I LOVE Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi action movie Children of Men. I’ve watched maybe six times and every time, the ending always almost brings me to tears. So when I learned it was adapted from P.D. James’ book of the same name, it was a no-brainer deciding what my next book would be.
After finishing the book, it wasn’t difficult to reach to the conclusion that I enjoyed the movie better.
While James’ book gives a more in-depth look at how human infertility and humanity’s slow death march towards extinction affects the sexual dynamic between men and women and almost demented ways humans try to cope with a world without children or a race of dead men walking, I feel the book dedicates WAY too much time describing the failing of human civilization and the Regrets and guilt of Theo Faron. It’s not even until after 2/3 through the book where it feels like the plot and story are properly paced and stuff of consequence actually begin to happen.
The film’s adaptation by, comparison, feels consistent in its pacing and the world building and woe-is-mes of Theo feel more compact a take up less of the audience’s time.
What books do you feel were worse than its film adaptation and why?
Jurassic Park is my go-to answer whenever this question comes up.
i like how the book sets up the world but boy do i not like most of the characters in it.
Ian malcolm dies but his speech at the end is some of the most up your own arse, ego self insert anti science BS i have seen from a writer and feels like ian dies like jesus. Ian in the movie is funny, critic who plays the devil advocate on maybe dont play god, with some great lines. Ian in the book is anti-science self insert for Michael who gets so annoying by the end
John Hammond, there is no depth there, just big evil billionaire, which i enjoy a takedown but i dont get any interesting thing out of it. Hammond in the movie is so much warm and a joy too be around but also a great way too show hubris in playing god and how captalism gets in its own way.
I have to disagree. I think they are both on par. Different enough that I enjoy the for different reasons.
I agree but did like both
I agree with Jurassic Park, but some of Crichton’s other novels have terrible movie adaptations.
I love Congo the book, the movie is trash.
I love Sphere, and again, trash movie.
Timeline is considered one of his best (I enjoy it, but not one of my favs), and the movie is pretty shit.
Rising Sun is an odd case, as I don’t really like either the book or the movie, but for fans of the book, they usually prefer it, and the movie didn’t get good reviews when it came out.
The Great Train Robbery and The Andromeda Strain are classics, but I’ve never seen the adaptations of either.
I really njoyed assic Park.
What confuses is me how Lost World the novel never gets any hate. It is like Michael hired a high school student to write a sequel, it is awful in every imainable way, and the movie LostbWorld is betterbjust by existing.
I think the 13th Warrior was a better movie than Eaters of the Dead.
13th Warrior is a blast, and yep, it’s better than the book.
Yeah, it just annoys me what a transparent riff on Beowulf it is.
The scene that shows him picking up bits and pieces of the language and then speaking it back to them is some of the best writing that’s ever existed. The whole thing was done well, but that scene was a master class in screen writing.
Ridiculously underrated adventure film. Great cast, plot, dialog, pacing, ending.
The Great Train Robbery is an awesome movie. Might be better than the book, actually.
Mm yeah. I read the Reader’s Digest version when I was a kid and bought a copy after 25 years or so. While it’s still a cool techno thriller (and the tech has caught up with its vision), I was surprised how much Crichton fantasized about >!native women having sex with apes and gorillas!<.
Great Train Robbery is a fucking banger. Donald Sutherland.
How dare you disrespect the masterpiece of cinema that Congo is.
C’mon, it’s got Bruce Campbell! A gorilla that does sign language that’s played by a woman in a gorilla suit! Laura Linney shooting a laser gun and saying great one liners like “put them back on the endangered species list”
Ok yeah, it’s kinda trash. But I love it.
If they would’ve cast Bruce Campbell in the Dylan Walsh role instead of giving Bruce a one-scene-and-done, the flick would’ve had a lead who knew how to play against the ludicrousness.
Tim Curry is gold in this movie. “Stop eating my sesame cake!”
Tim Curry is gold in anything he is in.
Tim Curry is such gold in everything that you could have him play lead (the metal, not the most important character) and discover the secret alchemists have been searching for for centuries.
Overall I like your comment, but what did you want from the gorilla? A real gorilla that they taught sign language to?
Ugly gorillas. Ugly! Go away!
