"I Am Legend" has been made into 3 or more movies, none of which have anything like the book's ending.
The Last Man on Earth (1964) is dull and misses the point almost entirely, but almost manages the title line. Not quite.
The Omega Man (1971) is exciting and misses the point even further.
I Am Legend (2007) almost gets it. The vampires are competent. Will Smith's smarter than Neville of the book, but crazier. But then both endings fail to treat the vampires as a society.
The original cut of the 2007 ended with Will Smith's character realizing he had been abducting and murdering conscious, aware creatures. The ending has the vampires doing a rescue mission, visibly terrified of Smith, and then he allows the one he abducted to rejoin her society.
Test audiences apparently didn't like it or didn't understand it
I read the book on a whim in high school. I think it was one of those random Barnes and Nobles finds. The ending was an amazing horror twist, with Neville realizing he's the monster and the audience realizing that they've been rooting for the villain The whole time, and the acceptance of the transition to the new society.
The only adaptation I've seen was the Will Smith movie which was generic zombie movie nonsense.
They weren't zombies, they were vampires in the book. Like talking, civilized people.
I only know of Will Smith version of "I am Legend". There are more?
Imagine if they did an anthology series... /drooling
For now I've got Pluto to look forward to.
Pluto? I never finished reading the manga, but it was looking promising. Is there a movie made or coming up?
It's a great story, but that's up to you! I ended up reading scanlations of it years ago.
somewhere in the distance, the Blue Oyster Salad Bar music starts playing
World War Z is absolutely a modern classic. You can just tell when people are going to be talking about a book a hundred or so years later.
I agree on the basis that classics are defined by reception and not if they are any good or not, like how Birth of a Nation was for a while considered basically the best movie ever.
No one appears to have yet mentioned Forrest Gump. In the book he was a chess grandmaster who wrestled professionally and was an astronaut. Also, the book sucks.
I haven't watched or read it. Are you saying the movie is better than the book in spite of bastardizing it?
I think the book was written to be satire and the movie is, uh, comedic but in a much less pointed way
the book as an audiobook is good
Forrest was a POS and he was a bum because he knew it!
Starship troopers. I say this not because the movie is bad (it's not, I think it's exactly what it meant to be and did it well), but that the movie and the book are thematically opposites. The book is very pro military authoritarian. The movie is a satire of that.
Heinlein also claimed the book its "swiftian in intent" its just done dry. And probably wouldnt have been adapted well to tv.
That being said in the book it was clear carmencita was way out of jhonys league and he was very aware of that. While other heinlenian heroes are generally horny.
Another difference from the heinlenian hero is that jhony is not very smart. He lacks agency and any positive agenda. He just stumbles around.
'Johnny lacks agency.' Well, he was a brand new high school grad who thought owning an Olympic size pool was normal. He joins up because his buddy was going in, and then is too proud to quit.
Exactly. He just goes with the flow. No soul of his own. Just another cog in a fascist machine.
This is even more notisable when you compare him with other heninlein protagonists who are also teenagers and join the army or simmilar institutions. They have their own agendas and goals.
The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.
The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops
Did it glorify cops? It's been a few years but I seem to remember the Chief of police being a literal Klansman and chips beating the shit out of people all the time
The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of "what if cops mainly profiled poor white people." That's because the premise is that there's been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.
The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That's the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a "good cop" who is routing out the "bad cops" in order to repair the structure. It's the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show's attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.
Although another way of reading it is that it's a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That's a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I'm stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.
I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.
The good thing about the Watchmen movie was that the ads and hype were the first time I'd heard about it, so it got me to read the Watchmen which is an amazing work.
The bad thing about the Watchmen movie is everything else
The worst aspect is Zack Snyder seems to think Rorschach is a cool dude with cool ideas. They made him talk normally in the movie, maybe that was so he could be more easily understood, but it didn't feel right. He's supposed to seem deranged. In the comic he talks in squiggly text boxes and in an odd kind of halting, broken English. He's not bad at speaking English, he's become so unstable and antisocial his social skills have atrophied. Jackie Earle Haley came across as too earnest or too confident. Like that scene with the therapist reading the ink blots, Rorschach in the comic comes across as pathetic. He's done, doesn't care, doesn't want to live. He says he sees flowers and trees because he just wants to leave the therapy session. In the movie he comes across as like this snickering badass ready to cause trouble. He's like "heh, you can't handle my twisted mind, doc." I hate it. Synder completely misread the scene.
At least the TV show had the guts to show Rorschach would eventually inspire a white supremacist movement
it wasn't Watchmen it was Rorschach: the Movie.Considering thr fact that Rorschach is a stand in for the American crypto-fash to straight up fash lines of thinking that inform the superhero genre, its not strange that Snyder would think hes a cool guy with good ideas.
It's weird because Roschach still comes across as a disturbed weirdo, but he definitely ends up being turned into a more murderous version of the fascist interpretation of Batman.
I'm sure it's not the worst but I felt like the adaptation of Watership Down changed the tone/message compared to the book. Now granted the infamous violence is present in the book (though seeing it is more visceral than reading about it). But in the book there's a nice story at the end where Hazel is injured (iirc) and is taken in by a little girl and her parents who take care of him while he recovers before releasing him back to the wild (which only adds to his legend, of course).
Removing this bit, the only positive interaction with a human, makes the message feel more like, "Humans are bastards and inherently anethma to the natural world, which is also a brutal war of all against all even down to the cutest softest creatures." It just makes you feel bad, whereas the book might make you feel bad at times but it also offers an example of what you can do right. It's kind of a pet peeve when a work with environmentalist themes falls into that line of "Humans are the problem and there's nothing you can do but feel bad about it."
I love bunnies so much so I tried to read that book and I just couldn't. Even from the start it seems like there's a lot of harsh shit happening to those poor bun buns and it was too much for me to think about.
I would say its actively terrible I the worst kind of way: it has fuck all to do with the characters and the plot of the books
for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
Agreed. I read it when I was in 5th Grade and thought it was wonderful. I noped out of the movie when Reese Witherspoon [?] turned into a flying carpet.
If TV shows count: Earthsea.
It was such a poor adaptation that Ursula Le Guin wrote an article denouncing it.
"I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill."
I fucking miss her, her death was a real loss to the world. I wish we could just keep some people forever.
Ohhhh... Pepperidge Farm remembers. I remember the family and I giving the series a try, and even without it being a bastardization it was a really shitty show.
Agreed, I watched 1 or maybe 2, lost all interest in more of that nonsense
It could have been one great movie, but they decided they needed a trilogy in order to replicate TLOTRs financial succes.
Why? tlor are three pretty thick Books, as opposed to the pamphlet that is the hobbit.
If we're talking about the 80s one I couldn't disagree more. It has little to do with the book but as its own thing it's perfect.
The best one is the scyfi mini series. They have awsome sets and coustumes. The did change some things but not as much as the old one. The old one sucks in all aspects except their casting for paul is the best. The new one has by far the best casting(except gor paul) but some of the lines are delivered wierdly and the sets and the contrast of the colors is a bad choise.
The Gunslinger. It was supposed to be more of a continuation of the books but it just sucked all around.
Queen of the Damned was pretty awful and threw out the majority of the storyline.
I'm pretty sure it would have been a shit show regardless. They had Lestat's actor lip synch to Korn.
You mean Failed Aragorn? Yeah, and that was lousy casting, too.
