Ask Lemmy

I Am Legend

The ending was completely and utterly different than the book, which destroyed the gut punch at the end of the book that was kind of the whole theme of the book.

I don't even remember the book as a whole. But I remember the ending. Then they Hollywooded it and it was awful.

The movie version of A Clockwork Orange was based on the American version of the book, which left out the entire last chapter. In that chapter, at 18 years old Alex pretty suddenly grows out of his violent and criminal ways and wants to start a family. Some say this ending is more optimistic but I actually think it's darker, because it shows that any normal person you meet might've at some point been a wanton brute reveling in the chaos and pain they so arbitrarily inflicted. And that they can just move on and start living like a normal person.

The Lawnmower Man

In the book, an unassuming everyman stumbles upon the fact that a local landscaping company is actually a front for a demon who has an arrangement that involves making human sacrifices of those that discover his supernatural nature.

In the movie, a Cyber Virtual Reality 3D Battles ON 3D CYBERSPACE Stunning Effects 3D Internet Pierce Brosnan Warfare Nineties Futuristic VR Headset Technology BATTLE In 3D Mind Expanding Guns, and one of the characters is a man who has a lawnmower.

Edit: Shit, okay, I just read this on Wikipedia and nearly wet myself:

A feature film, The Lawnmower Man, starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, was released in 1992 by New Line Cinema. This film used an original screenplay entitled "CyberGod", borrowing only the title of the short story. The film concerns a scientist, Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Brosnan), who subjects mentally challenged Jobe Smith (Fahey) to virtual reality experiments which give him superhuman abilities. The film was originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man. King won a lawsuit to have his name removed from the film, stating in court documents that the film "bore no meaningful resemblance" to his story. King then won further damages in 1993 after his name was included in the home video release.

The Dark Tower. Everything. An 8 book series smashed into 1 terrible movie. Who ever green lit that should be fired.

Everything in WWZ

Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

In the book the character Duddits had the shining, yes that motherfucking shining.

In the movie they made him an undercover alien. Man what a let down.

I know we're not into Harry Potter now, but the past is the past and I can't forget how annoyed I was when the movie based on the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, came out. I was a very disappointed teenager.

It was a whirlwind story to me at the time. I remember exactly where I was when I read it, as the moment that revealed the friendship between Harry's father James, Professor Lupin, Peter Pettigrew, and the alleged-murderer, Sirius Black, became seared into my brain. It was such a pivotal part of the overall story to me, that that twist alone made it my favorite in the series. So when the movie came out, I expected the use and development of The Marauder's Map to be a key highlight. It was a huge deal in the books, after all.

Yet in the movie, the map is just a neat thing Harry gets to use. Nobody mentions that Harry's own father helped create it. The movie never even tells who the Marauders are, even though the reveal of their backstory was the key emotional crux of the Shrieking Shack scene. To omit their story entirely felt like a gut-punch.

I didn't understand at the time why the director (Alfonso Cuaron) decided to straight-up change everything that made that story so compelling to me and my friends. To this day, I still don't understand.

I was surprised when I read heart of darkness, that, for me at least, the final gut-punch of the tale isn't a dying man thinking of the horror he had wrought and seen, but the protagonist getting back to the man's wife and lying to her, telling her his last thoughts were of her. It isnt something that would have worked for Apocalypse Now, but I didn't expect such a short novel to hide a completely different ending mood. I still think about it, years later.

The book Annihilation centered on a "tower" that was a mysterious, fleshy, downward spiraling tunnel with creepy writing on the walls. The imagery was so unsettling.

For some reason it is entirely absent from the movie. Like... that was half of the point of the book - a "tower" that climbed down into the earth instead of towards the sky. Why would you cut that?

Matilda. They made them y*nks 🤢🤮

Ready Player One. So much about the movie adaptation of this book infuriates me, but the fact they replaced Wargames with the Shining is a crime against humanity!!!

I, Robot.

Asimov was explicitly trying to get away from the trope of "robots take over humanity". To be clear, the first short story that became I, Robot was published in 1940. "Robots take over humanity" was already an SF trope by then. Hollywood comes along more than half a century later and dives head first right back into that trope.

Lt Cmdr Data is more what Asimov had it mind. In fact, Data's character has direct references to Asimov, like his positronic brain.

The Hobbit. Like, all of it