That’s the sense I got. I think they threw in the ‘3 laws of robotics’ stuff, and maybe the scene where they are trying to find 1 robot among hundreds just to have something in common with the book.
I had forgotten all but a few details of the book when I saw the movie, but what little I remembered did not match at all.
Only after I reread the book, (a soft cover with Will Smith on the cover no less) did I learn that the script had been written first, and the ‘I, Robot’ title added later.
Thanks, JohnT. I was thinking this, but didn’t have a quick way of verifying. I didn’t want to post from memory. Also, those events do not occur in the original movie (not any edits putting everything in chronological order). They both occur in The Godfather II. I remember thinking that Coppola was pretty faithful to the book when I got around to reading Puzo’s work.
So having Will Smith on the cover of your paperback means he is in a movie that is very unlike what you are about to read. I had the same experience with “I am Legend”. Though I knew going into that one that the movie was quite different. Still, with all that was changed, I was surprised they were promoting the movie on the cover.
But, but… the energy signature!
That’s Standard Operating Procedure with movie tie-ins. They promoted the James Bond movies Diamonds Are Forever and You Only Live Twice with cover tie-ins, even though there’s practically no similarity between the movie and the books ian Fleming wrote.
Ditto for Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra and Robert Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend.
Sometime in the 1970s this started to bother them, so they started issuing “re-novelizations” when the difference got too large:
The Spy Who Loved Me by Christopher Wood
(James Bond and} Moonraker by Christopher Wood
The Thing by Alan Dean Foster
The Island of Dr. Moreau by (not H.G. wells)
and so on. But it’s still easier to issue the original book. Heck, Planet of the Apes went through a gazillion printings, even though pierre Boule’s novel didn’t resemble the movie all that much.
(One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)
As wonderful as the movie is, the book is vastly better. One of my top five books ever. Highly recommended.
AFTER you’ve read it, check out Chapter 4 of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” for some startling insights into Kesey’s writing of OFOTCN.
“Blade Runner” the movie, and “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” the book.
Too many differences to list, and yet clearly the same story.
.
They changed the ending to the movie version of Stephen King’s short story “The Mist”, but IIRC King said he liked the new ending because it was darker than his original.
The Jason Bourne trilogy.
The first one adopts quite a few important elements from the book, but changes most of the storyline, including the purpose of Bourne’s work for the government. The second and third movies basically take nothing from the books except the titles, and the name of the main character. The stories are completely new.
Some aspects of The Bourne Identity that are similar in the movie include:
In the book, however, he doesn’t offer Marie money to drive him to Paris; he kidnaps her at gunpoint to aid his escape from a bunch of gunmen.
Of course there was The Bladerunner the book and Blade Runner the movie, which had nothing in common other than the title (which the movie paid for the rights).
“We Can Remember it for you Wholesale,” the short story and Total Recall, the movie. The differences were immense – the story had very little action and the main character didn’t get to Mars (though he had been there before).
As I’ve said before, most of the plot of the film Total Recall seems drawn from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization*, although the ending with the atmosphere plant seems straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars
*Distant planet, people hunting you down to try and kill you. Memory wipes. Misshapen Mutants who can penetrate the Memory Wipe to tell you about your past. The hero befriends and hides out among the mutants. The hero turns out to be the one responsible for his own memory wipe, in the end. Hero overcomes the tests and difficulties to beat all his enemies and emerge victorious.
Yes, and she is a smart, intelligent woman, who is actually useful to him in the book, and not a ditzy drifter.
You missed the biggest one: Homer’s father in the book was supportive of his ambition to be an engineer - he just wanted him to be a mining engineer. In the movie, Homer’s father was a miner and just wanted Homer to be a miner. His view that Homer’s wanting to be an engineer was just him getting above himself. A major change in the characters’ motivation that really ruined the movie, as far as I was concerned, as it made his father a very unpleasant character.
I think Roger Ebert said of Godfather I that, if you read the book, you had seen the movie, and if you’d seen the movie you’d read the book.
Godfather II, while using the same characters, was a whole different story.
You enticed me to go look it up:
Also in the book, the ship goes to the moons of Saturn, not Jupiter. I think they changed it to Jupiter for the movie because they wanted to simplify the plot (there’s a big sequence in the book where the ship has to do a slingshot maneuver around Jupiter to get to Saturn).
Right. She has a PhD in economics, and is Canadian rather than German, too.
Although, in my mind’s eye, she was never quite as hot as Franka Potente, which i guess is what the movie producers were going for.
The novel 2001 was written at the same time that the film was being made, and by one of the two creators. It may represent Clarke’s view, but I’ll bet it’s not really Kubrick’s view. Clarke always was pulling more toward rational (see his numerous rewrites in his book The Lost Worlds of 2001), while Kubrick, despite his commitment to a good, rational SF movie, kept pushing toward “mystical”. You can get a good interpretation from reading Clarke’s novel, but don’t believe that you’ve got the entire “real” interpretation. Kubrick’s film departs from the book not just because of technical difficulties (Doug Trumbull has admitted they swtched from Saturn to Jupiter because of the difficulty with rings), but also because Kubrick didn’t want to film it that way. No blue food. In the movie, Dave doesn’t try to land on top of the monolith and go through – the “star Trip” starts nowhere hear the monolith.
You had a situation slightly different with The Abyss. Orson Scott Card was writing the novel while the film was being made, and Cameron incorporated Card’s ideas into his film (especially the characterization and motivation). But they weren’t co-creators like Clarke and Kubrick – Cameron was clearly in charge.
Yes, truly a huge difference there. The movie version of “John” was kind of dumbed down to a mean sumbitch that you wanted to love but couldn’t quite bring yourself to. (Or maybe the other way around.) And the overall arch of the story was about a boy trying to win his father’s approval. I think in the book it was more about the quaint ways of Coalwood.
The 2nd Dexter book, which the 2nd series is based loosely on, has Sgt. Doakes being turned into a mute amputee and going back to work in the homicide dept. I wish that had happened in the series.
Not that I blame them, but Hannibal the movie sure does go down a different path than the book.