hURR dURR dERP said:
I Am Legend and I, Robot
The fact that they're both Will Smith movies is a coincidence, really. I don't mind Will Smith. Occasionally I even like him, which believe me is a compliment. It's just that both of them are based on books I really like (or, in the case of I, Robot, based on a collection of short stories I really like), and both of them completely miss the whole fucking point of the stories they're based on. This can't even be accidental. There's no fucking way you can miss the meaning of the way I Am Legend (the book) ends. There's no fucking way anyone who's ever read an Asimov robot story could make an AI the bad guy and believe he's made a good adaption.
To me, these two are prime examples of how a story can be utterly raped in an attempt to make it more attractive to the masses. They're (unfortunately) far from the only examples, but for me they really stand out because I've loved those books and in both cases I was excited to see how they'd handle the movie adaptations.
Well, I never read the book
I Am Legend myself, but after all the hype the movie got, I really hated it. I felt it could have been so much better... Maybe that's the explanation.
Concerning
I, Robot, I totally agree with you, but you forgot to mention one of the worst atrocities of the movie, i.e., the way they turn Susan Calvin into a Love Interest (not to mention a Damsel in Distress), and a very generic one at that. After the way they distorted the Three Laws, that was the second worst sin the movie commited. And the fact that it was a rather cool movie if you forget it's based on Asimov made it even more annoying. I hate to admit, but I liked that movie, I just think it should not be called
I, Robot nor have Susan Calvin in it. They could have just changed the character's name, how hard would that be?
About
Harry Potter, I kind of liked
Goblet and
Order (but I still missed the World Cup), they were the best that could be done in movie format. But
Prince was a huge disappointment. The way they rushed through the plot was inexcusable. The worst part was the ending, when (no spoilers) Harry and Dumbledore go to a place that was never mentioned in the movie, while in the book its importance for Voldemort was very well established. I went to see the movie with a friend that had never read the book, and he was utterly confused as to where the idea of going to that particular place came from. That was an example of bad screenwriting and one of the many reasons why I'm worried about the adaption of the last book.
Eragon... guys, you don't know what
atrocious means until you watch the Brazilian dubbed version. If you are Brazilian like me, you know our dubbers are among the best in the world, and sometimes it's more fun to watch a dubbed movie than one with original voices. But they got celebrity Fernanda Vasconcellos, a TV "actress", to be the voice of Sapphire (is that spelled correctly?), and
that was the last nail on the coffin of an already awful movie.
I can't think of an original example to add to the list right now, but let me say that "if you don't like it, don't watch it" is a poor argument, in my opinion. If I like a book and there is a movie adaption, of course I will want to watch it. And because no one will adapt the same book twice (unless it's a timeless classic like
Dracula or
Wuthering Heights), a bad movie version kills my chances of ever watching a
good one. And I feel completely justified to be pissed off by that...
)
