SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

I was having a conversation with some friends about which books I wish would be adapted to some other medium and what I hoped for them. What books would you like to see on screen, stage, or computer? What adaptations do you wish had been done differently and what would you like to see happen to get your beloved book "right?" What adaptations do you think did a really good job?

That's quite good topic for a chat.
I think one of the problems, especially for longer works, is the risk of cutting too much - I believe this was one of the problems with Eragon, though I never saw the movie. And it was possibly the reason why HP7 was split into two movies (and even then, skipped or simplified much).
Mortal Instruments series suffered from too many edits for the ending of first book when the movie was made, and just like Eragon, it put a full stop to the series being filmed.

As for something I liked, it was the "I, robot" movie, though I am yet to read the book (hopefully I'll put it on my list of classics to read this year).
Oh, now I remembered one more:
The Time Machine - I saw the movie one or two times, liked it as well.

Most of the books that I love I don't want to see on screen- I'm grateful that Hyperion hasn't yet made it despite a lot of false starts.

After a lot of years of hating it, I now love watching David Lynch's Dune- it has almost nothing to do with the book, but it's a lot of fun.

Not a fan of GOT the series- love the acting and the settings/costumes, but it dumbed down a great series and was considerably more misogynistic than the books.

Loved the original Blade Runner- I thought that the visuals and settings went very well with the original story.

I'm glad that there's very little chance of the Thomas Covenant books making it to screen. It's my favourite fantasy world, and although the entire series is depressing as hell, I wouldn't want to see it done wrong.

This is not SFF, but the TV adaptation of The Last Kingdom is kind of depressing. Don't get me wrong- it's a good show. But it isn't the book.

I think Tomas is right when he says the problem with movies is time and the amount of things they have to cut- but there is no reason they need to cram two books into every season of a TV show. One book would have provided sufficient content for a single season.

I sort of hoped at first BBC was just waiting to see how the show did before stretching the books out into a whole season, but then season 2 came out and we got 2 more books. They are just missing too much, particularly the relationships between characters and all of Uhtred's ingenious battle strategies.

I really love mini-series and the advent of small-prod companies like Netflix and Hulu etc. I think those give more time for ideas to breathe without having to worry about making someone sit in a theatre for 8 hours.

Putting books into films is so scary. On one hand, I love to see more of the worlds that captivate me. On the other hand, they so often get it wrong. I understand that some things need to be adjusted to appeal to a wider, and more visually inclined, audience. But sometimes it just goes so completely awry. (I actually think the very last Twilight movie did a good job of changing the story enough to make it more of an action film while still maintaining the integrity of the story.)

I enjoyed the Hunger Games adaptations as well as the Harry Potter films. Thought the books of course were better. (Cue every non-reader rolling their eyes at me and groaning.)

I loathed The Host adaptation. I actually threw a bit of a temper tantrum in the parking lot afterwards.

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children adaptation was dreadful.

I thought the Warm Bodies movie was good in its own right, though very different from the book. Same with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I'm really looking forward to Ready Player One and Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, as well as the new HBO Fahrenheit 451 movie.

I just finished the Temeraire series (His Majesty's Dragon) and would LOVE to see that adapted. Unfortunately, I'm realistic and don't see anyone picking up a series of nine books about the Napoleonic wars with dragons for a film franchise. Probably for the best. It would most likely just get ruined anyway.

I'll try not to rant. Most of the books to films I've seen have kind of cheesed me off. LotR most of all (won't even look at the trailers or film clips of The Hobbit).

The reason most don't work for me is that 90% of the time these films or TV shows are primarily made to capitalize financially on the original's branding. I.e., the primary motivation is all wrong. Capturing the narrative and emotional essence of the original is not the primary driving factor, so these products most often strip away the most important part of the original works.

Other times, the person put in charge of the project 1) has a fundamentally different interpretation, or understanding, of the original work than I do; 2) they believe they know better than the original author what makes a great story; or 3) they are too wrapped up in their own creative ego to stick to the original story and feel the need to interject their own concepts into the work.

