The Door Into Summer (2021 Japanese Movie)

Cafe Society
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Clearly based on the Robert Heinlein Book of the same name. Though the movie credits didn’t seem to mention it, IMDB does.

It was surprisingly decent and fairly true to the book consider the time gap since the book was written {1957} and moving the story to Japan.

So in the book the action starts in 1970, in the movie, 1995.
Pete is still a major part of the story, though a bit lesser in size and I though Pete was described as orange in the book. This Pete is grey. He still doesn’t like to go outside in the snow.

Rikki is 17 instead of 11, that is probably for the better. Though it confuses some of the storyline.

Anyway, to fans of the book, probably worth watching.
No English dubbing on this one, just subtitles.
On Netflix currently.

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As I said in the "movies that you’ve seen recently thread:

I just watched The Door Into Summer . Confession time, I haven’t actually read the Heinlein novel, but going from the Wikipedia summary of the book, the movie is actually a pretty faithful adaptation.

As typical in Japanese films/tv, there are moments of heavy-handed melodrama that seem clumsy from my POV, but I mostly enjoyed it.

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OK, I can’t remember offhand what color Pete’s fur is, but the actor absolutely nailed his facial expression, there!

I’ll definitely have to check this out sometime; Door is one of my favorites.

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We watched this yeaterday. Good movie! The Door Into Summer is one of my favorite Heinlein books.

This is my favorite Heinlein adaptation so far. It stayed very true to the theme of the book, and the changes it did make either didn’t hurt the story or actually made it better than the book

Spoilers ahead, for those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie:

The Ricky/Riko subplot was much improved from the book. Making her 17 and having her choose cold slerp on her own without prompting from Dan/Soichiro removed all the squicky aspects of that storyline, and having Riko become a 27-year-old engineer on her own before taking cold sleep put her on equal terms with Soichiro in the future, while in the book 18 year old Ricky in the future was still going to be dependent on the older man.

I liked the robot. It was a great way to update the Hired Girl/Drafting Dan stuff, and a good device for accelerating the plot. For instance Soichiro wakes up in the past With Sato Toro/John already filled in on the details by the robot, saving many scenes of exposition.

The time travel thing was more clever in the movie. In the book, Dan’s co-worker accidentally spills the beans on a secret time travel project over beers, then Dan has to browbeat/humiliate the scientist to get him to do it. In the movie, it’s all part of the time travel loop, and unavoidable. It was also clever to have him give the gold to the professor in the past to fund constructing the machine.

Most of all, they stayed true to the book where it mattered, and kept all the critical scenes such as meeting Belle/whatshername in the future, John and Jenny/Sato Toro and Midori are lovely people and don’t try to screw over Soichiro. The love of engineering comes through, and of course Pete is still there and his story line is pretty much identical to the book.

They dumped the nudity stuff, which was also an improvement because it didn’t advance the plot at all in the book and was basically Heinlein indulging his kink.

You could tell when they used Heinlein’s actual words vs the screenwriters, as the quality of writing was better when they stuck with Heinlein and got a little melodramatic and simplistic when they didn’t. But unlike Starship Troopers, what really comes across is the honest and affectionate treatment the creative people gave to the original work. Where they changed it wasn’t gratuitous but necessary to bring it up to modern standards and the limits of low budget movie-making.

Best Heinlein adaptations for me now:

Destination Moon (well, he wrote the script, so it doesn’t count)
The Door Into Summer
Predestination
The Puppet Masters
…
A random piece of paper in the garbage
…
Starship Troopers