Yeah, I know there’s a superficial similarity, but in the short story the sniper is a serious KGB sniper. In the movie she’s the defector’s girlfriend, set up. They tried to work the story in, bt, as in Octopussy, I don’t think it really worked. (Incientally, have the story o a Durkin-Hays audio cassette, and it’s great.)
Anything by Jack London is always totally changed for the film. White Fang and Call of the Wild were supposed to be the stories of DOGS, you stupid movie people! Not humans. Yes, there are humans in the books, but they exist only in relation to the dogs.
It makes no sense. I mean, everybody likes dogs, and they like movies about dogs. Doesn’t a movie about a dog make sense? Why can’t this be done? Why even bother making a movie with the name “White Fang” or “Call of the Wild” if bears no relation to those books?
heh there was supposed to be a lne there about the books based on the movies made more sense than the actual film
although i dont know if they were in the original script and just cut out or added later
has there even been a movie that was better than the book ?
i thought the ending to the film version of the firm was better than the book
Going OT here, but whatthehell…Shawshank Redemption was pretty good, as was Stand By Me; Cat’s Eye was only let down by the final segment in the arc and was otherwise pretty respectable; The Dead Zone came up on film okay. But yeah, the vast majority are ordinary, to say the least.
Along this same line - for my money at any rate - Christine the movie was actually superior to the book. Carpenter’s direction and the effects team provided a much better vision of a self-healing car than King’s description. Okay, I know it was mainly just film being shown in reverse, but it worked a hell of a lot better than some teenage kid pushing a 50’s model car with four flats around a junkyard by himself. Puh-leeze.
I saw the movie first, and when reading the book I discovered the climactic action scene involved, what, a cement truck (?) rather than a bulldozer, I was less than impressed. I mean, how cool was that, the tires on that car still screeching away at the pavement while the tracks on the 'dozer are climbing halfway over the damn thing? That car scared me, King’s book did not.
- Dave
Okay, I’m looking into the future with my amazing psychic powers, and predicting that The Minority Report by Steven Spielberg will be nothing like the Philip K. Dick story.
Movies adapted from Dick’s stories are so different from the originals that you end up with two camps, people who love the movies and hate the stories, and people who love the stories and hate the movies. I have a friend who worships Bladerunner. I keep urging him to read the book, just so I can see his confusion and horror.
“Wait, the book really talks about electric sheep? And what is all this about owls? And what on earth is the ending about?”
Of course, I’ve never seen the movie, so maybe it does spend a lot of time discussing how much the main character wants an owl. Or, maybe not.
Exit To Eden is a pretty funny example of a book and movie that have nothing to do with each other. Anne Rice herself describes the book as pornography. So lets make the movie in to a comedy! Yeah, that’ll work!
Who Censored Roger Rabbit.
Like many mentioned above, a few of the main characters are the same, and that’s about it.
The interesting thing is that a movie faithful to the book would never have been as good, and a novelization of the film would have been silly.
Both stories worked best in their own artform, but, would not have worked as well in the other’s.
Now we should have a category for films that were too faithful. My vote would be Hotel New Hampshire based on the book by John Irving. Whoever wrote the screenplay was incapable of editing anything out whatsoever. It was like watching a filmed synopsis instead of a coherent story.
The clearest example is, as usual, overlooked (note: they did make movies before 1980, you know).
Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” The only thing he kept from the book was the title. The book was a nonfiction discussion of sexual matters in Q&A format; the movie was a series of humorous skits on sexual themes. The title of each skit may have corresponded to questions in the book, but that would have been the greatest extent of what was taken.
Well in this case, I think the lack of it being overlooked got overlooked, which is its own kind of usual. Poirot mentioned it.
“The Omega Man” was allegedly based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, but pretty much dropped the whole vampire thing, and tacked on a Christ allegory to the ending that simply wasn’t there in the novel.
What about “The Firm”?
The movie and book both have the Harvard-educated uber-lawyer. But the book ends with McDeere escaping to a Caribbean island, basically saying “I didn’t want to be a lawyer anyways”.
I like the movie’s ending better, where he was still able to be a lawyer.
What about Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden? In the book, Dan Ackroyd and Rosie O’Donnell do not exist, there is NO plot involving jewel smuggling, or anything like it. They were added for comic effect in the movie, behind Garry Marshall’s abysmal directing. The book focuses on Dana Delaney’s Lisa and Paul Mercutio’s Eliot, which were both minor characters in the movie.
Don’t sugar-coat it, Derleth… how did you like the movie?
Okay, look. I have both read Heinlein’s novel and seen Verhoeven’s movie, and I’m a big fan of both, each for different reasons.
