What book was a total disaster when made into a film?

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by tirsales

They were brilliant - apart from can-it-get-more-annoying Liv Taylor. Really .. the love story between Aragorn and Arwen is bad enough as it is, it really does not need more time.

I think they just exchanged actresses between LOTR and Troy: Liv looks like Helen, and the blond trojan would have made a better Elf...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by fugazied

Some of them were classics though. The green mile, cujo, carrie.
But yeah, "IT" was a shocker as I am sure many others were.

I've not yet read The green Mile but my wife has and when we watched the movie together, she did say that she thought the movie was better then the books.

[Uzumaki]

Bonfire of the Vanities

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Have you seen the "Extended Editions", rather than the cinema releases? They put a lot of stuff back into the extended versions, specifically for the fans of the book.

Originally Posted by Sonist

I've seen only the extended versions, and I thought they did as good of job as the medium can do.

Much better, than the early Harry Potter movies.

I think I only saw the third movie in the cinema. The rest I've only seen the extended versions (bought them as soon as they were available). It was a brilliant movie (in three parts), but I still think you can't make a film out of a book. You can make a mini-series out of them though...

Besides, I like to fantasize in books. And when a movie shows something completely different from what I thought it should look like, I probably won't like it

[curtw]

I'd call it a toss up between "Coma" (1978) and "Millennium" (1989). Both were reasonably entertaining novels that somebody in Hollywood decided to destroy.

And in the case of "Coma," they really should have known better, because Michael Crichton turned everything he directed into crap. Most of the time, he was adapting his own works, so it wasn't that much of a slide downhill, but in this case...

[dragonbone]

I thought LOTR was spectacular! Shogun... brilliant!

I was very disappointed in The Kite Runner and Angela's Ashes.

[KarlB]

Um... Most of them?

[bminata]

Dragonlance.

[Nate the great]

The remake of The Manchurian Candidate was horrible. If the earlier version didn't exist the remake would simply be really really bad.

[bertold]

I hate to disagree with so many people, but I must say that the LotR films are,
in my opinion, absolutely horrible as an adaptation of the book. In fact,
the movies show such a profound misunderstanding of the book and characters
that I wouldn't call them an adaptation, but a heavy-handed bastardization.

[yvanleterrible]

I would say... Any movie made from a book you would have previously read.

Most books have a descriptive that can not be done justice to in visual. Others are too long to fit in the alloted 2 hours a movie can last... and on and on...

[AprilHare]

One old bad one I came up against recently: Magnificent Obsession (1935)

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by bertold

I hate to disagree with so many people, but I must say that the LotR films are,
in my opinion, absolutely horrible as an adaptation of the book. In fact,
the movies show such a profound misunderstanding of the book and characters
that I wouldn't call them an adaptation, but a heavy-handed bastardization.

Why? d*mned 5 chars

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

The remake of The Manchurian Candidate was horrible. If the earlier version didn't exist the remake would simply be really really bad.

I couldn't agree more! The first was brilliant!

[bertold]

Originally Posted by tirsales

Why?

One of the worst failings of the movies was the way in which they misrepresented the original characters:

• Book-Faramir vows to not be tempted by Isildur's Bane and keeps his word, movie-Faramir not only makes no such vow, but immediately falls prey to the Ring literally seconds after encountering it.
  
  
• Book-Denethor has the nobility of a great ruler before his reason succumbs to his cares and worries (even Pippin thinks of him as more like to Aragorn than to Boromir); by contrast, movie-Denethor is a corrupt, demented imbecile from the get go. He can also run a quarter of a mile while on fire, but I try to pretend that scene never took place.

This lack of nobility extends everywhere in the movies:

• The Council of Elrond becomes a shouting-match
  
  
• Treebeard has to be tricked into attacking Isengard
  
  
• Elrond Half-Elven is portrayed as a racist pig
  
  
• Movie-Gimli lacks any of the original character's wonderful traits and is simply the butt of a crapload of stupid jokes.
  
  
• even Arwen, for Pete's sake, is introduced onscreen by bringing a blade up to her fiancee's throat
  
  
• And the most beloved character of all, Gandalf, is not immune to Jackson's idiotic treatment either. He beats the hell out of Denethor with his staff, for example, in one of the most despicable scenes in the entire trilogy of films. He goes to confront Saruman after he was defeated by Treebeard not to extend a chance for Saruman to turn from evil and onto a path to redemption (as does book-Gandalf), but to get the skinny on Sauron's next move.

All of these changes were made for one reason - Jackson wanted to make an action flick very loosely based on Tolkien's work. He was never interested in making an adaptation, in spite of repeatedly claiming that he would be true to the source material.

Note, too, that the changes mentioned above are only a fraction of what Jackson did wrong in these movies. I could really go on for hours on this topic, but I fear that even the above is too long for a single post.