Wait…Bruce Campbell is in it?!! How is this news to me? Iist find and watch this movie now.
Strangely enough, I enjoyed both the book and the movie versions of Timeline.
My first thought as well. I think the smaller scale of the movie also really helps contain it, like having only 3 raptors makes them more consequential than the 11 or so they dispatch in like one chapter. Although I miss the Baby T-rex in the movie. Overall, Crichton is really good at the science aspect and the theme of chaos theory, but the movie treats every character better. Like Grant is way more interesting in the movie imo
Baby t-rex is in the second book & movie.
Are you sure? Maybe I’m mistaken but I read the first one recently and there were two t-rexes, one adult and one juvenile. Oooh, wait, is there an actual baby t-rex in the second and not like a kid one? I only saw the first and third movie so I don’t know
I’d say pretty much everything Crichton wrote was better as a movie in large part because he was writing books rather explicitly intended to be turned into movies.
In addition to being a misogynist he was also hilariously petty. He hated a critic name Michael Crowley so much that in his novel Next he had a character named Mick Crowley, who was a critic, who was a pedophile. Just to be a dick and get back at a critic he hated.
sigh and he specifically stated that this character had a very small penis.
I love Chrichton, or did, but man. Reading that really made me consider putting the book down and not picking it back uo.
The dinosaurs were also written more as just scary monsters, with a lack of the respect/beauty of them the movie had.
More like the Chris Pratt movies then?
Nah
I hear this complaint about Lex a lot, and how she’s annoying, badly written and frankly unbelievable. Once upon a time I might have agreed. However, since becoming a parent, and thus being exposed to many more real-life children (not just my own), I can confidently say that Lex’s annoying little sister behavior is not that unrealistic. It just really isn’t. Many young kids are just like that.
Agreed. Lex wasn’t a great character for a book, but it was a realistic depiction of some young children. I think everyone has met an extremely annoying 7-12 year old kid.
Michael Crichton always wrote like a dad with experience lol. Hyper obsessed with certain topic kids, annoying whiney brats, babies who just wouldn’t eat their f******g oatmeal, toddlers who got diaper rash because someone didn’t wipe them well enough and they had crusty poop in their genitals. Absolute undying unconditional love for your kids. He was so real for that lmao
Agreed.
And for that reason, I wasn’t too upset that they swapped the ages and aged her up. It’s difficult to write for a small child in a way that’s coherent to the plot and doesn’t just turn them into wallpaper (emotional or otherwise).
Dakota Fanning’s character in War of the Worlds gets similar flack for being very much like Lex.
I much prefer child characters that act like realistic kids, than child characters who act like tiny 35 year olds.
As some one who doesn’t really read but is a jurassic park nerd i really hope the day jurassic park is old enough to be re made they make it book story line accurate. I like the book story better but the movie is more enjoyable.
Crichton is bad at writing people in general, it’s just particularly noticeable with the woman in his books, because he seems to hold contempt for them. Saddler is one of the few presented as competent, and the book goes to great lengths to let us know what nice legs she has. Ian Malcom, the author insert character, comments on them to her face and we are left with no indication of how she felt about it, and it’s presented as a completely normal thing to say.
Other characters are just 101 level textbooks with hints of a personality, which Crichton just takes from professionals that he personally likes or dislikes.
What he does exceed at in Jurassic Park, is demonstrating all the little decisions made by management, as you see them continuously compound into larger and larger problems. In the film, it’s almost like the storm is solely responsible for Jurassic Parks failure.
Additionally, despite the terrific performance by Samuel L. Jackson, Tom/John Arnold from the book is really the stand out character of the novel. An intelligent, competent engineer, who’s confident in the park, but comes to realize that Malcom is right over the course of the book (making him the only character with an arch). He realizes his hubris, yet still ultimately pays the price for it. He and Wu were both brilliant, but unable to see outside of their own personal responsibilities to notice the broader picture.
Lex is awful in the movie too. She gets the genius idea to shine a gigantic flashlight right into the eyeballs of a t-Rex and then screams because she can’t find the button to turn it off? At least in the book she had thr excuse of being only like five years old instead of 13.
Yeah. I just kept flipping through pages and pages on the science of cloning. I’m here to read a story, not a textbook on cloning.