They certainly had great moments- in the Shire, the White Council vs the Necromancer, and other scenes. But the big battles, the barrel fight and the 'romance" were all pretty bogus.
The Riddle scene belonged in a much better and shorter movie.
The were-worms of the Last Desert were pretty cool.
Oh, I understand how & why people such as your distinguished self, like the Hobbit movies, I so wanted to myself. And I understand the studio doing it for the $$, not so much Peter Jackson’s motives for doing them: money OR the art of film? But they were just too f*#%ng BUSY with visual overload AND so much plot & character details that are nowhere in Tolkien’s legendarium that I couldn’t enjoy the hellacious ride though, again, totally wished I could have. 
I wanted to like the Hobbit, but I didn’t even manage to finish the first one… And I went into it blind (as in, I had avoided any reviews and such; I had definitely read the book once or twelve times).
One I haven’t mentioned yet (although I’ve brought it up in the past on this Board) is This Island Earth. You can probably tell from my Boardname that I’m kind of a fan – but of Raymond F. Jones’ novel, not of the movie (although one reason I chose the name was because of leading man Rex Reason)
Although it has a weak and indecisive ending, Jones’ novel – actually a “fix up” of several short stories – starts out strong, with scientist hero Cal Meacham finding the mysterious ultra-capacitors delivered to his lab and starts to investigate. As in the movie, he gets a catalog from the mysterious supplier, and ends up ordering all the parts to build an Interociter. Unlike the movie, though, they don’t send him the plans to put it together – he has to dope it all out for himself from hints and clues in the catalog. In the movie, he’s a high school hobbyist assembling an interplanetary Heathkit. In the book, he’s gotta use his knowledge and skills to figure out how it all fits together. Imagine getting a box full of electronics parts and boards , but no circuit diagram, and you don’t even know what the damned thing is supposed to do once you put it together. This was, after all, a test of Meacham’s intelligence and creativity, as well as his knowledge of electronics. He even accidentally breaks a part, and has to build a replacement (despite the warning that no parts can be replaced).
The novel also shows us some of the other “qualification tests” sent to other scientists and engineers at his facility. A mechanical engineer gets a box of really mysterious things he can’t explain, for instance, but he fails to use it properly, and thus flunks his qualifier.
In due course, Meacham id recruited by the aliens (who aren’t called “Metalunans”). The leader isn’t the British-sounding “Exeter”, but “Jorgasnovara”, which sounds like a cross between Swedish and Indian (but not like stereotypical “alien” names). They don’t want us for coming up with new uses for radioactive elements or the like – the aliens are infinitely superior to us in technical knowledge. They need superior human engineers to carry out tasks like building Interociters – lower-level tech needed for their war effort against the Bad Guys so that the alien scientists can continue designing superweapons for the war effort. Our best guys re effectively “grunts” recruited into the war effort because our world in behind the Good Guy alien lines. We’re like Pacific Islanders during WWII helping out the Allied pilots by building runways and the like. Earth is thuis like one of those islands – which explains the title, something the movie never does.
The novel has none of the pseudoscientific blather of the movie – no insect-like mutants, no adjustment to “pressure” aboard the ship, no bombardment turning Metaluna into a sun (!) or the like. I get the impression that the makers of the film thought all the highfalutin’ science was over the audience’s heads, so they threw out 90% of the book and substituted a plot made by linking together images from the covers of science fiction magazines. and I have to admit that the film looks good – spaceship battles in space, planetary bombardment, doomed cities with monorails and tall buildings and domes, weird aliens. It’s just that it’s brain-dead empty space-fantasy. Compare it to something like Forbidden Planet, which came out about the same time, and which was intelligent as well as photogenic, and you can see what a waste the film is.
I made it a little further than you did. The Hobbit is one of my favorite books (and I’ll commit some heresy here and admit that I liked The Hobbit much more than I did the LOTR books), and I made it through the first film, but there was no way I could handle the prospect of watching two more of that crap.
I’m not sure if the criteria here is “Worst” as it totally changing the story, theme, and/or characters, or “worst” as it in just sucks, even if loyal to the story.
But really, an obvious winner either way is “The Running Man.” The movie with Arnold in it is fucking terrible, a cartoonish mess that somehow looks incredibly cheap - I think they spent the entire budget on Arnold’s salary. It actually looks a lot like “Batman and Robin,” Arnold’s other cinematic catastrophe.
It is also totally unrelated to the book aside from involving a television show. The book is one of the best dystopian stories you’ll ever read, both exciting and sad. It would make an excellent movie if adapted at all faithfully.
Not sure if you’re aware of this, but there’s supposed to be a more faithful version of the story coming next year that features Glen Powell, Josh Brolinand Lee Pace.
You could say the same thing about Total Recall, except that, as director Veerhoeven pointed out, it doesn’t look cheap . "Every dolar is up there on the screen.
The problem is that Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” doesn’t have anywhere near enough story to sustain a 2 hour action movie. So they stole the bulk of the plot from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization
Speaking of Sheckley, his own works have been abysmally adapted into things that don’t look at all like his original stories.
Immortality, Inc. (AKA Immortality Delivered) would’ve made a fine action film (premise – What if modern technology could guarantee you would make it into the afterlife?), but instead they made Freejack with Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins. Really.
Watchbird is a story about the danger of autonomous drones (written in the 1950s!) It would’ve made a neat, prescient drama when they filmed it for the TV series Masters of Science Fiction, except they completely changed the story line. (They also did this with Robert Heinlein’s Jerry was a Man, making it about an android instead of a chimpanzee.)
Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall was adapted not only once, but twice – in 1988 and 2000. I haven’t seen either version, but they don’t get good reviews.
Similarly, the Science Fiction channel tried twice to adapt Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld, changing it severely in both cases. Apparently they thought American viewers wouldn’t stand for a version in which an American wasn’t the hero.
I agree with you that “The Running Man” is terrible adaption of King’s novella.
I DISAGREE with you though that is a horrible movie. Granted it is NOT a serious film but is one of Schwarzenegger’s better films and one of the best of cheesy corny 80s mindless action films with stupid one liners and over the top violence…
Worst adaptation?
I’ll give you a hint-They didn’t even say “You sunk my battleship!”
Honestly, I think if Gandalf had said that, the adaptation would’ve been even worse.
I love The Running Man; though I have a soft spot for 80s Arnie flicks.
I also am probably one of the few who likes the move Freejack, but I had no idea it was based on a book. It’s just such a weird movie. Renee Russo and Emilio Estevez, with Anthony Hopkins and Mick Jagger as the antagonists? So… odd.
The 2012 movie adaptation of the board game Battleship starring Taylor Kitsch? I thought it was not as awful as I expected and was certainly better than John Carter, also a 2012 movie adaptation starring Taylor Kitsch, this time based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels set on Mars. Now that was a truly awful movie.
We will have to disagree on this. I loved John Carter, which never got a fair shake.
If need be, we can settle it with Barsoomian rifles at 100 paces.
Really? That John Carter movie felt like three hours of boredom. (Though it was just 132 minutes.)
Considering the rather sparse source they were adapting, it’s far better than anyone ever could have expected.
I used to have the “Bruce Willis Rule” in which your expectations for a movie have to be factored into your final opinion (I can’t recall exactly why I picked on Bruce Willis, but I suspect it happened during the Die Hard sequels). In any case, my expectations were very low for Battleship, and the movie was indeed better than I expected.