I think PJ did all three of those things to LotR, and I ended up despising his work. OTOH, I feel that David Lynch fell into the third category when he made Dune. I really think he revered and honored the original, but he had to make it his own. So what he produced was a story with a message exactly opposite of Herbert's ... (view spoiler)[Herbert's Dune ended with the reveal that Paul was special but NOT the messiah foretold by Bene Geserit lore because their myth was essentially a lie; while in Lynch's adaptation, Paul is essentially a god who can literally call rain down from the sky...he IS the legend. (hide spoiler)] I liked Lynch's version, warts and all, when it came out but feel a lot of it has aged very badly.

The original Blade Runner is an interesting case because Scott injected his own interpretation onto the story, making it as much his own as Philip K Dick's ... but the studio forced it to be released with alterations that exemplify the first category (believing they know better than the original author what makes a great story), trying to turn it into a SF Noir Detective story with those embarrassing narrator overdubs. Scott eventually re-tooled the film into his Final Cut, which is a beautiful, brooding film that totally assimilates PKD's world concept, but still alters the story according to Scott's design. I love that film but it's not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which would be top on my list to re-do in an accurate adaptation (with Mercerism back in its place, Deckard's wife still being alive, and Deckard's fixation on animal husbandry restored, etc.

Here are some films I feel really do the translation correctly:
Slaughterhouse Five: from the Vonnegut book of the same name.

A Scanner Darkly: another from PKD, a bit too focused on the comic element but essentially the same story.

Throne of Blood: Kurosawa's take on Hamlet. It's a great example of major changes being made while preserving the essential plot and emotional content of the original. I mean, medieval samurai rather than European, in a completely different language ... and yet it's probably the most intense version Hamlet ever.

It is so tricky. On the one hand, the books I love are such great stories I want to see them in other media and have people introduced to them who otherwise might not be - but, on the other, I know that it might be disappointment because it may not match the images in my head - or may just not be very good!



I think the advent of Amazon, Netflix, etc is a massive step forward and, generally, an adaptation would mean a movie and that is generally not long enough for a novel (I've long argued that short stories, maybe novellas, are massively under developed as source material for movies, but novels get the name recognition).



Here in the UK we do have something of a tradition of adapting novels to mini-series, and I think the streaming boom is helping this as the BBC or whoever now have more options for selling this on. The last really good adaptation was, for my money, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.



One thing I think is a problem (and I am genuinely sincere about this) as that adaptations and remakes are so often made from amazing source material. Think about it; a film is such a collaborative project, and so damned expensive, that if the source material is amazing the chances of repeating that are really slim. It has so much chance of regression to the mean and so little of hitting the same heights.



Wouldn't it make more sense to remake or adapt something that had potential but was flawed? then, chances are, you're going to improve on the original!

I think the Mistborn (The Final Empire) books by Brandon Sandersonwould make good movies / TV, as would theThe Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky series by N K Jemisin if they had enough budget to do them justice!

Paul wrote: "Wouldn't it make more sense to remake or adapt something that had potential but was flawed? then, chances are, you're going to improve on the original!

I think this is a good idea. But I can imagine why the suits with the money wouldn't,

Ruth wrote: "I think the Mistborn (The Final Empire) books by Brandon Sandersonwould make good movies / TV, as would the[book:The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk ..."

Lookit this :)


https://io9.gizmodo.com/n-k-jemisins-...

Paul wrote: "Here in the UK we do have something of a tradition of adapting novels to mini-series, and I think the streaming boom is helping this as the BBC or whoever now have more options for selling this on. The last really good adaptation was, for my money, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell...."

This comment reminded me of the truly atrocious BBC adaptation of Neverwhere. I have avoided the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell series simply because of how awful Neverwhere was. (And that is a favorite book of mine, so it was particularly painful.) Maybe someday I'll get over the trauma and check out JS&MN.

as of February 2018:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/...

as of July 2017

https://www.tor.com/2017/07/31/upcomi...