I understand the reaction of most sf fans to the film, but I think any attempt to do a one-to-one, perfectly faithful adaptation of the novel would have been a disaster. (I know, I know, you already think the movie’s a disaster. Quiet, I’m pontificating here.) According to the film’s screenwriter, Ed Neumeier, his original draft was, in fact, just that --an extremely faithful adaptation that reproduced the novel as accurately as humanly possible.
And it didn’t work. It just sat there. And the reason it just sat there is that nothing happens in the novel, people. It’s not a narrative, it’s a sociopolitical tract with incidents in it. The book spends its time either lecturing us on the workings of a fascist utopia, lecturing us on the tactics of battle, or just plain lecturing us, with long pauses wherein we get to see lots of bugs getting stomped by cool futuristic weapons.
Now, mind you,I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of that. So that you cannot mistake my meaning, allow me to put it in boldface: I like the novel version of Starship Troopers. I just don’t think it’s a movie, and if I’d been the filmmakers, I’d have thrown away the first draft of the screenplay too.
(Oh, and all the complaining about the power suits? Sorry, but I couldn’t care less. The power suits are cool, the power suits are neat, they probably make all kinds of sense tactically, and they don’t add a single thing to the story other than those factors. In a movie, in other words, the only use they have is as a cool special effect. They don’t affect the story or the characters at all, one way or the other.)
I was about to go on with all the things I really like about the film version, but I realize there’s not much point. It’s not going to make anyone who hates the movie like it , and people who already like it don’t need my opinion.
I doubt anyone can touch this:
Rebel Without a Cause was a non-fictional work by a college professor about hypnotizing adolescent criminals. The book was optioned for the title alone.
The book, with suits: “We are a cadre of highly-trained and well-equipped professionals who know our mission, and know our hardware. Watch us kill bugs. Many, many, many bugs–albeit with a reasonable number of casualties on our side.”
The movie, without suits: “AAAARRGGHHHHH!!! HOLY SHIT! BUGS! BUGS! BUGS EVERYWHERE! BUGS RIPPING US APART! AHHH! BLOOD! GUTS! BUGS! Let me fire my automatic rifle! Crap! I only killed one bug! THERE ARE STILL BUGS EVERYWHERE! WE DON’T STAND A CHANCE! AAAAAHHHHHHH! RUN! RUN! FIRE WITH ALMOST NO EFFECT INTO THE UNENDING WAVE OF BUGS! WATCH US GET RIPPED APART! AAAAHAHHHHHH!!! WHY DID OUR SUPERIORS PUT US IN THIS OBVIOUSLY UNWINNABLE SITUATION? IS THIS SOME SORT OF COMMENT ON VIETNAM AND THE ULTIMATE FUTILITY OF WAR? IS THIS HOW WE INNOCENTS PAY THE PRICE FOR OUR SOCIETY’S PRO-MILITARY BELEIFS? AHHHHH!! MORE BUGS! BUGS EVERYWHERE! WATCH US GET RIPPED APART SOME MORE!!!”
Hey, if you liked the end product with no suits, great. Thematically, the movie and the book were direct opposites, and Verhoeven changed signficant elements of the book to get his points across. The suits are the least of it, honestly.
You’re probably right that the suits would have made no difference to Verhoeven’s movie, though–he’d just toughen up the bugs and so they’d slice through the suits like tin cans, and the brass would continue to send their under-equipped troops in inadequate numbers against a numerically and individually superior enemy. shrug Perhaps it’s best that there weren’t any suits, after all.
But I’m not bitter. . . no . . . 
All of your points are well-taken; more importantly, they’re funny, which I respect even more than a well-turned argument.
I’d be the last person to argue that Verhoeven preserved the essential themes of the story. Funnily enough, I think that was a shrewd decision. The trouble with Troopers as a novel-- when viewed in light of the demands of a movie, and only then – is that its themes demand thought, reflection, argument and explanation: all things that R.A.H. had plenty of time to give us, and which no movie ever does.
I also think a lot of it has to do with Verhoeven’s own background: he’s a child of WWII, grew up in Holland and witnessed bombings and violent death first-hand, so I doubt he has much sympathy with Heinlein’s views of war, however defensible. In someone else’s hands, the film would probably not have been such a broadly satirical sendup of military thinking nor, in fact, would it have been a self-reflexive sendup of the very kind of movie it was being sold as.
All this certainly makes for a major perversion, if you will, of everything in the novel, but it makes for a hell of an entertaining film, by my lights – and in an odd kind of way, it still, somehow, manages to preserve something of the book’s original spirit. To me, at least. And in film adaptations, getting the spirit right is far more important than getting the details right.
I’m happy to agree to disagree, Pix. I didn’t the movie, but it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is because of the movie’s inherent suckiness ( if any), and how much because it was a major diappointment to me.
