Show me the money!!! I mean, the movie did not stay true to the book, which is ok; but for the author to say it does I think is misleading to the audience. Hey, glad they were able to make a fun movie and used the book as a base. Sure, but don't say that it is true to the story
@VRRanger I don't know, according to IMbD he was the screenplay writer so in a sense it is still his work. I think the movie is a good nostalgia bomb but it's really dumb compared to the book as there was no attempt at world or character building. (Outlook hotel was a big improved for me. I liked that better then that part of the book)
I read an interview with the author in Writer's Forum magazine, he explained why they made the changes in that. The screenplay was a collaboration between the author and an experienced screenwriter. It was issue #199 May 2018.
Agreed, still haven't seen it myself, other half tends to go by the reviews a lot, so he didn't want to watch it. Will probably watch it when it comes out on dvd. I read the writing magazines each month, well can't read Writers Digest anymore since they swapped, and the system doesn't like my Win 7. Way to quickly lose readers that.
That's the deal with adaptations. You've gotta make changes. Back in the early days of film, there were more faithful attempts at adapting novels to movies. The resulting movies were 8 hours long. And like I said, this was in the early days of film, back when typical movies were still roughly 40 minutes long. They were less "movies" and more "audiovisual books". They exceeded at capturing worldbuilding and character building, but they were so painfully long that you couldn't bear to slog through it all in one sitting. That's why the book is usually better, why novels excel at worldbuilding and movies typically fail unless they're spread out over multiple installments. You can read five pages of a book and come back to it later. Before streaming became a thing, it was awkward to only watch a few minutes of a movie at a time.
My issue was that they didn't adapt the book so much as re-write the whole thing and just use the same names from the book. Now according to the author and Spielberg a lot of that was done for the visuals which I get. Example, First Key challenge. In the book :- Get through a retro game's dungeon (which the MC had the map memorized by heart) and bet the final boss in a game of.... ostrich. No that's it, he and the lich final boss stand infront of an old style arcade game playing an 8-bit game with ostriches jumping. The idea is ridiculus in your head as you see a lich in spell robes and glowing red eyes trying to focus on the old style joysticks of those consoles that it works. But it might not be so on film. In the Movie :- A race full of easter egg cars with a T-rex attacking and distroying the surrounding buildings. A larger then life Donkey Kong intercepting your way as you make a sucidal jump off a bridge. That's visually awesome! My issue is how the challanges were solved. It's S-T-U-P-I-D in the movie, forget gamers my 4 year old niece would have tried them! in the book everything is tied to the MC being not just a gamer but someone that both young enough to be a student and into the game enough to not just know but understand this man's life. He wanted the winner to be a kid! In the movie it's and spoilers ahead Spoiler In the book the only reason he got the first key was because the dungeon itself was hidden in a school planet. Not a playing area. He located it after 10 years of searching AND because he was a student in another school branch so had access. Winning the key was simply him playing that game over and over with his buddy for years and knowing that player 2 had a slight speed advantage. This is not just world building it also gives you a reason why nobody has found the first key even years after the hunt was started by pros and game specialists. In the movie it's a race that everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE in oasis knows about. is in a public area and people have been playing daily for over I think 40 years trying to figure out. What's the solution? You drive in reverse... Yeah, nobody's tried that? ever? in 40 years? public daily game? I had the urge to give the movie the middle finger when I first saw that.