Paul wrote: "Here in the UK we do have something of a tradition of adapting novels to mini-series, and I think the streaming boom is helping this as the BBC or whoever now have more options for selling this on. The last really good adaptation was, for my money, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell...."

I haven't read the original but the series was quite good.

I'd say the same about The Expanse, and to a lesser degree about Altered Carbon.

Paul wrote: "(I've long argued that short stories, maybe novellas, are massively under developed as source material for movies, but novels get the name recognition)."

Hmm ... not so sure about that. Wikipedia lists something like 458 films based on 430 works of short fiction.

Novels are more likely to have titles you recognize, so it's often times hard to see that a film is based on a short work.

Short stories make up the bulk of movies made based off of Philip K Dicks for example (by a 7 to 4 ratio):

Blade Runner (based on novel)
Total Recall (based on short story)
Confessions d'un Barjo (novel)
Screamers (short story)
Minority Report (short story)
Impostor (short story)
Paycheck (short story)
A Scanner Darkly (novel)
Next (short story)
Radio Free Albemuth (novel)
The Adjustment Bureau (short story)

Micah wrote: "Paul wrote: "(I've long argued that short stories, maybe novellas, are massively under developed as source material for movies, but novels get the name recognition)."

Hmm ... not so sure about tha..."

Stephen King has a bunch of movies adapted from his short works too. The Shawshank Redemption, Secret Window, and The Langoliers all come to mind but there are a bunch more from stories of his I have yet to read.

I enjoyed the Hunger games movies.

While reading the Mistborn series, Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set, I thought I would enjoy a movie of it because sometimes I had trouble picturing in my mind the acrobatics of the special characters, although there was so much to those books that movie-makers would leave out that it would probably ruin it.

Kristin B. wrote: "This comment reminded me of the truly atrocious BBC adaptation of Neverwhere. I have avoided the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell series simply because of how awful Neverwhere was. (And that is a favorite book of mine, so it was particularly painful.) Maybe someday I'll get over the trauma and check out JS&MN. ..."

The book is actually a novelization of the mini-series, but I think Gaiman prefers the book because it contains ideas that had to be cut from the series.

And I adored the Strange & Norrell adaptation. It strayed a bit, but stayed true to the spirit of the story and characters.

Although it was a podcast first, and then a book, it's now being set up for television on FX. I haven't read Welcome to Night Vale but it is a fun podcast that could be a fun TV show, in a Twin Peaks odd sort of way.

Kristin B. wrote: "Same with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Technically the book is the adaptation of the original radio play, and Adams revised it after that for the TV series, and each iteration was different from the one before, so that one is kind of hard to pin down the provenance of. They all came from the same guy, though.

I heard the radio play first and then saw the TV series, so to me the book is a novelization and wasn’t as funny, but I’m guessing most people read the book first.

Trike wrote: "Kristin B. wrote: "Same with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Technically the book is the adaptation of the original radio play, and Adams revised it after that for the TV series, and each i..."

The only thing I've experienced other than the book is the movie with Martin Freeman. I keep meaning to listen to the old radio show, but have just never gotten around to it. I almost think I shouldn't since I'm never a huge fan of adaptations and to me the radio show would feel like an adaptation even though it technically came first.

Allison wrote: "What books would you like to see on screen, stage, or computer?"

I’d like to say I want the work of living writers adapted so they can get the benefit, but in all honesty I want a Well World miniseries that embraces its complex epic storyline, starting off right at the beginning with Midnight at the Well of Souls. Centaurs! Spaceships! Pegasuses! Plus body transformation, wars, the complete destruction of the universe.

Also, a The Dragonriders of Pern miniseries. Supposedly they are making this, but I’ve been hearing that for 30 years now.

A more realistic adaptation is Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. It would be fairly low budget, too. Since it’s basically a literature version of X-Men and is focused on immortal PoC, it’s a natural fit for the current market.

Basically half the books I read in 1978-1979.


Allison wrote: "What adaptations do you wish had been done differently and what would you like to see happen to get your beloved book "right?""

