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FelineRanger -> RE: On movies made from books qualifying as failed cinema... (9/19/2014 7:11:04 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: RockaRolla
I, Robot drew from a number of Asimov's works but flopped. The adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 made me angry. If we're including short stories, Bradbury's Frost and Fire got got a short adaptation in Quest, but it's a loose adaptation at best.
Whether these are widespread views or my own biases due to these being my favorite authors, I don't know.
But I'm going to include a non-literary example here as the worst movie adaptation I've ever seen: Aeon Flux. The animated series was an amazing mix of the bizarre and dark. The movie made it more upbeat, lost the nonsensical elements, completely drifted from the original plot, and tried to keep Charlize Theron as naked as possible to make up for it. (It didn't work.)
I, Robot flopped so badly because the book was actually an examination of human dilemmas through the machines who faced said dilemmas without guidance from previous generations. The movie lost that aspect in favor of something that kinda sorta more resembled the stories surrounding R. Daneel Olivaw. The short-lived TV series Almost Human was actually closer to some of what Asimov wrote.
If you have the DVD for Aeon Flux, listen to the directors' commentary. It's a fascinating cross between post-mortem and whining about how studio interference undercut the movie. Basically, everything that stayed closer to the source material came from the scriptwriters and directors. Everything that strayed from the source material and, therefore, didn't work was the direct result of notes from studio execs. Some time ago I asked JMS, creator of Babylon 5, about that and got a far more extensive answer than I expected.
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