Fuck, yes. Have Faramir be very different to his big brother - kinda quiet, bookish, liked and respected Gandalf more than was fashionable, had heard about the Ring and figured that if he didn’t look at it and stopped talking about it, it probably wouldn’t be able to corrupt him. It’s astonishing that, oh, say, the original author didn’t write it that way. :rolleyes:
That’s for The Two Towers, though being restricted to one thing in the film to fix is like being made to eat one peanut. In The Fellowship of the Ring:
Don’t make Merry and Pippin into a pair of cod-Irish idiots good only for comic relief. Have them know an unexpected amount about what Frodo is up to, and come up with some useful help at a time when it was badly needed, such as the Black Rider being on Frodo’s track. That’s much better than having them chased out of someone’s field and coincidentally being foisted upon Frodo for no reason whatever, and characterises them better for the rest of the series.
I’ve heard that in the original script, that being really was God. The original ending had some sort of Devil character show up, and then there was going to be a huge battle. Unfortunately, the special effects involved would have blown the budget, so they cheaped out.
As for Star Wars, I really like the idea of making Jar-Jar competent. That would go a long way towards improving the movie. His only real flaw would be his naivety. To show this in Episode 1, we could see him get cheated out of some money by a con artist.
Agreed. And we could still have the epilogue with the little fat kid showing some new attitude by kicking the bully in the nuts and riding off while giving him the finger.
Kingdom of Heaven. Can’t change the cast? Fine; I’d keep Liam Neeson, who was great, but he, not Orlando Bloom, would play Balian of Ibelin – the real Balian, who was about 45 at the time, and was born and raised in Outremer. (In other words, very like the fictional character Neeson was playing.) Orlando Bloom could still serve a purpose by playing a young, naive knight just arriving from France; this would still give us the “new guy’s” view of the Holy Land, without all that nonsense about a blacksmith suddenly becoming a brilliant fighter and strategist. (If the young knight had joined the Templars or Hospitallers in atonement for committing a murder, he’d be dealing not only with a new environment, but with celibacy and guilt.)
Any Steven Spielberg movie: use a good composer for the score.
Any Tim Burton movie: use a good composer for the score.
John Carpenter’s The Thing: get rid of that tacked-on happy ending. Just kidding.
Actually, I’ll go along with this, taking that cynical “happy” for “downbeat”. The original John Campbell story (which the film very closely follows, much more so that the Christianm Nyby/Howard Hawks 1951 film) ends about 15 minutes before the end of the movie, on a very credible and upbeat note. Lancaster and Carpenter had to go out of their way to turn that into a Hans Christian Andersoneque downer. To no purpose that I can see.
Minority Report: The ending is all wrong. Let me get this straight: The use of the telepaths almost completely eliminated the crime of murder for ten years, and now they’re gonna junk the system just because one man was able to temporarily abuse it? It certainly has nothing to do with the human rights of the telepaths, because if people didn’t care about their rights for ten years, why would they suddenly start?
No, the ending needs to be that the program goes on as planned, regardless of the evidence that came to light, because the public just doesn’t give a shit.
I agree it makes no sense, but to be fair, this is Shakespears fault, not any of the movie makesrs. The Women-in-drag thing is in th play.
I watched the pacino version with a friend and we both kept saying “So can they not tell these are women? Hell, can these guys not tell that the judges are their wives?”
I always thought, just remove the sections the first and 3rd hour and just show the attack. That’s all everyone who saw the movie was waiting for anyway, and the characters were pretty useless so cutting out their backstories wouldn’t have harmed a thing.
“I miss you like Micheal Bay missed the point…when he made pearl harbor”
IIRC, all characters, male and female, were played by men in Shakespeare’s time. No women in the acting guild, it was much more moral to watch guys in drag. Point being, the scenes would’ve been more plausible in Shakespeare’s time. If that’s the right word.
Well, I love the great Campbell story too, but I feel a movie and its literary basis should be judged separately.
We have two movie versions, both good, with two very different tones; the 1951 film, although it changed the nature of the eponymous being considerably (and moved the story from the Antarctic to the Arctic), had a tone, a sort of hearty, can-do attitude very much in keeping with Campbell’s Golden Age science fiction. The 1982 John Carpenter movie , although it technically was more faithful to the sequence of events in Campbell’s story, was made in a different era, had a very different tone, and carried a strong underlying theme of paranoia and alienation. In other words, it was a John Carpenter movie. The ending seems to me entirely in keeping with the rest of the movie.
Of course, with the passage of time somebody could always film another version; with enough budget you could make it exactly like Campbell’s story, including the ending. (Maybe you could even film in Antarctica.) I just think that “Who Goes There?” has such a multilayered subtext that, like the Thing itself, it can assume different forms, depending on what theme you want to explore. The 1951 movie looked at it from one angle; the 1982 movie had a different perspective.
So, in the original production of As You Like It, there would have been a scene in which a male actor would be pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.
Well, I do too – but not completely separately. If some says they’re basing something on another work I feel ripped off if it’s blatantly different. See our many discussions of Sarship TRoopers.
Campbell’s story is all about paranoia, and about a scientific and logical solution – something dear to Campbell’s heart. The original film was not at all in keeping with Campbell’s vision (although he coyly refused to criticize he film i interviews). I’m convinced that someone (Hawks, probably, raher than Nyby) changed the entire story because they didn’t want inward-directed paranoia.
The Carpenter film is, on the other hand, with its Bill Lancaster script, is amazingly faithful to the story, yet manages to pay homage to the 1951 film as well – quite a good trick. But they kept the paranoia and alienation that was in the original story – not the product of the passage of years. The change was when th got to the end an they changed Campbell’s set-up “happy” ending (which makes logical sense, following the sequence of events) with a heavily ambiguous and downbeat ending. It reminds me too much of the tacked-on “bad” ending L. Sprague de Camp avised against in his book on SF writing – even though the heroes have succeeded against all the odds, we’re still going to have their ship hit by meteor, just to show what cynical felows we are."
I disagree. The ending is completely in keeping with the dramatic progression of the Carpenter film. We have a bunch of guys out on a remote outpost, made of fairly adventurous stuff as they are serving in what might be the most hostile environment on the surface of the Earth. When they first encounter the alien in the Norwegian encampment, they are puzzled and slightly frightened, then as they discover more and more about the alien, they get more and more frightened and puzzled and angry so that toward the end of the film, they’re fucking terrified and also enraged. But they demonstrate that they have the resolve to face the problem (except for the doctor hwo figured it out initially).
By the time we get to the final scene, the protagonists have figured out that the only solution to the problem posed by the alien is for everyone in the base to die. By this time, they have been so steeled by what they’ve been through that they are able to deal with their own deaths and even face the prospect calmly. The ending, rather than a tacked-on bit of cheap cynicism, is the logical outcome of the story, and fully develops the courage of the protagonists. Not a happy ending, but a good one.
Also, my reading of the original story is that it’s much bleaker than either movie, since it clearly implies that the heroes’ sacrifices have been in vain.