No one has done any of my beloved books. But Starship Troopers deserves a do-over. Talk about completely getting the point of that book wrong, holy crap.

Oh, oh, Damnation Alley! The book is much more badass than the movie. I think if they merely changed the thing that wrecks the world from nuclear war to climate change it would be relevant again. (Although nuclear holocaust seems to back on the table recently.)


Allison wrote: "What adaptations do you think did a really good job?."

All the Marvel movies. :)

The Handmaid's Tale miniseries on Hulu was an incredible adaptation. They updated it yet preserved the essence of the story.

Over on Amazon, The Man in the High Castle is likewise brilliant.

The Martian was pretty well done.

The Boys from Brazil is an amazing adaptation, way better than the book.

Planet of the Apes was done well in the 1960s and the recent trilogy is great. They are absolutely nothing like the book, though.

Colossus was adapted as Colossus: The Forbin Project, and the movie is much more intense than the book. One could argue that The Terminator owes a lot to that book, too.

For me, though, the greatest adaptation of all time is The Thing. It’s based on the John W. Campbell story Who Goes There?, which was originally adapted in the 1950s as The Thing From Another World, which is pretty decent for a 1950s sci-fi flick, but they couldn’t pull off the intensity back then. John Carpenter’s movie manages the nearly impossible trick of adapting both the story and the first film, seamlessly blending the two.

Micah wrote: Other times, the person put in charge of the project 1) has a fundamentally different interpretation, or understanding, of the original work than I do; 2) they believe they know better than the original author what makes a great story; or 3) they are too wrapped up in their own creative ego to stick to the original story and feel the need to interject their own concepts into the work.

I take an entirely different view of this. Movies are a very different art form from novels, and I see no reason why a director should have his hands tied by a misplaced reverence for his source material. The director's only responsibility is to make a movie that stands up in its own right.

Micah wrote: Most of the books to films I've seen have kind of cheesed me off. LotR most of all (won't even look at the trailers or film clips of The Hobbit).

I love all those films. I saw the first Hobbit film 5 times at the cinema. Watched it again at home a few weeks ago. I think the Hobbit films have been seriously underrated. Jackson is an imaginative and accomplished director - he knows which features of a book work on the screen and which don't, and he makes films accordingly.

I'd like to see Vernon Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep being adapted.

Silvana wrote: "I'd like to see Vernon Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep being adapted."

I’d be kind of creeped out by the Tines. Giant meerkats covered by those shudder-inducing disc-holes that pass for ears on lizards? Ick. Great book, but gah.

Trike wrote: "Silvana wrote: "I'd like to see Vernon Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep being adapted."

I’d be kind of creeped out by the Tines. Giant meerkats covered by those shudder-inducing disc-holes that pass f..."

The one with the giant spiders would be worse!

I'll start with what I was not happy with. The Golden Compass movie was one of the worst adaptations I have ever seen. It just absolutely butchered the plot, and over simplified everything. The characters were so good in the books, but they had no personality in the movie. Another terrible adaptation was the Shannara Chronicles on MTV. I couldn't even watch more than 3 episodes of it. I was so excited when I heard about it, but the acting is terrible, and the elf ears are so fake I cringed every time I saw them.

On the positive side, I really enjoyed I am Legend with Will Smith. It was definitely different than the book, but it still made a great story, with some really good acting. I also liked Harry Potter and Hunger Games movies. As usual things were cut out, but I think they both did a good job of staying faithful to the story they were telling. I really like Game of Thrones too. It is funny because the first season really follows the books closely. Then as each season went on, it got farther and farther away. I just had to learn to enjoy it as an alternate interpretation of these characters and I am (not so patiently) waiting for the real story from GRRM.

There are a lot I'm looking forward to, but one that I am skeptical about. I was so excited for Ready Player One, but then I saw the trailer and I'm ready for disappointment. There's a NASCAR race, and a random Orc that is featured very prominently like it's a main character. I'll still see it because I loved the book, but besides the stacks and IOI, I didn't recognize anything from the story in the trailer.

