Yes, Puzo did originate the characters, but is a filmmaker always obligated to follow the original text to the letter?
Complete tangent, but so glad to hear someone else say the end of 2001 is a WTFer. So it’s not just me 
That book, though, is a collection of lightly-related short stories, originally published seperately, with a minor framing device thrown in. Of those stories, the film’s plot arguably has the greatest similarity to “The Evitable Conflict” (in which the “zeroeth law” concept is discussed) and one scene in particular involes “Little Lost Robot”, but even that ain’t a lot.
Similarly, the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only draws material from (primarily) two seperate short stories and one novel:
Woman seeking revenge for the murder of her parents: “For Your Eyes Only”
Greek smugglers involving Bond in their rivalry: “Risico”
Bond and the girl get dragged along coral to attract sharks: “Live and Let Die”
License to Kill is also a hodgepodge, drawing elements from “Live and Let Die” and the short story “The Hildebrand Rarity.” Of course, the variation between Bond movies and Bond stories is a thread unto itself.
The translation from Rocket Boys to October Sky suffered a few inaccuracies, puzzling since Homer Hickham was involved in the screenplay.
-His parents didn’t call him Homer, they called him Sunny because of his dour disposition.
-His father’s name was not John, it was Homer. (I suppose this would have caused confusion in the movie.)
-There weren’t four rocket boys, there were six.
-They never named a rocket Miss Reilly.
-The movie has one believe that the story took place over the course of one school year. In fact is was two or three.
There’s a bunch of other little things, but those are the ones I remember.
Still, the basic gist of the story was not compromised.
I, Robot started life as an unrelated script written in Asimov’s universe. After it was in development, the company got hold of the rights to Asimov’s book, apparently simply to cash in on the name value. At no time, as far as I can tell, was the movie ever intended to actually be an adaptation of Asimov’s work (I’ve read the screenwriter’s on-line blog). QAll they did was change the names of some of the characters to be the same as Asimov’s. But the plot differences and the philosophical differences are enormous.
It’s like filming The Red Badge of Courage with two of the names changed to Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes and then retitling it Gone With The Wind.
I wish they’d filmed Harlan Ellison’s screenplay for I, Robot. It legitimately did adapt Asimov’s book. And had Asimov’s blessing.
“Upon learning the creature’s intended purpose, Blake’s practiced cynicism cracked. Though appalled, exposing my plan would precipitate greater horrors preventing humanity’s salvation. Even Blake balked at that responsibility, telling only Moloch, who he knew wouldn’t understand…”
I don’t see that it’s any different in the movie; either way, Blake discovers that Veidt is going to kill millions to save billions, and (a) has to decide whether to blow the whistle on it, and (b) chooses to keep quiet – but he’s conflicted, and so winds up tearfully blurting out a thing or two when he’s had too much to drink. With regard to that aspect, what difference does it make whether it’s a squid or an energy blast? Isn’t “killing millions to save billions” the key part?
The book The Godfather only goes to the end of the Five Families War, say 1947 or so. The events you speak of (Fredo being killed and Kay getting an abortion) are not referenced in the book because they occur after the events in the novel. Same thing with Cuba, Michael’s dealings with Hyman Roth, Pentangeli, etc - all the “modern” stuff in GF2 lies beyond the scope of the novel.
Also, Michael warned Fredo not to go against the family in both GF1 and the book. It’s only in GF2, when Fredo breaks this rule again, when Michael realizes that Fredo is a constant danger to Michaels life.
At the end of GF1, you could argue that Michael is like the Don. However, it’s harder to make that claim at the beginning of GF2.
Heh.