A carryover discussion from Comments on the last entry: How true are movies to the novels they are based on? And how much does it really matter?
Andy has been discussing his confusion over Chris Suellentrop's Slate article on I, Robot and how it gets Asimov wrong. Andy, and then Laura have both taken the position that "I, Robot" (Will Smith and all) gets Asimov pretty well.
Its funny, I had a similar experience watching Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers", which while not the finest piece of film-making I've ever witnessed, was pretty good. But I kept hearing people complain about how it got Heinlein totally wrong, and I really didn't see it. To be fair, Verhoeven's personal politics are quite distinct from Heinlein, some of which editorializes its way into the movie, but I think he hit most of the themes pretty well. But more importantly, how can anyone capture the depth of philosophical thought found in "Starship Troopers" in a two hour movie, and who would want to watch it? Sure, Verhoeven could have expanded the classroom scenes from 4 minutes to 40 minutes and gone into a more indepth exploration of the concept of civic duty, but it would have been a terrible thing to watch.
So I think there are two things happening.
1) People are expecting a 2-hour movie to somehow encompass the same depth of ideas as a 300 page book. The problem of course is that film is a visual medium, intended to transmit images and emotions rather than communicate ideas.
2) People automatically expect a movie to screw up the book version and so are only looking for the differences, rather than paying attention to what they get right. A great example of this from Starship Troopers is the insistence on combat armor. While the armor as described in ST the book was cool as hell and an interesting concept, it was essentially set dressing, and Verhoeven (wisely, I think) avoided a whole lot of explication on what all this crap was and just cut to the core of the infantry experience rather than complicate things.
I haven't seen "I, Robot" (or read the book, or much at all of Asimov) so I can't comment on that one. What do ya'll think? Any other examples?
(Links to be added later)
I could go on and on how, although X-Men and X-2 were okay as films go, they didn't stick to the comic book's storylines very well at all. It's annoying if you know what was "supposed" to happen, but if you've never had a background in comic books, it doesn't hurt your viewing experience. Plus, being comic books, it's less likely that the audience will actually care if the plot doesn't stick to the original storyline (that is unless they're like me. Then they'd be super annoyed!)
The list of movies that I've seen and read the book for is rather short and seems to fall into four categories (Note: even when not stated, the movie was not as good as the book):
Reasonably faithful and boring as hell:
Slaughterhouse-Five
Catch-22
Farenheit 451 (not to be confused with a current propaganda movie which is, by all accounts, much more interesting)
(... Hmm, these all have numbers in the titles)
Les Miserables (3.5 hour, 1958 version)
Harry Potter #1 (I've skipped the rest of the movies... blech)
The Last Picture Show
Wuthering Heights (I hated the book too)
Reasonably faithful yet still good:
Ordinary People
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Completely different from the book yet still vaguely phisophically faithful:
I, Robot
Jurassic Park
Starship Troopers (at the shallowest possible level)
Not faithful to the book philosophically nor plotwise (and still boring):
Crime and Punishment (mini)
The Puppet Masters
Les Miserables (Liam Neeson version)
And the one shining example, that I can think of, of a movie transcending its source material:
Fight Club
There must be more, but it's hot, I don't care, and I'm going to eat pie.
I would like to add a couple of movies attached to one book that I have seen to Andy's list.
Better than Nyquil:
Dune 2002 remake
Book, what book. Just a damn good movie:
Dune (the older one)
The Wizard of Oz was really different from the book. If a little kid hasn't read the book, they'll still enjoy the movie, but the book was better, as always.
I am wondering if we like what we see/read first. I go back to Dune and I found the first movie to be excellent, but my brain does not tie it to the book at all. Or some who prefer the book, has an emotional tie due to the time committment that they made?
On the topic of XMen, I think comic fanatics don't mind so much because comics themselves rewrite their own origin stories over and over again and change things to fit a new generation of readers. Shoot spiderman (comic form) has had 5 rewrites to his story that I know of.
I also think that the phrase "the book is better" is making a judgement that doesn't necessarily fit. I'm not sure that you can equate the story told in each on the same terms. If you're the sort of person that enjoys the realm of ideas, you'll always be more satisfied with a book than its movie equivalent, whereas if you're more tied to images the opposite is likely to be true.