There are a few book series that are supposedly in development as TV series or movies that I'm happy about, but are low on details and might or might not happen. Wheel of Time is supposedly in the works for streaming on Amazon, so that would be cool. Red Rising was going to be made into a movie, but the author didn't like where it was going, so now it is in the works as a TV show. Again, it might be years, but I'm hopeful. The last one is the Dragonriders of Pern, which has supposedly been in the works forever, but might actually be real this time.

I’m looking forward to Ready Player One. I hope to enjoy it more by refreshing my memory and re-reading the book after I see the movie.

Chris wrote: "I take an entirely different view of this. Movies are a very different art form from novels, and I see no reason why a director should have his hands tied by a misplaced reverence for his source material..."

In which case I don't think there's any reason for them to use other people's stories as fodder for their art. Just write something new because movies are an entirely different art form.

I mean it's kind of like saying painting is a totally different art form than a book so any paintings done based on a book can just do whatever the artist wants ... put a clown nose on Gandalf, paint Golem wearing a business suit with a halo and perfect teeth, have Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz riding a dinosaur, whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I'd say artists can do that ... but I'd feel free to criticize their interpretation as being rubbish.

To each their own, I suppose. :D

So, The Shape of Water, that's the other way 'round, right? Does it often happen that a movie comes first, and then a novel? Is this the one/ one of the few time(s) when we'd want to see the movie first, then scold the book for not being true to movie version?

Sincere questions, because I'm confused.

Cheryl wrote: "So, The Shape of Water, that's the other way 'round, right? Does it often happen that a movie comes first, and then a novel? Is this the one/ one of the few time(s) when we'd want t..."

yes (off the top of my head, here are three):

Star Wars
Star Trek
Alien

it's a big business

Cheryl wrote: "So, The Shape of Water, that's the other way 'round, right? Does it often happen that a movie comes first, and then a novel? Is this the one/ one of the few time(s) when we'd want t..."

Novelizations have long been a thing. Alan Dean Foster has made half his career on writing novelizations.

Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by “George Lucas” back in 1977 was actually ghostwritten by Foster. (The version of the book released alongside Phantom Menace, A New Hope, gave Foster his credit.)

James Blish did the novelizations of the original Star Trek series. And Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelizations for the animated Trek series.

Micah wrote: "Chris wrote: "I take an entirely different view of this. Movies are a very different art form from novels, and I see no reason why a director should have his hands tied by a misplaced reverence for...

In which case I don't think there's any reason for them to use other people's stories as fodder for their art. Just write something new because movies are an entirely different art form."

I’m with Micah. If you aren’t going to hew as closely as possible to the source material, why bother adapting it at all?

Otherwise you end up with garbage like Starship Troopers or a mess like The Hobbit.

Douglas Adams changed Hitchhikers Guide every time he changed it to a new form of media. He was probably trying to keep it fresh.

The radio series was broadcast in 1978 and was different to the Book came out in 1979 which was different to the TV series which was aired in January 1981. The movie came out in the 2000s just after Adams death. He wrote the movie and had a hand in its making until his death. And yes this was different to all of the others even though they all had the same basic plot line.

I read the book and watched the TV series and then watched the Martin Freeman movie. I have listened to some of the radio play but not much. I loved each and every incarnation of the story. He also wrote a few Dr Who episodes including one that never made it off the ground. Dr Who and the Krickket Men (or something like that) that used his little white robots who came to the Lords cricket ground in the Hitchhikers series and started blowing up stuff and then took the ashes away. I really need to get around to watching the recreation of his Dr Who story “Shada”.

Cheryl wrote: "So, The Shape of Water, that's the other way 'round, right? Does it often happen that a movie comes first, and then a novel? Is this the one/ one of the few time(s) when we'd want t..."

Even rarer are cases where book and film are made in concert. I can think of only one case ... 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick and Clarke worked on the story partially based on a pre-existing short story by Clarke. The film and book were written concurrently, and to mutual benefit I think.

