I’ve started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I’ve ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it’s a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I’m just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
It’s tv series not a movie but The Three Body Problem. The ideas are poorly thought out ass pulls to setup the weirdly specific situations the wittier wants.
At least the show makes the characters more interesting.
Agreed, most of the characters in the book are so flat, and only do things because the plot needed them to do that thing.
The Netflix series managed to make the character’s motivations seem more believable which I appreciated.
Funny, I didn’t mind that the characters’ motivations were written differently. Much more about their pasts and their circumstances than their outward emotional states, their irrational fears or momentary actions, and their short-term gains. It more all about the situation, the collective motivations, and the achievable ends.
I liked reading a Chinese sci-fi novel. It was alien twice.
I haven’t tried to watch Three Body Problem, because I disliked the book so much. I’m not surprised it’s better, but I still probably won’t watch it.
I really had a hard time with the chinese names, especially the ones that sounded similar.
Babylon AD (the book is called Babylon Babies). I thought it was bad editing that made the end of the movie confusing. No. Turns out they took the actual ending of the book, toned it the fuck down and filmed it.
Not sure they could have filmed the part where the hyper-evolved babies take their comatose mother’s consciousness, stuff it in an experimental space station and launch it towards the galaxy at 10% of light speed.
This may be unpopular but I was deeply disappointed in Shawshank Redemption when I read it. The movie is top tier.
Edit: In retrospect this doesn’t really answer your question as you asked about bad movies with a worse book and Shawshank is definitely not a bad film.
Movie is definitely top tier, I also love the novella. Different Seasons is what I point to when people dismiss stephen king. Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and (while not on the level as the other two) Apt Pupil all in the same collection. But to each their own; pretty sure the final story is trash though haha.
The story was a novella King wrote in the early 80s for a short story collection, and it was his first real attempt at writing genres outside of horror. He’s gotten better at that over the years.
Even so, I wouldn’t say it’s bad, just that the movie blows it out of the water.
The Da Vinci Code. The film and book were both utter, contemptible garbage.
I don’t know about worse, but the Eragon books and movie are equally terrible.
Eragon was my first foray into proper swords and sorcery fantasy after Harry Potter.
Are the books really that bad in your opinion? By no means do they reinvent the wheel, but I enjoyed the magic system and enjoyed the aspect of Dragon + Rider and that relationship we see between the two.
I haven’t read much other Fantasy besides LotR and Stormlight Archive, but I enjoy the Inheritance Cycle.
Take my opinion with a slight grain of salt because it’s been at least a decade since I read the book and a half of the series that I got through, but from what I recall the books just didn’t really have much to them - flat characters, awkward dialogue, and the actual prose itself was pretty bad. It was also boring enough that I just didn’t care about anything that was happening, and I’d read enough good fantasy by the time I read Eragon that its flaws were hard to look past - I know the dude was a teenager when he wrote it, but that doesn’t make the work magically better. Not trying to shit on anybody’s parade, but it just really wasn’t my thing.
The books end that bad. The first couple were pretty good, but the ending was awful and ruined the whole series.
Also the buttmonkeying of the MC was a bit insufferable at times (also Saphira was an insufferable cockblock and for the wrong reasons)
I’m a bit sick of its narratives around sexuality and state, apart from that I really liked the books, but HATED the movie.
I just re-read them last year. What narrative are you talking about? Is it to do with Eragon not understanding that he’s a teenager and he shouldn’t hit on the elf princess who is literally 80 years older than him?
Arya is not a viable partner for him for at least another five to ten years, IMHO actually for like 20-30 years. Eragon is still a displaced peasant with power not seen for millenia and Arya is a monarch of a superhumanity, who was stuffed with knowledge and experience since birth while having a very different mind. Eragon might not even fully understand yet how relationships work and how truly different elves are.
Roran’s martial masculinity and Katrina’s clicheed submission, Sloan’s power trip etc.
