I am forever bitter about Eragon…
The fucking Dark Tower.
What a complete waste of a great cast.It’s disgusting. There is so much story and world there why did they have to make it so shitty
I didn’t even recognise the story in the film. I did hear something about amazon making a series adaptation?
It wasn’t necessarily ‘bad’, but I think they could have done better with Ender’s Game.
As soon as I heard about the movie I knew they were gonna milk the laser fight scenes for far more than they were worth.
I know this is a total pipe dream that never would’ve happened, but I wish they either just focused on Bean or just made a philosophical epic out of Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide instead.
Ender’s Shadow would actually be an excellent way for them to soft reboot the series.
I think it would have been better as a TV series. They glossed over the battle school battles too quickly. And in making it a series, they could have done Ender’s Shadow at the same time.
Not the best Crichton novel, but Sphere. The book was a fun read but not even the combined powers of Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson could make the movie adaptation palatable.
I liked the book.
For kids books, I thought The Spiderwick Chronicles movie was unnecessarily shitty.
World War Z.
Book: Absolutely brilliant “documentary” from the survivors of a fictional zombie outbreak. Goes deep in to the details of high command and front line soldiers about how their initial assumptions were flawed and the ethical nightmare they were faced on a day to day basis. From wondering if they are killing infected people that could eventually be cured to strategically letting uninfected cities be used as zombie bait giving them time to prepare defenses elsewhere. All told way after the fact when the charcters have benefit of hindsight giving them lots of room to be reminest, express regret and throw shade at each other on why someone ELSES arrogance got people killed. Super funny writing and a nice tide clever book overall.
Movie: Brad Pitt, playing a non-scientist, runs around and finds the cure for the zombie virus in like two days. Forgettable action movie that does nothing unique or interesting.
Audiobook: Full voice casted by A list names who absolutely nail it. Faithful to the original text and lightyears ahead of. the movie. IMHO, it’s the best audiobook experince around.
The North Korea section of the book was so creepy, I still think about that from time to time.
Animorphs. The show was atrocious, which is a crime because the books were amazing.
Catch 22
I thought the 2019 mini-series was pretty decent.
I loved the Timeline book from Crichton, but one look at the trailer for the movie, I decided to not watch it. It looked really bad. 5.6 on imdb sort of backs that up I guess.
Indeed. I saw that movie and it was pretty bad. The book, like most of his novels, was a good read though.
I loved the book. The movie trailer made me ashamed of liking the book.
Artemis Fowl, Ella Enchanted, Inkheart. I loved these books as a kid, but none of the movies were good adaptations.
I want to say Percy Jackson, but the series seem on the right track to fixing this.
The series looks excellent so far! I am so freaking excited!
I don’t think we’ve had a single good adaption of an Isaac Asimov story - Foundation the show is very clearly not Foundation the series and I Robot is…not even worth acknowledging and infuriates me because like, if they wanted to do a murder mystery about Asimov’s robots and call into question his “laws”, Caves of Steel is right there and it’s great. I’d love a good adaption of Caves of Steel but nooo lets all adapt the nigh impossible to adapt because it’s dense as all fuck Foundation instead because that’s the story everyone knows.
Also because you’ve mentioned kids media - How to Train your Dragon. The original series was this fun and interesting world where dragons have existed along humanity since the beginning and were our friends and work animals and the main character was a legitimately weak kid who was more interested in being a biologist and was legitimately pretty good at it, being able to actually talk to them and he had friends and Toothless was this highly entertaining small sassy green thing who was like, the world’s equivalent of a house sparrow. And then DreamWorks took the title and base concept of “dragons and vikings” and threw everything else out for a generic movie with a generic protangonist in a generic fantasy setting. The dragons are now big and scary but the main character goes out to prove that they’re not big and scary and Toothless is now just a giant dumb cat who’s the world’s equivalent of an invisible fire breathing polar bear but it’s ok because Hiccup is special and they replaced the fun gremlin Kamikazi with the generic female love interest character who’s trait is being better than the boys. But because everyone adores it we’re never going to get an actual adaption that actually follows the books are we?
Also Solaris deserves a good adaption that isn’t actively hostile to anyone who isn’t interested in avant garde Soviet cinema. Stanislav Lem’s one of my favourite authors and because of that fucking film it’s legitimately hard to recomend Solaris the book to people because they’re like “oh I tried watching it and it was really boring and confusing and overly arthouse?”
Also also I haven’t actually seen them but like, is there any adaption of Wuthering Heights that’s actually like, accurate? Because I’ve read the book and every time I talk to someone who’s only seen the movie or TV adaptions it feels like they’re talking about a completely different story that’s just like, “Austen but kinda deranged” and not the batshit anti-Austen sturm und drang trainwreck that is the actual story (and also they apparently kinda ignore the last third of the book with Cathy 2 and Linton and Hareton?)
Annihilation. The book had such incredible imagery that was left completely out of the movie. The entire tone was different.
Maze Runner series. The first movie was fairly loyal but they split entirely from the books from the 2nd film onward.
Most of them? Lord of the Rings is the exception not the rule
