The fourth movie is the one that's closer to the book. Even for a Howling sequel, that one is pretty bad.
Bad Adaptations, Good Product
- Thread starter Trekkin
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The fourth movie is the one that's closer to the book. Even for a Howling sequel, that one is pretty bad.
This far into the thread and no one has mentioned The Wizard of Oz? 
*And speaking of films that came out in 1939...
*And speaking of films that came out in 1939...
Over the years I've managed to read both copies of 'The Tower' and 'The Glass Inferno' which Irwin Allen combined to make the movie 'The Towering Inferno'.
It was interesting to see what characters/elements he took from both books to combine into one movie.
Both stories have the buildings catch on fire as a result of poor construction although in 'The Tower' it's hastened along by a disgruntled employee setting fire to the building. It also has the party on the top floor being attended by all the dignitaries and the cage between the two buildings as well as the attempted helicopter rescue. In the end though the firefighters are unable to stop the spread of the flames and everyone on the top floor dies of asphyxiation. Also it's implied but never mentioned that the building that catches on fire is the World Trade Center Tower One seeing as the story is set in New York and the building they run the line to is equally as tall.
'The Glass Inferno' is set in an unnamed Midwest city and it is the tallest building in the Midwest. This one had the architect and using the water tanks at the top of the building to smother the flames.
It was interesting to see what characters/elements he took from both books to combine into one movie.
Both stories have the buildings catch on fire as a result of poor construction although in 'The Tower' it's hastened along by a disgruntled employee setting fire to the building. It also has the party on the top floor being attended by all the dignitaries and the cage between the two buildings as well as the attempted helicopter rescue. In the end though the firefighters are unable to stop the spread of the flames and everyone on the top floor dies of asphyxiation. Also it's implied but never mentioned that the building that catches on fire is the World Trade Center Tower One seeing as the story is set in New York and the building they run the line to is equally as tall.
'The Glass Inferno' is set in an unnamed Midwest city and it is the tallest building in the Midwest. This one had the architect and using the water tanks at the top of the building to smother the flames.
I think the film medium had one major advantage for telling the story, which is that it could be told without written words, as a better fit for the illiteracy of the culture. I love the conceit of the opening credits being spoken by a narrator rather than printed. (On top of the thematic appropriateness, it's kind of a nice throwback to the days of radio and early TV.)
And the monorail thing is cool, although it's a little obvious that there's only the one and that it doesn't go very far. Might've helped if they'd at least thrown in a matte painting suggesting a more extensive monorail system.
The first Mission: Impossible movie comes to mind. The team (which was the emphasis of the show) was killed of in the first act, and the lead character of Jim Phelps is turned into a villain. I understand any fan of the TV show who utterly hates this movie.
It is still a very good movie in its own right. I saw the movie before I ever watched the show, and it worked very well for me.
It is still a very good movie in its own right. I saw the movie before I ever watched the show, and it worked very well for me.
I think it's a pretty bad movie for reasons that have nothing to do with fidelity to the show. Heck, it's actually more faithful to the show than most of the sequels. But it has a completely incoherent and nonsensical plot. The supposedly crucial clue involving a hotel Bible doesn't prove anything at all. The character motivations and logic are poor and arbitrary. And the ending of the climactic action sequence makes no sense whatsoever, physically or logically. Also, Ethan is a totally one-dimensional character, though not quite as much so as in the second, and Cruise gives a flat and lifeless performance, even though he got an Oscar nomination for Jerry Maguire the same year. The Prague caper and the Langley break-in are effective set pieces that feel like M:I, but they're in the middle of a movie that's a complete mess from the standpoint of plot and characterization and mediocre at best from an acting standpoint. More detailed analysis here.
Now, the third M:I movie is the one I'd list here. It's one of the least M:I-like movies in the series, more like an episode of Alias, but it's also one of the two best movies in the series, with the richest characterization. Ethan gets more personality in the first four minutes of M:i:III than in the preceding four hours of the franchise.
For me I find that adaptations that make small, subtle changes annoy me more than ones that make major changes.
