I’m gonna mention “How to train your dragon”. I actually preferred the books, but they are very different and I know many people who much prefer the movie.
I honestly think they’re different enough that the comparison becomes unfair. I enjoyed both, but there’s only a superficial amount in common.
The audiobooks read by David Tenant are superb - something the whole family was happy to listen to in the car with small children. He does a fantastic job with a different regional accent for each tribe.
And yes, the movies are just a different thing.
maybe shrek? i never cared for the book though its not bad
Stuart Little was the weirdest book you could possibly read, the movie managed to make it actually make sense while both were meh.
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.
Battlefield Earth. The movie is awful but it’s a much smaller time commitment than the book.
Dine. The book is terrible, I couldn’t read it at all after trying twice… way back decades ago, the recent movie was good.
I’m guessing someone with enough familiarity could say this about one of the John Green books’ movie adaptations, but I haven’t seen any (?) of the movies and haven’t read the books since I was a teen so
Starship Troopers was a far different story in each medium, but I think the movie is much more worthy of your time
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.
+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
Probably because Starship Troopers isn’t PKD. It’s Heinlein.
Kind of funny to imagine what it would have been like if it had been written by PKD. Johny Rico would have spent 1/3 of the book going through a divorce and the troopers would have all been on halucinogens.
oh whoops, I’ve made that mistake for X years then. Solves a mystery too - I hate Heinlein. Stranger in a strange land was dull.
Yeah I found it boring as well. But yeah that would explain it!
The only book of his I’d recommend is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It’s quite Anarcho Capitalist, and sexist in places but it’s an interesting revolution story regardless and has some interesting ideas in 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.
It’s been a while since I’ve read it but what was fascist about it? That only people who served got to vote? It was either/or iirc, you could not vote while in the military, only after you left, and if you did you could not return. Not exactly Nazi Germany.
Only ex military caste have power because they are the only people who can vote or hold public office.
There’s this respected teacher guy in it who goes on about how violence solves everything, hero’s main trajectory is for him to become really on board with that setup. Bunch of capital punishment, whipping etc.
I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. There were other paths to citizenship (iirc something akin to the peace corps and perhaps even business success? It’s been a while since I read it). But it wasn’t just military. It’s just that military was the easiest for most people.
Been a long time since I read it too but basically you had to do federal service and military was the most popular branch of that. But the book is mostly interested in military and high up characters talk about their military background etc. It’s definitely fascist.
Heinlein experiments with loads of social structures and governments. Starship Troopers is the fascist example, not an example of all his work.
Funny thing, The Forever War is considered a direct reaction to Starship Troopers, the former as a pacifist take to the latter’s militarism.
Learn something new every day!
The Forever War is a book that I’ll always point to as a gateway into reading sci-fi, not just watching it.
Such a good book.
would you like to know more?
I’m doing my part
There’s also an anime adaptation in 6 episodes, Uchuu no Senshi, made by Bandai. It was directed by Tetsurou Amino (Iria, Macross 7) and the mechas were designed by Kazutaka Miyatake (designer of spaceships and power suits for Macross, Gundam and Battleship Yamato).
It’s considered an important milestone and a progenitor in the mecha genre. It has a very… anime approach to the adaptation, focusing mostly on the action and scifi with very little of the original drama or politics.
there’s so much different I’d almost consider them related and not an adaptation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the later books Harry gets a slave and doesn’t free him but its ok because the slave is rude.
Kreacher really wants to be a good slave, he just wants to be a good slave for the bad guys. So it’s okay to abuse him, see?
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.
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!
50 Shades of Grey.
The film is silly and mediocre but the book is next level terrible.
I’ve never consumed either media of that story. But I thoroughly enjoyed Dan Olson’s take.
Just so you know, everything in that link after ?si= is purely tracking information so Google can know who you send links to, and when they open them.
Thanks, forgot to delete that.
Yep. This is probably the best take of showing how the movie’s writing process changed the writing for the better, then the books’ author put a stop to that.
Thank you. I ended up watching the whole trilogy (of videos).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/qzk9N7dJBec?si=zp_SQRQ3jBbOUWab
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Hunt for Red October though film wasn’t bad at all, but the book was mediocre, boring and offputting.
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
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.
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.
I really had a hard time with the chinese names, especially the ones that sounded similar.
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 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
I read the first book and enjoyed it. I’m halfway through the Chinese series and enjoying it as well. I haven’t seen any of the American series yet but I hear it is also good.
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
Howl’s Moving Castle. Not that I didn’t enjoy the book, I just preferred the movie more.
Same. I remember the book being actually kind of unimpressive and wondering “Really, this is what inspired that amazing movie?”