When I first saw some previews of Starship Troopers, I was annoyed that there didn’t seem to be any suits, but I was really excited because they were obviously leaving some of the heavy political stuff in! Wow! For this, I thought, I could live with no suits!
I was terribly disappointed to see that Heinlein’s ideas were preserved (insomuch as they were) only to be parodied. But then I thought, well, what do you expect from a Hollywood action flick? Throughtful discussion of non-mainstream political ideas? snort It should have been obvious from the start that it would be impossible to make a movie that really reflected the book–too controversial. If such ideas are to be presented to a general audience, they must be ridiculed. Not that I’m saying they’re great ideas, just that they might merit a moment’s thought rather than sneering derision. But when I realized that the director is European, the anti-war sentiments and fascism parallels made a lot more sense to me as well. There were elements of the parody that I thought were rather deft, but all in all, I wish that he’d chosen to make Forever War into a movie, instead.
I also am happy to agree to disagree.
You know the thing about *Troopers * I find most ironic? After Heinlein’s novel came out, there was a firestorm of controversy, fueled by those who had not bothered to read the book carefully – or, as usually happens, who simply filtered the book through their own prejudices – and branded R.A.H. a fascist, a Nazi and a warmonger.
Then, decades later, comes Verhoeven’s film, clearly an acid satire of every basic tenet of the novel, clearly an antiwar film – and, once again, all the mainstream critics took the picture at pure face value and accused Verhoeven of glorifying war. (There’s a moment on the Starship Troopers DVD, during the commentary track, when Verhoeven comments, “Vhen ve put our characters in Gestapo uniforms, please understand dat ve are saying dey are bad!”)
Podkayne: Forever War could make a fabulous movie, but they’d have to change it around some. Movies have to rise to a climax, and a series of episodes doesn’t really work for a movie story (particularly if there’s a pinhead development executive in charge who adheres strictly to Hollywood’s Conventional Wisdom that a story has to have three and only three major arc sequences). But if it were adapted intelligently, then yeah, it could be amazing.
And re this:
I think I’m in love.
Seriously, this is exactly my take on the movie (and on Verhoeven’s career in general; Hollow Man and Showgirls, I believe, are stupid on purpose). However, I’ve tried to argue this before, and have made no headway. (Podkayne, above, says fine, but I still disagree.)
I guess I just wanted to put up my hand as somebody who totally and completely agrees with that interpretation of the movie – that Verhoeven is so derisive of Heinlein’s neo-fascism that he made the movie to mock Heinlein instead of to honor him – so you wouldn’t feel so lonely.
Here’s another movie adaptation that diverges significantly from the book: Never Cry Wolf. Farley Mowat’s non-fiction first-person yarn-spinning gets turned into a thinly-fictionalized, borderline-impressionistic film. But this, I think, is a case where the original book wouldn’t have worked as intended on screen, and the filmmakers had to change everything around (inventing the third act, with Brian Dennehy’s pilot returning, from whole cloth) in order to convey the book’s deeper message about ecological spiritualism.
Cervaise, I’m touched. I am,however, used to being the Lone Ranger with regard to the movies I love and hate. Ask me about what it’s like to be one of only three people on the planet, not counting the filmmakers, to adore Unbreakable. (Then again, it’s possible you already know the feeling. Dare I make that four people?)
I have to say that I’m personally pretty derisive of ol’ Admiral Bob’s neo-fascism too, while recognizing the soundness of his argument as far as it goes; and I think not only Verhoeven, but everyone connected with the movie, must have reacted pretty much the same way, that the only way to present that world in any kind of fashion that honored the novel at all was to make fun of it – there needed to be that wink at the audience that told them, “don’t worry, we know, we know” – and even then, almost nobody got it.
I agree with those who say that Verhoven’s take on the miltary in Starship Troopers is satiric.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a good movie. It’s just a below-average Hollywood effects picture with a paper-thin layer of satire added on top. I’m sure the only reason the satire was added was so that Verhoeven could say, “But I was being ironic!” when the reviewers accused him of being a hack.
I’ve got news for you, Paul: just because it’s satire doesn’t mean it’s any good. Perhaps it’s true that Showgirls is an ironic commentary on Douglas Sirk movies of the 1950s. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a steaming pile of unmitigated crap as well.
Anyway – rant over, back to the subject at hand. Despite superficial similarities, the movie version of THE GRINCH managed to totally reverse the meaning of the book. The Whos became shallow, greedy conformists and the Grinch became a sadly misunderstood fellow.
No doubt the brainiacs who thought this up believed it was a devilishly satirical “re-imagining” of the story, but all they did is turn one of literature’s best-loved misanthropes into yet another mopey teenager with a skin condition.
Apparently, similar horrors were perpetrated in the movie version of STUART LITTLE, but I managed to miss that one.