I would really like either a graphic novel or show adaptation of the Ketty Jay series by Chris Wooding. (Retribution Falls.) The writing style is very visual, and I think it would actually work better in that medium.

Trike wrote: "I’m with Micah. If you aren’t going to hew as closely as possible to the source material, why bother adapting it at all?"

Well, perhaps a less harsh way of saying it is that I believe the premise that the two media are so different that it doesn't matter how you translate one to the other is a false dichotomy.

Certainly it's almost impossible to fund a 100% faithful film that a general audience will still watch based on such a long story as LotR (for example). Length alone rather dictates that. But both art forms are still storytelling. The same plot and character dynamics exist in both.

Sticking with the LotR example, I would have totally been fine with the movies being transformed (as they were) from a journey and coming of age story to an action/adventure film. That's not an issue. But there is no need in the film to totally change the psychological makeup of main characters. Aragorn in the book knows he will be king. There is no doubt about his destiny. In the film he's a self-doubting, self-loathing character. Similarly, Sam ends up turning his back temporarily on the quest where in the book he is (according to Tolkien himself) actually the main character who never fails his friend and master. Faramir is turned into almost a mirror of Boromir, (view spoiler)[choosing to take ring back to Gondor (hide spoiler)] when in the book he is as wise as Gandalf(view spoiler)[ and realizes the danger in that course, choosing instead to let Frodo go on his quest unhindered (hide spoiler)].

Those kinds of changes lessened the story in my opinion and were not called for by the differences between film and book. (The Faramir thing actually required adding scenes not in the book, thus countering the argument that Jackson had to do all his changes in order to cut time from the film). Sure, cutting Tom Bombadil was a bitter pill but I could see doing that to some degree ... but then to add more scenes not in the book throughout the films? It made no sense in a "books are different than films" argument.

Changes and revisions during translation are inevitable, but fundamentally changing the characters and stories are not. That's the art in it.

Yeah, I agree. I loved what they did with Fellowship, but the other two books (and The Hobbit! I pretend that's not a real thing) were massacred.

I'd have liked to have seen the fierce Aragorn, but I understood the sad Aragorn. The Ents acting hasty pissed me right off. And the whole point of Helm's Deep was that the humans had inherited the problems of the world! No help coming! That was the undercurrent that made it glorious.

I really liked the adaptation of The Princess Bride. The movie took away some of the bitterness of the book, but also made those parts of the book more "believable." The sarcasm and the pokes at tropes made it through but lightened it up a little so that you could still admit you were enjoying the story.

See, I don't like the HP movies! I want those books to be about 10 hours of spectacle each, and can't let go of that dream.

I also started out like GoT but agreed that at some point the writers went on a power trip and it took them to ugly places that I don't think even Martin would have written or anticipated.

Marvel did it really well, IMO. So much fun, but still poignant at times.

Allison, I agree with you on the HP movies! I always wanted them to be a TV series so they could spend more time on everything.
I enjoyed most of the movies but I really didn't like the final two. I thought they changed things that didn't need to be changed. It did not live up to my imaginings.

I can't comment on many others because I so seldom watch movies, I'm that person who always says, "I didn't see it, but I read the book." Actually sometimes when I hear about interesting movies/TV series I find myself wishing they were books so I could read them instead, so I'm in favor of novelizations though I worry about quality (because I imagine it's often done primarily for the profit rather than to tell a story in a meaningful way.)

Micah wrote: "Cheryl wrote: "So, The Shape of Water, that's the other way 'round, right? Does it often happen that a movie comes first, and then a novel? Is this the one/ one of the few time(s) w...

Even rarer are cases where book and film are made in concert. I can think of only one case ... 2001: A Space Odyssey."

Also Mad Max: Fury Road where the graphic novel and film were both created from the storyboards at the same time.

There’s another one whose title is slipping my memory. I’m going to ask my Library of Congress friends if they can recall it.

Micah wrote: "Trike wrote: "I’m with Micah. If you aren’t going to hew as closely as possible to the source material, why bother adapting it at all?"

