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.
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 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!
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…
Battlefield Earth. The movie is awful but it’s a much smaller time commitment than the book.
Hunt for Red October though film wasn’t bad at all, but the book was mediocre, boring and offputting.
essentially they first hired baldwin, who was not a leading man but had already done some big movies, and it was going to be more of a traditional vehicle for baldwin.
then they hired sean connery, a genuine movie star, and he wanted them to expand on his character and make the soviets more interesting and human as a result. they had too or wanted to take advantage of connery’s star power and the result is a much better story.
I was a huge Tom Clancy fan as a teen. Thank fucking God I grew out of that shit, or otherwise I’d be a massive chud. The worst fucking part of his books is the way he writes women and relationships, every woman needs to be rescued, and they have no personality of their own.
I recently had a thought about HfRO book - it’s allegedly a mandatory reading in Annapolis naval academy (or so the publisher claimed), so if the average level of their readings is like that, no wonder that US Navy officers are having fuckups like all the 7th fleet navigation accidents or that they can’t even defeat nor scare country without a navy.
i read rainbow six because i played the game, and while i enjoyed it, even me as a 13 year old boy was kind of disturbed by how 20% of the book is lurid descriptions of the beauty and efficiency of our weapons. long descriptions of how the troopers are super competent, long descriptions of the precision and mastery of the snipers, how the guns are well oiled and wonderful tools, etc. real psycho stuff. also the bad guys are environmentalists planning to kill everyone on the planet with a engineered virus lol
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.
Ready Player One is the Skeet Ulrich of Snow Crash ripoffs.
The movie is so much better than the book because it drops a lot of cringe that the book has.
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
Yeah, the book felt like I was being beaten over the head with pop culture references…but then you open up VR Chat…
I feel like there was value in the predictions RPO was making, particularly at the time it came out, just before Facebook became Meta and basically made it their playbook. If the world ever gets so shitty that the friction of putting on a VR headset actually becomes preferable to doing literally anything else, I think it’s a pretty believable future.
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.
The Mission, though I haven’t seen the movie yet.
Haven’t read the book, but watched a guy discuss the differences between The Devil Wears Prada and the movie.
His contention was that there were absolutely no redeeming traits about Miranda in the book and she had somehow failed upwards with no true talent. Andy the protagonist spends the whole time rebelling against the magazine and its people.
In the movie we see Miranda to be a horrid person but we see that overlays a keen eye and talent that has led her to the top. Moreover, Andy spends effort to fit in with the magazine people and she evolves as a character.
That’s a good example. A filmmaker saw a 2D character and added a layer to save the story
I think you could make a credible argument that some of the Harry Potter books are worse than the movies. The best example that comes to mind is making fun of Hermione for wanting to free slaves, and the other characters claiming being slaves is in their nature or something. If you had only watched the movies instead, you’d get to see the slaves are miserable, most of the good team characters don’t own slaves, and Harry Potter tricks a slave owner into freeing their slave.
and Harry Potter tricks a slave owner into freeing their slave.
That happens in the books too. He only does it because the slave owner is a mean slave owner, though, not because slavery is wrong.
The thing is that Rowling hadn’t really thought it through yet. Having the hero save a slave is pretty clearly heroic and good, and it’s a nice way to wrap up the Dobby story arc, but then the fans were all like “wait WHAT!? there’s slaves under Hogwarts!?” and she was forced to think it through, and it turns out JK’s pretty awful so the result of her thinking it through was to make it worse.
I know that I was almost an adult when Harry Potter came out, but I really tried to get into them as everyone else loved them, but the writing was flat af.
In the later books Harry gets a slave and doesn’t free him but its ok because the slave is rude.
Jk rolling made some really strange decisions. Some of it really makes you wonder if maybe she was being a little too honest or just too unaware to see the implications.
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.
its relieving to hear others didn’t like the book because everytime it gets brought up you usually see nothing but gushing praise bordering on fanaticism. I liked the concepts behind them but really didn’t enjoy reading them at all
I really had a hard time with the chinese names, especially the ones that sounded similar.
I quite enjoyed the books. Would I then enjoy the show?
I loved the books and found the netflix series to be a pretty enjoyable westernization of them.
There were a few changes/choices that were a bit strange or missed the point, but overall it’s worth watching
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Ready Player One I guess. There’s a big difference between seeing a fuckload of pop culture artifacts on screen and reading multiple pages of somebody rattling off their knowledge about them. The worst part is that RP1 doesn’t even really engage with the culture it utilizes in any kind of interesting way, it’s all just surface level references that you’d learn from reading Reddit comment sections where people quote memes at each other. The movie on the other hand kind of makes it work because the pop culture artifacts aren’t dwelled on, they’re used more like an aesthetic choice, while the main focus of the movie is on its paint-by-numbers plot.
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When the iron giant shows up in your story as a reference and you have him
checks notes
Choose to be a gun
I actually really liked the book over the movie. I felt like the book did a much better job of describing the dystopian world and how the MC (can’t remember his name and too lazy to look it up) and the world at large more or less dealt with it.
Iirc the movie doesn’t even go into the history of the digital world and why the MC was obsessed with it. I get that movies and books are different but it seemed like the movie was “inspired” by the book and not based on it.
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.
The name of the rose. The movies…fine, I guess. The books at least 300 pages too long and frequently segues into long-winded discussion of the political minutiae of the warring monastic orders during the reign of Pope John XXII.
If you want to read about the time period you’ll be annoyed by the murder mystery shoehorned into your dry long winded historical fiction. If you wanted a murder mystery set in a historical setting then you’ll be annoyed by the history lesson being shoved down your throat like a dehydrated fig newton.
I really liked the book. I thought it was clever to use the murder mystery to explore the world of the abbey. The minutiae was the point of the book for me.
Stuart Little was the weirdest book you could possibly read, the movie managed to make it actually make sense while both were meh.
