Bad Adaptations, Good Product

[Trekkin]

Somewhat inspired by this:

Lost In Adaptation - Howls Moving Castle.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMjxA0u3oFQ

Can people think of adaptations that diverged significantly from their source, yet they nonetheless like?

For eg. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Arguably throws out everything from the novel outside of some names and some bare-bones scenarios, but is extraordinarily well-directed and creepy in its own right.

 

[auntiehill]

The first two that came to mind:
The Natural.
Very little to do with the book, in which Roy is not only an ordinary guy, but a dishonest one. In the novel, Roy is not only corrupted by the business of baseball, but destroyed by it. The book is rather a downer, not at all like the Arthurian Legend of Baseball that is the film version. That said, however---I still love the film version. It's so well made that, despite the hokiness, it still gives me goosebumps.

Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame
Yeah, OK, file this one under "duh!" Of course it's nothing like the book; the novel's ending would have little kiddos in therapy for years. Still, despite my curmudgeonly ways, I still like this movie. I love the music, the larger themes of isolation, judgement, fanaticism, fear of those who are different, etc. There are big ideas crammed into this brightly colored kiddie film. Oh, and it has great songs, too.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

Hannibal: a mish-mash of the Harris books but I loved where they took the characters and storylines.

The Bourne films

Sleepy Hollow (TV): even after an uneven second season, I like what they did with Washington Irving's story.

World War Z: I love the book but its in-name-only adaptation was pretty good.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Orange Is The New Black, one rather obvious one. It's kind of brilliant how they took a satirical true story about the prison system and added a lot of sexed up lesbian melodrama to it.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Jaws - The book is a pretty melodramatic soap opera with a corrupt mayor in with the mob and Brody's wife having an affair with Hooper. The movie strips away all of that and it's far better for it.

 

[auntiehill]

^true. That's another I was thinking about. The book is really mediocre--a trashy soap-opera story. But the movie is one of the best suspense films, monster movie or not, in American cinema.

 

[Christopher]

Blade Runner. Has little in common with the book, but it's a classic. Philip K. Dick actually said he liked it better than his book, I think.

Singer's X-Men. Takes enormous liberties with the comics, but still, it was faithful enough to the spirit to be the foundation of the modern superhero-movie fad.

Kenneth Johnson's The Incredible Hulk. Aggressively strove to be as unlike the comic as possible, but still a beloved adaptation to this day.

The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51). Has only a few elements in common with the source story, "Farewell to the Master," but improves and deepens it enormously.

I'm not crazy about the thread title. A divergent adaptation isn't automatically a bad one. "Adapt" means "change." That's what you're supposed to do -- to create something new using the original work as a starting point. Sometimes you just change the minimum necessary to make it work in a new medium, but sometimes you use the source as just the seed of something essentially new. If anything, the bad adaptations are the ones that slavishly copy the form of a story rather than finding a fresh way to capture its substance. (For instance, the first two Harry Potter movies are the most faithful to the letter of the books, but by far the weakest films in the series.)

 

[Greg Cox]

Good to remember that fidelity to the source material is not an absolute virtue--or even always a good thing.

Two examples:

The classic 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (and pretty much every other movie version, such the Disney musical mentioned earlier in the thread) gives the story a much happier ending than the original book. It's still a great movie.

The classic 1968 version of Planet of the Apes is arguably better than the original novel--and has a much better ending (courtesy of Rod Serling).

 

[Avro Arrow]

IIRC, Children of Men had a fair number of differences from the book it was based on, but it's still a pretty great movie!

 

[Greg Cox]

Heck, the classic 1931 version of Frankenstein bears little or no resemblance to Mary Shelly's novel, but it is iconic in its own right.

In fact, the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, lifts more bits from the novel than the original film does . . .

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Speaking of Philip K Dick, Minority Report.

 

[Greg Cox]

Pretty much every version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde made since at least 1920 assumes that the audience already knows that they're the same person and tosses out the mystery aspect of the original novel, in which the Jekyll/Hyde thing is supposed to be a surprise twist ending.

 

[Christopher]

In fact, the sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, lifts more bits from the novel than the original film does . . .