Well, perhaps a less harsh way of saying it is that I believe the premise that the two media are so different that it doesn't matter how you translate one to the other is a false dichotomy.

Certainly it's almost impossible to fund a 100% faithful film that a general audience will still watch based on such a long story as LotR (for example). Length alone rather dictates that. But both art forms are still storytelling. The same plot and character dynamics exist in both."

If we’re strictly talking about feature films, then the only one I can think of is Greed, which was 8 or 9 hours long. But certainly TV miniseries can faithfully reproduce every bit of dialogue, if someone is into that. That said, an image can recreate pages of description, and that’s the key to a good adaptation.

What I meant though was retaining the themes and ideas of a book when translating it to a movie. Changing specific details is relatively unimportant if the spirit of the piece is retained. The 1968 Planet of the Apes changed some key details of Pierre Boulle’s book, but the point of both of them is the same: a despised underclass will eventually overthrow the status quo because we are complicit in our own fate. The new trilogy makes it even more science fictional but retains that core message: our fate is our fault.

I don’t like the LotR films, not because I have any special reverence for the books but just because they are bad movies. The fact that they changed core characters is emblematic of that issue. Same goes with movies like Man of Steel. I don’t particularly like the character of Superman, but that movie is just poorly done. Getting Clark and his dad Jonathan completely wrong simply underscores the point.

Starship Troopers is not a great book, but Heinlein was doing some interesting things with it, which are fodder for discussion and challenging our worldviews. The first being his idea of a political system different from ours. Verhoeven slightly touches on it in the movie but it is a central theme to the novel. It drives everything. Heinlein was also interested in the increased mechanization of war, personified by the battlesuits. The soldiers didn’t clump together like idiots while wearing plastic hats, they fought independently in body armor that was the equivalent of walking super tanks, including being armed with nuclear weapons. In that regard he anticipated the style of push-button drone warfare we have today, in spirit if not exact tech. And thirdly, revealed at the end is the fact that Johnny Rico isn’t white. This was a huge deal at the time, and is still relevant today 60 years later when we continue to suffer under the assumption that our protagonist is white.

Verhoeven took all that and saw only fascism. He made Rico super white and jettisoned everything else.

If I were to adapt that book today, I would do something like make Rico gay. You can’t hide the fact that he’s not white, so you have to find something else to surprise the audience with. Heinlein got away with it because he could dole out specific information. Being gay or some other internal thing (being an atheist, being a Muslim, etc.) is the sort of thing one has to look for in a movie adaptation. It’s not identical but it is equivalent.

Stephanie wrote: "Allison, I agree with you on the HP movies! I always wanted them to be a TV series so they could spend more time on everything.
I enjoyed most of the movies but I really didn't like the final two. I thought they changed things that didn't need to be changed. It did not live up to my imaginings. "
Yeah, exactly, though in my case I'd include ending of sixth movie as well. Battle for Hogwarts in HP7 P2 was just mess.

Micah wrote: But there is no need in the film to totally change the psychological makeup of main characters.

You're assuming that the director must be able to demonstrate a positive need before he's allowed to make certain kinds of changes. This is precisely what I am challenging. He's under no obligation to do anything of the kind. He's only under an obligation to produce a good film.

Trike wrote: If you aren’t going to hew as closely as possible to the source material, why bother adapting it at all?

And this assumes that the main point of adapting a novel is to be faithful to it. Again, I challenge that.

When I go to see an adaptation, I take my affection for the book with me into the cinema, but I'm very open to the director doing something new with the material, because after all, I've still got the book, and I'm not going to lose it by seeing the film. The movie is an addition to the book, not a substitute for it. I want the film to evoke the book; it doesn't have to copy it.

This is not to say that changes don't jolt me when I experience them. The character change of Faramir jolted me when I saw the film the first time, but on a second viewing I knew it was coming, and I accepted it as a variant of the story. (Let's not forget that Tolkien himself wrote different versions of some of his own stories, which posed problems for his son when he came to compile The Silmarillion after Tolkien's death.) The insertion of Tauriel in the Hobbit film, on the other hand, was no surprise and did not jolt me, because it had been trailed in advance, and I could see what Jackson was doing and was comfortable with it from the word go.