Of course there are examples of movies that just suck, and that take major liberties with a book and screw it up. But I think that you can't possibly get the depth of a book into a movie, unless its a really shallow book.
The best example of this phenomenon for me comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn't take long in a conversation about it before someone talks about how Kubrick "ruined" Clarke's beautiful book. Of course, this statement is ridiculous as Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on both the book and the movie, which were released at the same time. But you'll still here people say that the movie gets the book wrong, despite the fact that they were both made by the same people.
Okay, so Dun, 2001, and 2010 should have been on my list.
2001 was a special case and both were very enjoyable in completely different ways. My big beef with that particular collaboration was, how the hell did they end up on different moons!? In the book version, the monolith that Dave disappears into was on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, in the movie, it's on Europa, which orbits Jupiter. Of course having it at Jupiter made for better sequel possibilities; so much so that by the time the book version of 2010 came out, it had switched to Jupiter with a quick apology from the author.
Sigh. Trivia.
Addendum: the monolith was moved from Titan into Jupiter orbit between 2001 and 2010, not to Europa as I stated earlier. It was not until the third book, which never became a movie, 2063, that the monolith was on Europa after the ignition of Jupiter into a second sun.
Apologies.
I can't resist providing a link to OSC's "I, Robot" review (he agrees with me... except he thought was good, I didn't).
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2004-07-18.shtml
He does make a point that, as a sci-fi writer, he thinks sci-fi movies are usually crappy. Science fiction today is the only genre in which ideas are addressed in any serious manner. This, unfortunately, makes generally boring movies. Hence, most sci-fi movies don't progress beyond action/adventure space opera and what you see called sci-fi on the screen rarely resembles what you find in novel form.
Some exceptions:
Contact
A Clockwork Orange
Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind
The Matrix (barely)
I, Robot (well, not really, but close)
... crap, I'm out... a little help here?
Well, I'd say 2001 belongs on this list (putting Kubrik up there twice).
Brazil
Twelve Monkeys
Delicatessen
City of Lost Children
Planet of the Apes (remake doesn't count)
Close Encounters
28 Days
The Abyss (slightly superficial in the idea department, but better in the full directors cut)
Alphaville
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Cocoon
Starman
But for each of these, there are at least 5 in the "Men in Black" pointless action movies with lasers category, 2 in the "Total Recall" started with a good idea then ignored it and shot a bunch of people, and the one more "Star Wars" / "Blade Runner" really good movie, but still not much in the realm of new ideas department.
Hmm, I see to have higher standards for Sci-Fi movies than Ish. I probably should have included Cocoon and am rather ambivilant about 2001. But I intentionally left off The Abyss, Planet of the Apes (both versions), and Close Encounters despite having seen them and having enjoyed watching them (not so much Close Encounters though). A lot of the rest of them I haven't bothered to see.
Delicatessen and City of Lost Children are on my to watch list.
28 Days? That Sandra Bullock rehab thingy? Surely you don't mean that zombie one! Blech!
Also, who can forget classic Sci-fi movies. You know, the MST3K fodder. "What if the town were attacked by giant spiders? Okay, now what about giant iguanas? That sucked, now lets get crabs!"
I suppose one could add Pleasantville as it has a faint veneer of science to it. One might construe it to be one of the most interestingly structured time travel movies of all time.
Well, what is the standard here? Is it films that deal seriously with ideas as opposed to being simply action/adventure in a new setting? Or is there another criteria I'm missing?
Oh there is tons of criteria. Very mysterious criteria. It's like petals around the rose criteria.
"Well, what is the standard here? Is it films that deal seriously with ideas as opposed to being simply action/adventure in a new setting?"
Well, that and an additional, mysterious quality I'll call the Andy X Factor (TM). Generally, if after watching it, I spent 10 minutes or more thinking about the movie (beyond simply ridiculing it in my mind for bad physics, The Abyss, I'm looking at you) and I consider the science to be not entirely implausible, then it qualifies.
I suppose someone might label the Andy X Factor (TM) test as mildly subjective.
I also suppose that I should also say that I had to not hate the movie, otherwise AI might slip itself in (note: I spent about 10 mental minutes ridiculing the physics in AI, and days thinking about how much I hated the characters, plot, themes, and style of AI).
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/abyss.html