I think the whole point was that Eragon wasn’t right for Arya, I thought that was quite refreshing and a pretty important message for adolescents. It’s a pretty big deal, imo that they don’t end up together at the end, and eragon has to get over it. I think thats an original part of an overall cliche but enjoyable book. I do agree with roram and Katrina’s plot though.
Granted the author was quite young when he started the series (15) to when the first book got published (18, first self published then republished by an established publisher a couple years later). He’s came out with a new series recently, but I don’t know how much better it is.
And while I’m not saying the books are anything great, they’re still a far cry from the movie imo.
Starship Troopers was a far different story in each medium, but I think the movie is much more worthy of your time
would you like to know more?
I’m doing my part
+1 the movie is pure epic satire
I do like PKD as an author, I just never quite liked Starship Troopers the book, even though it’s got some nice Forever War vibes to it
Heinlein not PKD.
Starship Troopers is Heinlein not Dick, and it’s fascist nonsense. Verhoeven was right to throw the book in the bin after two chapters and the movie rules.
Heinlein experiments with loads of social structures and governments. Starship Troopers is the fascist example, not an example of all his work.
The movie is great but I’m curious as to why you think its better than the book?
I think the story and messaging of the movie is just amazing. We get to see the decline of Rico into a fascist mouthpiece, the casual disregard for human life and the way society warps us all. What starts out as perceived funny-ha-ha jokes in the opening act (the kid saying “I’ll serve too”) is retroactively depressing by the end of the film where Herr Commisar NPH shows how trivial the whole war is.
Hey now, I read Jumper as a teenager and it was one of my favorite books… Admittedly, adult me has never gone back and read it so maybe you’re right, but I have read the sequels and I thought they were okay. The fourth one has Danny and Millie’s daughter teleporting into Low Earth Orbit and using a bunch of real life space and satellite communications technology, which was cool because I consult in that industry and so it was like “Hey! I know what she’s doing and that would work!” or even “I have a client who’s working on something just like that!”
It doesn’t fit the prompt because they’re actually both really good, but the movie Contact is better than the book. Carl Sagan wrote in a very rambley, wordy way (kinda like how he talked). He spends like two and a half pages describing Palmer Joss’s tattoos or Ellie Arroway’s hair. So much of the stuff in it is so cool, but it’s very hard to read. I’ve tried three or four times in my life, and I’ve ended up skipping around and just reading random parts of the story.
I could not disagree more about Contact. I read the book first. I found it to be an incredibly realistic depiction of what contact with alien life might look like. The clashing of world powers, science, and religion are central themes. The movie slimmed down the story as you would expect, but they completely changed the message at the end. The book ends with Ellie finding actual evidence for some divine being which eliminates her conflict with faith. The world governments had already been forced to cooperate much more. Now with the final conflict resolved, it’s implied that humanity can move forward in a more unified direction. The movie has her just believe in God, more or less. The Christians were right…
I can see that. Maybe as a teen I would have clicked with the style more. As an adult it just feels like I’m reading a twilight fanfic.
Never read Contact. Maybe it’s time!
Stuart Little was the weirdest book you could possibly read, the movie managed to make it actually make sense while both were meh.
I’ve started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I’ve ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it’s a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to want to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I’m just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
Jaws doesn’t quite fit the prompt but although it’s a good movie, the book is essentially a sub-par beach read. And there was no USS Indianapolis monologue in the book.
Harry Potter, the movies are at least wizards do wizard stuff even if the world is pretty boring to me. The books on the other hand, are just straight up strange and mean. Reading them as kid they just sucked, I have no clue why they are so popular outside of the movies.
Harry Potter has some issues, but for children’s fiction it’s better than a lot of series.
I’d have to disagree with that, one of the main reasons I didn’t read Harry Potter as kid was because there was simply better fiction. That and also easy access to manga in the west had started becoming bigger.
I dunno, I’m sure there’s a more complicated and interconnected series of events which lead to them truly being popular, not least of which was the movies, but in terms of how they’re structured, it kind of makes sense to me why they were a successful fiction. The various different houses, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable from one another internal to the books, give kids something to identify with and self-categorize into, which is something that teenagers kind of love doing in a struggle for identity. They’re also part of the hidden world subgenre, which means it’s even easier for tweens to self-insert into.