Maybe I'm just easy to please. If so, I'm probably lucky, because I'm evidently getting more enjoyment from these films than either Trike or Micah.

The changes and omissions in HP were a little annoying at first but my family discussed it when Philosophers Stone came out and we decided that the movies themselves were brilliant even if they were a bit different to the books so we would treat them as different entities to the books and not bring any expectations into the cinema and judge every movie on its own merits. So we love both the books and the movies and have reread them all and rewatched them all on many occasions. All 5 of us. Just as we would a TV series that did do it properly. Which is what it does need.

We went to Kings Cross Station on a trip to London and had our photos taken at Plarform 9 3/4 and started our journey to Hogwarts and then Hubby, Miss 24 and I made a special stopover in LA 6 months later to go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal and we finally finished our journey to Hogwarts. Yeahhh I’m a Potterhead and I’ll admit it.

I’ve never read LotR. Tried to a few times but it bores me to tears. I do love all of the movies though. Even the Hobbit. In fact Hobbiton was on the top of our list when we went to New Zealand.

The movie adaptations of Pride and Prejudice leave a lot to be desired but the 6 part BBC series was exceptional.

I recently read Wrinkle in Time and the trailer has a few things different to the books. I thought it was supposed to be the Mother who was the beautiful redhead.....and the kids were told about the Wrinkle thing and tesseracting but in one of the trailers the girl is explaining it. I didn’t particularly like the book. Not because it was a bad story but because of how childishly it was written. I’m hoping the movie is better.

Kristin B. wrote: "Putting books into films is so scary. On one hand, I love to see more of the worlds that captivate me. On the other hand, they so often get it wrong. I understand that some things need to be adjust..."

Amazingly enough, I loathed the Hunger Games adaptation, and enjoyed the https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9.... Don't get me wrong, they both chopped the story up and I can see an argument going either way, on a personal preference sort of thing. It was just interesting that I had the opposite reaction.

Micah wrote: "I'll try not to rant. Most of the books to films I've seen have kind of cheesed me off. LotR most of all (won't even look at the trailers or film clips of The Hobbit).

The reason most don't work f..."

Throne of Blood is amazing. One of the best Kurasawa works in my less than humble opinion.

Ruth wrote: "I think the Mistborn (The Final Empire) books by Brandon Sandersonwould make good movies / TV, as would the[book:The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk ..."

I am all for the Mistborn books being turned into a series of movies or a streaming mini-series.

Sarah wrote: "Micah wrote: "Paul wrote: "(I've long argued that short stories, maybe novellas, are massively under developed as source material for movies, but novels get the name recognition)."

Hmm ... not so ..."

Apt Pupil and Stand by Me are Stephen King shorter stories as well. There were part of the Seasons book that had Shawshank Redemption in it.

Chris wrote: "Trike wrote: If you aren’t going to hew as closely as possible to the source material, why bother adapting it at all?

And this assumes that the main point of adapting a novel is to be faithful to it. Again, I challenge that."

Of course that’s the point. The only reason a studio adapts anything is to tap into the existing fanbase. Or, in this era, purely because of name recognition. It’s all about a recognizable brand.

Which is why we keep getting movies based on board games and mobile games which don’t have a story attached. Battleship and Angry Birds are cynical attempts to cash in on brand names. That’s why — and I’m not making this up — there’s a movie in development based on Play-Doh.

H.J. wrote: "Trike wrote: "For me, though, the greatest adaptation of all time is The Thing. It’s based on the John W. Campbell story Who Goes There?"

I'd have to agree that's one of the best adaptations I've ..."

Maybe you should skip the book, since Starship Troopers isn't much alike in either format. And Doogie saying the brain bug was afraid was the most laughable moment in the movie. Hell with all those gun totting Marines standing around, I might have been afraid as well.