And even includes a prologue with Elsa Lanchester playing Mary Shelley as she tells Percy and Lord Byron that she's not done with the story. Although I believe it totally misrepresents her true intention behind the novel. Just because Victor Frankenstein believed his creation was evil and that he'd sinned by attempting to create life, I don't believe the author agreed with him. If anything, her sympathies seemed to be more with the creature. And so did the filmmakers', particularly in TBoF, which makes that moralistic, "playing God is evil" intro rather incongruous. I wonder if it was tacked on to appease the censors.

Pretty much every version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde made since at least 1920 assumes that the audience already knows that they're the same person and tosses out the mystery aspect of the original novel, in which the Jekyll/Hyde thing is supposed to be a surprise twist ending.

Honestly, the original Robert Louis Stevenson tale would be an absolutely terrible basis for a story if adapted directly, since the whole story is revealed by a guy reading a letter after Jekyll/Hyde's death.

Still, while the '31 Fredric March film is a fantastic adaptation (immensely superior to the Spencer Tracy one from a decade later), I do feel Hyde's appearance was given away too soon. There should've been more mystery about what was going on in that first transformation, some suspense about what the results of Jekyll's experiments were.

 

[Greg Cox]

Still, while the '31 Fredric March film is a fantastic adaptation (immensely superior to the Spencer Tracy one from a decade later), I do feel Hyde's appearance was given away too soon. There should've been more mystery about what was going on in that first transformation, some suspense about what the results of Jekyll's experiments were.

Perhaps, but even by 1931 there would have been virtually no one in the audience who didn't know that Jekyll was going to turn into Hyde and who wasn't waiting for the big transformation scene.

 

[Admiral2]

Jurassic Park. I found the book almost unreadable with a really silly ending but the movie rules.

Another is The Thing From Another World. It only gets the first third of the original story right and required 30 years and John Carpenter to get the rest of it, but the 1951 movie is fantastic.

 

[Christopher]

Perhaps, but even by 1931 there would have been virtually no one in the audience who didn't know that Jekyll was going to turn into Hyde and who wasn't waiting for the big transformation scene.

Which is just why it would've been effective to keep up the suspense a little longer about just what Hyde looked like. It's a classic monster-movie technique to only hint at the monster in the first act and take your time revealing it in full.

 

[Trekkin]

The Road to Perdition and A History of Violence.

The former really just streamlines things and changes the ending to be 'happier'. But if you've seen the movie, you know that's really saying something about how comparatively dark the comic was. It was practically Sin City with Irish gangsters, which the movie...wasn't.

A History of Violence completely abandons the comics plot after the opening, but is arguably the better for it. The comic is more a pulp crime/revenge novel, where the film is more of a character study.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I might get raked over the coals for this but I preferred the movie adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 over the book.
Back in 9th grade English we read the book and watched the movie to compare and contrast what Ray Bradbury and Francois Truffaut were trying to accomplish. I could never really get into Bradbury's style of writing so watching the movie helped me to understand/visualize some of what Bradbury was trying to say.
Having said that I don't understand why Julie Christie was cast as both the wife and mistress; and I missed seeing the mechanical dogs hunting Montag as well as the teenagers destroying the cars.
Also the ending left me cold. It seemed depressing that Montag and the others were going to spend the rest of their lives walking around in the winter snow memorizing/reciting books and not interacting with one another. In that respect they seemed to have become just as cold and mechanical as the people and society they left behind.
Granted this was all 30 years ago and maybe my opinion would change if I were to re-read the book and/or watch the movie.

 

[Goji]

The Howling is one of my favorite horror movies, and definitely my favorite werewolf movie. I've read the novel it is based on, which is also interesting, but it's very different. Apparently one of the lousy direct-to-video sequels is a remake that sticks closer to the source material, but I am not keen on sitting through it to find out.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Pretty much every version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde made since at least 1920 assumes that the audience already knows that they're the same person and tosses out the mystery aspect of the original novel, in which the Jekyll/Hyde thing is supposed to be a surprise twist ending.

Oh great, I might as well quite reading now... thanks a lot...