Wow 20 posts in on this subject on the Straight Dope, and somehow I’m the first to mention Starship Troopers?
ETA: I thought Fight Club was a good film, but I much prefer the book’s ending.
I have not read them, but I have heard the Bourne novels bear little resemblance to the movies. Is this correct?
Plus, I, Robot
I already mentioned it (and I, Robot) in the other thread. I figured somebody would repeat them here.
It’s stretching things a bit to even call that an adaptation, except in the sense that the movie was adapted when the screenwriters became aware of the existence of the novel.
Almost every movie based on a PK Dick book or story. I can personally speak for Blade Runner vs. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–they’ve got characters with the same names, and there are replicants. And I think that’s about it. The exception to the rule is the rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly film, w/ Keanu Reeves, which wasn’t half bad, as I recall.
Paycheck followed the original story pretty well, but they had to pad it out significantly and make things overimportant.
The American version of Love (1927), an adaptation of Anna Karenina, is one of the most notorious examples. It has a happy ending. Happy for Anna and Vronsky, that is. Not so happy for Karenin who has the good grace to die.
Nobody has mentioned that Adaptation is not a particularly faithful adaptation?
It’s based on the book The Orchid Thief, but it expands the story somewhat.
*Strangers on a Train *may have been one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous and arguably most ripped-off movie, but I honestly thought the book, by Patricia Highsmith, was better.
For those not familiar with the movie two people meet on a train and agree to “exchange murders”, one(the guy who suggests idea) will kill the wife of other while the other(the protagonist) will murder the father of the other, the idea being that by doing so they will have committed “the perfect murder” one that can’t be traced back to them. In the movie, the protagonist doesn’t realize that a serious proposal was made and refuses to carry out his part of the bargain and eventually defeats the bad guy, wins the girl and lives happily ever after. In the book, the protagonist eventually does murder the father but becomes guilt-ridden as a result despite becoming more involved with the bad guy, with whom there is a a lot of thinly-veiled homoeroticism. In the end, after the bad guy is killed in an accidental drowning, which the protagonist feels guilty for, he turns himself in to the police.
Except it’s not really based on The Orchid Thief, it’s based on Charlie Kaufman’s inability to write an adaptation of the book. I realize it was nominated and awarded trophies for “adapted screenplay,” but I would argue that it is not really an adaptation.
This is what’s the same between Shining the novel, and Shining the movie:
[ul]
[li]title[/li][li]little kid who sees ghosts[/li][li]an old care taker who leaves[/li][li]a hotel that the boy’s alcoholic father looks after[/li][/ul]
Aproximately 75% of the scenes in the movie aren’t in the book.
Forrest Gump - This is also a rare example of a case where the movie is clearly better than the book. The movie is so different from the book it is really an original work that only shares the title and a few superficial similarities. In the book, Forrest is foul-mouthed and also quite abrasive. He has a pet ape and not only goes to Africa, but also into space and is captured by cannibals. I have no idea how someone read the book and decided it could be twisted into a workable screenplay.
D’oh! Ninja’d by Shagnasty as I was typing this:
The movie Forrest Gump is about an innocent but heroic simpleton who lives an interesting life while pining sweetly for his childhood love, Jenny, whom he eventually has a child with and marries.
The novel Forrest Gump is about a crude, vulgar, foul-mouthed horndog. He does some of the same things as his movie counterpart (football, Vietnam, ping-pong, shrimp), but he also:
- screws coeds left and right in college
- becomes an astronaut (along with an orangutan co-astronaut) whose ship re-enters and lands on an island full of cannibals
- works as a stuntman and has some episodes with a naked Raquel Welch.
- becomes a professional wrestler and a chess champion.
The Count of Monte Cristo 2002 version.
Admitedly it is quite a long boook to get into a single film without a whole lot of editing. Maybe P Jackson could give it a whirl and make 6 films out of it , getting some additional source material from The 3 Musketeers
Apparently when they made Stephen King’s It into a network TV miniseries, they apparently decided it would be best to leave out the part with the 12 year olds having an orgy
You really need a miniseries to even attempt to do justice to a Michener novel. IMO they did a pretty fair job with Centennial, but it was 26 hours long.
The James Dean version of East of Eden. They cut out the entire first half of the book which obviously changed the focus of the story.
David Cronenberg’s version of William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”. If you haven’t read “Naked Lunch”, it’s a plotless, psychedelic, stream-of-conciousness prose-poem. Completely and utterly unfilmable as it is.
Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” borrowed images and ideas from the book, added events from Burroughs’ own life, and framed it around an almost “spy-fiction” type plot of Cronenberg’s own invention.
Despite (or more accurately, because of) his unfaithfulness Cronenberg gets an “A” for effort in my book. He took the unfilmable and turned it into a very weird and wonderful movie. I don’t think any other director could have handled the job as well.
One that frankly offended me was the Montgomery Cliff/Robert Ryan version of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, titled simply “Lonelyhearts” so as not to confuse the lady from Dubuque. In this version, Shrike doesn’t use Lonelyhearts as a teaser pony to get his wife in the mood for sex, and, Grinch-like, his heart grows ten sizes larger at the end. The 1983 PBS version with Eric Roberts is closer to the original, with Arthur Hill (the original George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) as the triumphantly cynical Shrike.
Blade Runner is nothing like the book that gave it its title.