this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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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.

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[–] livus@kbin.social 39 points 7 months ago (1 children)

50 Shades of Grey.

The film is silly and mediocre but the book is next level terrible.

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 12 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I've never consumed either media of that story. But I thoroughly enjoyed Dan Olson's take.

https://youtu.be/qzk9N7dJBec?si=zp_SQRQ3jBbOUWab

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 7 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] SacralPlexus@lemmy.world 35 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

This may be unpopular but I was deeply disappointed in Shawshank Redemption when I read it. The movie is top tier.

Edit: In retrospect this doesn’t really answer your question as you asked about bad movies with a worse book and Shawshank is definitely not a bad film.

[–] KnitWit@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago

Movie is definitely top tier, I also love the novella. Different Seasons is what I point to when people dismiss stephen king. Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and (while not on the level as the other two) Apt Pupil all in the same collection. But to each their own; pretty sure the final story is trash though haha.

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[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 32 points 7 months ago (20 children)

Starship Troopers was a far different story in each medium, but I think the movie is much more worthy of your time

[–] ctkatz@lemmy.ml 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

would you like to know more?

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[–] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The movie is great but I'm curious as to why you think its better than the book?

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 23 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] Tabitha@hexbear.net 30 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Adkml@hexbear.net 11 points 7 months ago (3 children)

In the later books Harry gets a slave and doesn't free him but its ok because the slave is rude.

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[–] ButtBidet@hexbear.net 10 points 7 months ago

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.

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[–] MrBobs@lemmy.one 22 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Fight Club, book is decent but the film seems a more complete package.

[–] SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 6 points 7 months ago

When the iron giant shows up in your story as a reference and you have him

checks notes

Choose to be a gun

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[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] TeryVeneno@lemmy.ml 14 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Harry Potter, the movies are at least wizards do wizard stuff even if the world is pretty boring to me. The books on the other hand, are just straight up strange and mean. Reading them as kid they just sucked, I have no clue why they are so popular outside of the movies.

[–] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Harry Potter has some issues, but for children's fiction it's better than a lot of series.

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[–] Kacarott@feddit.de 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean by strange and mean?

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[–] Omegamint@hexbear.net 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

An absurd amount of marketing, mainly. Very easy to shove YA/childrens books down kids throats, they don't have a lot of natural exposure to literature. Fuck, eragorn was the best example of the YA industry pushing a bad series (they even tried a movie series), I remember loaning it from my school library and being legitimately confused as to why it was becoming popular. I ended up finding a weird romance+fantasy series at the time that I largely consider as not being actually good, but remember finding it way more engaging. Maybe it's better now that kids are largely terminally online.

It's really my biggest gripe with it. There's better fantasy, better wizard centric fantasy, and better YA books out there. It's not great by any means, and I'm not surprised that I dropped the series without finishing it as a kid because I was reading much better stuff by the time the last few books came out.

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Honestly I kind of liked the eragon books though if asked I couldn't say why.

The attempted movie adaptation was horrible though

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[–] Hugin@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] infotainment@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] fr4nk_j4eger@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

I really had a hard time with the chinese names, especially the ones that sounded similar.

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[–] llamapocalypse@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago (9 children)

I don't know about worse, but the Eragon books and movie are equally terrible.

[–] TheMinions@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Eragon was my first foray into proper swords and sorcery fantasy after Harry Potter.

Are the books really that bad in your opinion? By no means do they reinvent the wheel, but I enjoyed the magic system and enjoyed the aspect of Dragon + Rider and that relationship we see between the two.

I haven’t read much other Fantasy besides LotR and Stormlight Archive, but I enjoy the Inheritance Cycle.

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[–] Kacarott@feddit.de 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm not gonna go claiming that the Eragon books deserve a prize, but I loved them as a kid, and comparing them as equals to that movie is bordering on insanity.

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[–] kylie_kraft@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

the Sookie Stackhouse novels vs. True Blood. the show got dumb but the books go off in so many more ridiculous directions. I quit watching the show after 3 seasons because the repetitive sex/violence juxtaposition got to be boring, but I still have to recognize that the show writers at least had restraint. also, Charlaine Harris writes like my foot

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[–] vivamatapacos@hexbear.net 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 11 points 7 months ago (5 children)
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[–] absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 9 points 7 months ago (5 children)

The lord of the rings!

I love reading....I read a lot. But Tolkien's style just never worked for me, the movies were great.

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I like Tolkien's style, but I get it. If you're not prepared to hear everything described in excruciating detail, maybe just stick with the Hobbit.

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[–] MxRemy@lemmy.one 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

This is a show and not a movie, but definitely The Magicians. The show is pretty incredible, and more or less abandons everything wrong with the original. The books mostly spend way too many pages following all the MC's petty grievances, and he's like a massive incel.

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[–] ours@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

Hunt for Red October. The book is great and for it's time had done amazing insight into modern naval warfare but the movie irons out a bunch of this which are a bit lame.

The Akula that kills itself with its own torpedo simply blows up because it abused its engine and another sunk when the titular sub rams into it.

The titular sub is later returned to the USSR.

The movie changes those and a few other things for a more exciting and satisfying outcome.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 8 points 7 months ago

Stuart Little was the weirdest book you could possibly read, the movie managed to make it actually make sense while both were meh.

[–] Bilbo_Haggins@lemm.ee 7 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] Kacarott@feddit.de 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Rinna@lemm.ee 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Howl's Moving Castle. Not that I didn't enjoy the book, I just preferred the movie more.

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[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

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