For example, take Sophie's Choice. The movie basically tells an abridged version of the same story, and some of the scenes are near identical to the scenes in the book. Only there is one subtle difference that changes the flavor of the entire ending. In the book, there is a possibility that the son may have actually survived. What happens in the book is, Sophie begs Hoess to submit her son to this program that takes children who look Aryan and raises them as Aryans. The next day, Hoess disappears, and Sophie hears that her son is no longer in the children's camp. Hoess probably didn't save him before he left, but there is a small possibility that he did and her son was submitted to this program. But, even if he did, there is no chance of actually finding him and if she did he wouldn't recognize her. This is even more torturous to her than if she just knew for a fact he was dead. In the movie, there's no ambiguity, he's just clearly dead. And this bothers me a lot more than the sweeping changes of a movie like Minority Report.
For example, take Sophie's Choice. The movie basically tells an abridged version of the same story, and some of the scenes are near identical to the scenes in the book. Only there is one subtle difference that changes the flavor of the entire ending. In the book, there is a possibility that the son may have actually survived. What happens in the book is, Sophie begs Hoess to submit her son to this program that takes children who look Aryan and raises them as Aryans. The next day, Hoess disappears, and Sophie hears that her son is no longer in the children's camp. Hoess probably didn't save him before he left, but there is a small possibility that he did and her son was submitted to this program. But, even if he did, there is no chance of actually finding him and if she did he wouldn't recognize her. This is even more torturous to her than if she just knew for a fact he was dead. In the movie, there's no ambiguity, he's just clearly dead. And this bothers me a lot more than the sweeping changes of a movie like Minority Report.
^That's surprising... normally, one would expect the movie to change things from the book so that a child doesn't die. There was an example of that just recently, but naming the movie would be a spoiler.
You know up until now I hadn't realized how many books I'd read over the years have been turned into movies. I've read 'The Poseidon Adventure' - that one is interesting in that the little kid bites it and the group of people being lead towards the bow actually make it out.
Then there's 'The Andromeda Strain' and 'The Terminal Man' both by Michael Crichton which are both quite faithful to the material.
Richard Matheson wrote the screenplay to his novel 'The Legend of Hell House', and you can actually read the novel while watching the movie and see whole sequences lifted directly from the book. I should also point out Matheson's 'I Am Legend' which became 'The Last Man on Earth', 'The Omega Man', and 'I Am Legend'. As an aside I recently read 'Armageddon Films FAQ' and in the chapter discussing 'I Am Legend' I learned that Matheson wanted Jack Palance in the role of Neville/Morgan instead of Vincent Price.
Finally two more adaptations come to mind - '2001: A Space Odyssey' and '2010: Odyssey 2'.
Then there's 'The Andromeda Strain' and 'The Terminal Man' both by Michael Crichton which are both quite faithful to the material.
Richard Matheson wrote the screenplay to his novel 'The Legend of Hell House', and you can actually read the novel while watching the movie and see whole sequences lifted directly from the book. I should also point out Matheson's 'I Am Legend' which became 'The Last Man on Earth', 'The Omega Man', and 'I Am Legend'. As an aside I recently read 'Armageddon Films FAQ' and in the chapter discussing 'I Am Legend' I learned that Matheson wanted Jack Palance in the role of Neville/Morgan instead of Vincent Price.
Finally two more adaptations come to mind - '2001: A Space Odyssey' and '2010: Odyssey 2'.
I really don't like the twist in the first M:I film that Phelps is the bad guy, but there are some things I like about the film. I think that the atmosphere of the foggy night along the Vltava River, that is the backdrop of all the treachery in the first part, is exquisitely realized, and it makes that part of the film really interesting. Also, the break-in to the supercomputer vault is entertaining and amusing on many levels. It's not my favorite film of the series by a long shot, but parts of it are rewatchable.
The first of those isn't quite an adaptation, because the book and movie were developed simultaneously and influenced each other. More collaboration than adaptation, though I suppose you could call it a mutual adaptation. 2010 is the more conventional case where the book was written first and the movie made from it later -- although there was still plenty of collaboration on the film between Peter Hyams and Arthur C. Clarke. It's really a pretty faithful adaptation aside from the tacked-on Cold War tensions, which made the film seem badly dated when the Cold War ended only a few years after it came out. And aside from casting a white guy as Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai.
