The Lawnmower Man
In the book, an unassuming everyman stumbles upon the fact that a local landscaping company is actually a front for a demon who has an arrangement that involves making human sacrifices of those that discover his supernatural nature.
In the movie, a Cyber Virtual Reality 3D Battles ON 3D CYBERSPACE Stunning Effects 3D Internet Pierce Brosnan Warfare Nineties Futuristic VR Headset Technology BATTLE In 3D Mind Expanding Guns, and one of the characters is a man who has a lawnmower.
Edit: Shit, okay, I just read this on Wikipedia and nearly wet myself:
A feature film, The Lawnmower Man, starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, was released in 1992 by New Line Cinema. This film used an original screenplay entitled “CyberGod”, borrowing only the title of the short story. The film concerns a scientist, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Brosnan), who subjects mentally challenged Jobe Smith (Fahey) to virtual reality experiments which give him superhuman abilities. The film was originally titled Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man. King won a lawsuit to have his name removed from the film, stating in court documents that the film “bore no meaningful resemblance” to his story. King then won further damages in 1993 after his name was included in the home video release.
I was surprised when I read heart of darkness, that, for me at least, the final gut-punch of the tale isn’t a dying man thinking of the horror he had wrought and seen, but the protagonist getting back to the man’s wife and lying to her, telling her his last thoughts were of her. It isnt something that would have worked for Apocalypse Now, but I didn’t expect such a short novel to hide a completely different ending mood. I still think about it, years later.
The movie version of A Clockwork Orange was based on the American version of the book, which left out the entire last chapter. In that chapter, at 18 years old Alex pretty suddenly grows out of his violent and criminal ways and wants to start a family. Some say this ending is more optimistic but I actually think it’s darker, because it shows that any normal person you meet might’ve at some point been a wanton brute reveling in the chaos and pain they so arbitrarily inflicted. And that they can just move on and start living like a normal person.
This is a good take although I still prefer the sinister ending of the film over the redemptive one in the book. Later editions include a foreword by Burgess lamenting the omission of the 21st chapter in part because he wrote three acts of seven chapters for the symmetry of it and the symbolism of 21 being the age of majority
The Dark Tower. Everything. An 8 book series smashed into 1 terrible movie. Who ever green lit that should be fired.
Matilda. They made them y*nks 🤢🤮
Everything in WWZ
Based although it would have been a weirdly awesome movie
Have you ever seen supervolcano? That exact format would be perfect for a true to book adaptation
Stephen King - Dreamcatcher
In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.
In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.
The book Annihilation centered on a “tower” that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.
For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like… that was half of the point of the book - a “tower” that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?
Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!
The only thing I remember about that movie was thinking mecha Godzilla looked like shit. Then the one from Godzilla vs Kong took notes…
Amen! !!
I know we’re not into Harry Potter now, but the past is the past and I can’t forget how annoyed I was when the movie based on the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, came out. I was a very disappointed teenager.
It was a whirlwind story to me at the time. I remember exactly where I was when I read it, as the moment that revealed the friendship between Harry’s father James, Professor Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and the alleged-murderer, Sirius Black, became seared into my brain. It was such a pivotal part of the overall story to me, that that twist alone made it my favorite in the series. So when the movie came out, I expected the use and development of The Marauder’s Map to be a key highlight. It was a huge deal in the books, after all.
Yet in the movie, the map is just a neat thing Harry gets to use. Nobody mentions that Harry’s own father helped create it. The movie never even tells who the Marauders are, even though the reveal of their backstory was the key emotional crux of the Shrieking Shack scene. To omit their story entirely felt like a gut-punch.
I didn’t understand at the time why the director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to straight-up change everything that made that story so compelling to me and my friends. To this day, I still don’t understand.
Yet subsequent movies mentioned the nicknames Wormtail and Padfoot. A lot of things in the films must have been confusing to people who didn’t read the books. Another weird thing I’ve noticed is that in the fourth movie, Barty Crouch Jr steals from Snape to make polyjuice potion and he blames Harry. But those who only watched the movies and didn’t read the books wouldn’t have known that Harry and his friends stole from Snape to make polyjuice potion before.
The Navidson Record
As a fellow HoL fan, dig your response.
Someone got the reference!
There’s dozens of us!
The Hobbit. Like, all of it
I, Robot.
Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of “robots take over humanity”. To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. “Robots take over humanity” was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.
Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data’s character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.
The only thing that advertisement masquerading as a movie has in common with the Asimov work is the title.
I, Robot was about as far from the source material as you could get.
That sounds like a challenge to Hollywood. Though I’d put Starship Troopers up there too, haven’t scrolled enough to see it mentioned but I assume it is.
Edit okay I did now and it’s not mentioned. While a fun movie it doesn’t have nearly the same story that the book does. Still I’ll watch it for what it is, but doesn’t have the same tone or scenes the book does.
You’re right, Starship Troopers should be way up on the list, too.
Robots take over humanity has been around since literally the first robot story. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is where the word robot was coined.
Shouldn’t be called an adaptation, really. They only dressed it up a tiny bit as Asimov for marketing reasons
From what I heard, they got the rights to I, Robot, grabbed some script about a robot uprising that they already had optioned, and slapped a few things on it.
This is apparently fairly common. If there’s a Hollywood movie based on something that doesn’t really align with the original, there’s a good chance that this is what happened. Starship Troopers was the same way (though that’s a whole different ballgame on whether the Hollywood version is good on its own merits).
Dune.
Turning the Bene Gesserit power of Voice into some weird gun was fucking stupid.
Edit to add: first film adaptation from the 80s. The latest movies have been good.
I assume you mean the 1984 version?
Yes.
Don’t actually remember that scene, refresh my memory please?
In the book, the power of voice was him singing.
I mean, how was it different in the movie? As I recall it was still a vocal thing. They could have done a better job explaining where it came from but I don’t remember it being egregiously different.
Voice is not a weapon like a gun or knife. Voice commands people. It’s like speed hypnosis/mind control achieved through voice manipulation.
Like I said, I don’t really remember instances in the movie of the voice being used in a way inconsistent with that description. I’m not arguing, I’m asking for examples to jog my memory.
Oh, the confusion might be from there being at least 3 different versions of Dune in cinema. I am talking about the first adaptation from 1984.
Ah ok. That’s the only version I haven’t seen, hence my confusion.
The Hobbit
From the shitty shoehorned romance to wholesale elimination of plot points in the original story. Yeah, there was definitely some drama in the whole production of the film, but nonetheless it was crap.
We demand our Tom Bombadil!
I like the Bilbo edit that removes most of the crap, and keeps the story shown to be from only what Bilbo sees. Gets the 3 movies down to 4 hrs I think.
I’ve seen that edit. Much improved, but unfortunately there are some continuity gaps that are inevitable when cutting up a film like that.