Then, I think it also helps that they’re kind of poorly written, weirdly enough. Every character isn’t usually a real, fleshed out individual, they’re just an archetype, and a shorthand, a common trope. I think this is probably desirable for a tween audience, and I think probably also a simple to follow plot and set of plot elements is also more desirable. There’s no lore to keep up with, it’s just like you’ve taken a bunch of other tropes from other, better works and compressed them into an easily digestible series of books full of melodrama. It’s not super hard to understand. Those other books, they’re like the various PDAs and shit you’d see floating around in the 90’s, they’re explicit works of art constructed for a singular purpose. Harry potter is like an ipod touch, or an iphone, or something, it’s just engineered to have more mass appeal at the expense of complexity and possibly quality.
Hunt for Red October. The book is great and for it’s time had done amazing insight into modern naval warfare but the movie irons out a bunch of this which are a bit lame.
The Akula that kills itself with its own torpedo simply blows up because it abused its engine and another sunk when the titular sub rams into it.
The titular sub is later returned to the USSR.
The movie changes those and a few other things for a more exciting and satisfying outcome.
the Sookie Stackhouse novels vs. True Blood. the show got dumb but the books go off in so many more ridiculous directions. I quit watching the show after 3 seasons because the repetitive sex/violence juxtaposition got to be boring, but I still have to recognize that the show writers at least had restraint. also, Charlaine Harris writes like my foot
In the book, I remember that sookie says that someone “had her engine running like the pace car at the indie 500”or something like it.
My mom was into True Blood for a little bit when it first came out, probably because she was trying to fill a Buffy-shaped hole in her entertainment and TB was close enough, lol. She bought me the first novel for Christmas one year and I very quickly donated it, it was so fucking bad. She asked me if she could borrow it, got mad when I told her I’d donated it already, and then sad when I told her it would ruin her enjoyment of the show by being complete and utter trash xD
Ready player one, though to be fair I didn’t finish either version. I feel like percentage-wise I made it further through the movie, but only because the movie is less than 2 hours long. I made it to the 2nd chapter of the 2nd part and couldn’t take the masturbatory prose any more. There’s no self insertion on one side of the scale, Mary sue-ing in the middle, and ready player one sits on the far side of the scale.
I was going to say, Ready Player One is not a great movie, but it does at least have Spielberg at the helm, and while late-career Spielberg is a shadow of his former self, the movie is directed competently and interesting enough visually.
Not least of all because you can actually see and enjoy all the various IP in action, rather than just have them name dropped like in the book. When there’s a sea of interesting or recognizable things on screen, that does a lot to help distract from how terrible the plot is.
But even at its worst, the movie is a tolerable popcorn flick. Turn your brain off and enjoy some pop culture references, then forget it all an hour later.
Because the book is just terrible. It’s an absolute slog, a lot of the dialogue is embarrassing, the prose is uninspired, it’s overloaded with explanations of UIs and unnecessary, long winded ramblings about the various pop culture references. The movie at least has the benefit of just putting a thing on the screen, the book has to describe all of this shit, and it’s tediously done.
Which is to say nothing of just how terrible the plot is in general but more than enough people have gone off about that.
Twilight for nerdy boys is the best description I’ve ever heard of it, but at least Twilight isn’t as gratuitously masturbatory.
The movie is so much better than the book because it drops a lot of cringe that the book has.
Ready Player One is the Skeet Ulrich of Snow Crash ripoffs.
I read the whole book twice. Its bad. The first time was fun because I was just looking for the pop-culture references, but thats the only kinda good thing the book has. The second time I focused more on the story and the characters and its just bad. There are no likeable characters, but you are supposed to like the main protagonist who is an antisocial creep. The setting makes no sense and the plot is just there to move to another place to show off more references stacked onto each other
Hunt for Red October though film wasn’t bad at all, but the book was mediocre, boring and offputting.