I hate it so much when they change an unhappy ending to a happy ending. My high school did a Pygmalion musical where the girl came back to the teacher at the end. That pissed me off so much. And then in Streetcar Named Desire where Stella leaves Stanley at the end in the movie. Don't get me started on The Magnificent Ambersons.
Also in the French Lieutenant's Wife movie it pisses me off how they deem one of the two book endings the 'Happy' ending and one the 'Unhappy' ending when it's so much more interesting than that. In the Sophie's Choice case it's more like that, not changing an unhappy ending to a happy one so much as eliminating nuance.
Collaborative is a good way to put it, and it must be unique, in that I can't quite think of anything else that's been done that way. Personally, I like to refer to them as companion works as they compliment each other very well, even though they differ in some of the details. I found reading the book to be very insightful as it added depth, especially in the case of the travel scene near the end, which in turn enhanced my enjoyment of the movie.
I feel there must be some other example, though perhaps involving a comic book instead of a novel. But all I can think of are examples of complementary works being developed simultaneously and cross-pollinating, like the Defiance TV series and MMO game, or the Young Justice comics that were written by the TV staff and were canonical, and referenced, within the show. But that's not the same as two simultaneously developed versions of the same story in different media, mutually drawing on each other.
That's a good term for it.
I read the book of 2001 multiple times long before I ever saw the movie, so I knew the explanations for everything in the movie that was supposed to be mysterious. It's striking to me how completely opposite the two creators' sensibilities were, with Kubrick making everything enigmatic and ambiguous while Clarke spelled everything out in detail. I've seen so many people complaining that the film 2010 ruined things by "inventing" an explanation for why HAL went crazy, when it's the same explanation that was spelled out clearly in the original 2001 novel from the beginning (and, of course, reiterated in the 2010 novel).
Well, currently Walking Dead the TV show and Walking Dead the comic have exchanged characters and storyline ideas while both are being produced and developed simultaneously. But they are considered separate realities.
Star Wars: Rebels has a "companion" book series called Servants of the Empire that focuses on Zare Leonis, that kid that Ezra met while undercover in storm trooper school. The events of the books run parallel to the TV series, with Zare popping up occasionally on the show and the Spectre crew interacting with the characters in the novels.
I briefly lived in the house where much of "The Magnificent Ambersons" actually took place. The nameless narrator of the story, and Amberson's friend, was patterned after a scientist named Charles Test, who was a friend of author Booth Tarkington. The Amberson character was patterned after another of Tarkington's friends, James Woodruff, who was the founder of the strange little suburb known as Woodruff Place where most of the story takes place (I forget the name of the area in the book.).
Wiki said:
I lived in the Test House from the fall of 2002, until early 2006, or thereabouts.
Here's a pic of how it looked long ago, and how it looks today. (The original porch was so rotted, that it was removed, and a new one built in the late 1970s, hence the differences between the pics.)
The house where Woodruff/Amberson lived burned down when I was just a kid. I currently live in the house that's diagonally on the opposite corner from where it once stood, and about a block from where the Test House still stands.
Heroes tried the whole concurrent multimedia thing during its run. For eg. Hana Gitleman from Season 1 (who vanished as quickly as she appeared) was a comic-only character crossing over.
Though if you were being cynical, you could say they were just trying to plug up their plot holes and explain away the Brother Chucked characters.
Sure, there are plenty of examples of different stories in the same universe being produced in different media in concert with each other. But that's not the same as two different versions of the same single story being done in different media simultaneously and cross-pollinating each other. Plenty of movies have novelizations that are written during production so they'll come out at the same time, but the novelizer is just following the film's lead and doesn't contribute to the development of the film itself.
The robotic hound was so scary in my mind when I visualized it while reading. Imagine my disappointment when it wasn't even in the movie! (although this was probably the correct choice, given that it might have looked lame)
Also I found the decision that everyone in the exile community names themselves after characters from the books they've memorized a bit twee.
