I disagree. Oh, not with your analysis, which is spot on, but if we’re going to talk about -worst- adaptation of a video game franchise, Bloodrayne is going to ROFLstomp the Resident Evil movies to take first place. Unless you want to give it bonus points, like Starship Troopers for T&A.
I think Disney’s Animated version got the tone right.
The book was written between 1885 and 1889 – only four years separate the beginning from the “dark” end. The late tragedies in Twain’s life (death of his wife and daughters, bankruptcy because of the Paige typesetter, the bankruptcy of his publishing house) happened after the publication of the book. You can’t blame the dark ending on the personal troubles in Twain’s life.
While I love Army of Darkness, Twain it ain’t.
I don’t quite agree – it’s not exactly Carrioll’s vision. But I do believe that the 1951 Disney animated film is much more faithful than it’s given credit for. They actually quote a surprising amount of the poetry in the books.
I agree, it is not quite Carroll. But the weirdness and silliness is there. Better than any I have seen, anyway.
Sort of agree too. And the Disney Jungle Book is quite fun as long as you realize it has almost nothing to do with the Kipling book.
But he should Burn in Hell for Ever for what he did to Winnie the Pooh.
Someone’s never seen the House of the Dead movie. 
The live action Super Mario Bros. movie from the '90s was arguably a terrible adaptation in that they basically just took the character names and used it to make a cyberpunk setting that had nothing to do with the games, but wound up being an entertaining movie anyway.
Actually, I have. And it’s also terrible, but not as terrible as Bloodrayne IMHO. Although… I submit that “worst adaptaion of another work” is a good way to describe Uwe Bolle as a “director”. 
As for the live action Super Mario Bros. as a terrible adaptation. Yeah, years ago it would have been a top choice, but much like you I can kinda judge it on it’s own mertis, just having to turn off the WTF moments about it being based on the “game”. And watching Hopper being evil is almost always worth a gander or two.
The only reason Boll kept getting work was because he was able to take advantage of a loophole in German tax law that allowed his investors to profit even if the movie bombed. For awhile he was challenging critics of his films to boxing matches, but I believe he chickened out of that after Seanbaby (who is 6’2" and has extensive Muay Thai training) tried to take him up on the offer.
At least it doesn’t re-age and sexualize Alice, which has been the trend of most adaptations since then.
What did he do? As I’ve said in another thread, I thought Disney’s Pooh adaptations from the 60s and 70s were reasonably faithful and well done.
I haven’t seen the stuff that came later, but you can’t hold Walt personally responsible for those.
Walt died long before those films came out.
Yep, and that’s because Walt made it himself.
This makes me realize that it might be a little odd that I always visualize Disney’s Alice when I hear Elton John’s “All the Girls Love Alice”, a song about a world-weary idle-riche teenage lesbian who winds up dead in the subway when her life of decadence and depravity catches up to her.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of my favorites, and I’ve never seen an adaptation that captures its magic. Carroll managed to capture a child’s conception of what adults are like in his various creatures: they’re nonsensical, rules-bound, contemptuous, and scary. Alice, over the course of her adventures, grows increasingly frustrated with them, until in the end she loese her shit and destroys their house of cards.
Any adaptation that loses the underlying threat of violence has lost a crucial aspect of the original; but any adaptation that focuses entirely on that, instead of viewing adults through a child’s lens, is nothing like the original.
Well, there’s American McGee’s Alice for the menace and violence, but I don’t think that’s intended as a faithful adaptation.
A couple that have already been mentioned:
Adaptation: I saw the movie before I read the book and enjoyed it. But after reading (and listening) to The Orchid Thief I found the story of John Laroche and his botanical misadventures a lot more interesting than Nic Cage as Charile Kaufman and his doppelganger.
Mysterious Island (2005 TV movie): Hey, it has Kyle MacLachlan and Patrick Stewart…how bad can it be? Pretty darn bad. The reviewer for Variety summed it up nicely “…it provides no pleasure to dismiss this adaptation of Jules Verne’s sci-fi classic as loud and tedious, with wildly uneven special effects and equally hit-miss performances… in almost any language the mystery is how such a clunky vessel strayed so far off course.”
The thread is unintentionally ambiguous, and can be interpreted in two very different ways:
- What adaptation is least like the original work in some significant way (e.g., spirit)?
- What adaptation is shittiest?
When I criticize adaptations of Alice, it’s mostly for the first reason. And I know that there can be excellent works that are nothing like their source, but I would love to see an Alice movie that captures that essence.
As I’ve said, virtually all adaptation of Verne aren’t at all faithful, and fail to capture the essence of his writing. A few are not so bad, but I doubt if we’ll ever see anything approaching a faithful adaptation of The Mysterious Island.
Yesss, The Hobbit movies were a disappointing movie$money grab, like they took a charming little book and filtered it through Game of Thrones & a bad video game 
Personally I liked the Hobbit movies. Towards the end of his life Tolkien had considered writing a new version of the book to make it less of a children’s story and more of an epic on the lines of LOTR, but never made it far - I like to tell myself that the movies were made in the same spirit.
That being said, all 700+ people in the Seattle Cinerama when I saw The Battle of Five Armies burst out laughing at the scene where Legolas parkoured his way up a collapsing bridge and then hit a hurricanrana on Bolg.