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I think I'll give I, Robot a pass. As far as film versions of books are concerned, I'm usually not the "slavish page-to-page adaptions are best!" type. And have in fact always thought that one reason why Jackson's LotR worked so well as cinema was that he didn't do what Chris Columbus did with the first two HP movies. Instead, he managed to keep the balance between capturing the spirit of the novel and creating his own cinematic vision of it. Cinema is a different medium, after all.
But. Note the "capture the spirit of the book" part. Now Asimov's Robot short stories are just that, short stories, and as such impossible to film unless you either take one as your basic premise or do a TV series. Not to mention the fact that they're really dialogue-centric, which made them very enjoyable to me but possibly not to a cinema audience, and revolve around intellectual puzzles to be solved. So, yes, I can see why a film based on them would introduce new elements. However. Asimov specifically created his famous three laws and the entire world in which the robot stories take place because he was ticked off and bored at the countless "creature turns against creator" stories, which were old by his time already. (And that was decades ago.) He really, really disliked them. And from what I gather by the trailer, the movie starring Will Smith is exactly that, yet another rip-off of the Frankenstein concept.
I remember stomping out of the film version of Misery irritated for a very similar reason. Now that was a good film, certainly one of the better King adaptions, with great peformances by James Caan and Kathy Bates (who rightly got an Oscar for hers), and a good script by Willam Goldman. But then they spoiled it, for me, at the very end. Because of one change (all the others, I had no problem with) that managed to completely turn a central authorial intent upside down. See, in King's novel, Annie might be a psychopath, but she's actually right about Paul's writing. In fact, there is a whole element of black satire because she is the Muse from Hell and forces him to write what he recognises is his best book, far better than the "literary" but ultimately pretentious novel he had finished at the start of the novel which was supposed to rehabilitate him from the fate of being a popular romance writer. In fact, Misery the novel is one of the best things I've read about the process of writing. Paul starts out because he needs to keep his psychopathic host calm but finds that he's also being Sheherazade for himself, that writing this novel is what keeps him alive in the true sense. In the huge passages quoted, you can see his situation inspiring him to increasingly darker gothic twists, with a dash of Henry Rider Haggard thrown in because of the African location. It is this novel Paul publishes at the end. (What he burned were the pages he had thrown out and rewritten during typing - remember, those were the pre-computer days.)
In the movie, however, Paul publishes his literary novel, and finally manages to be acknowledged by the critics. Which, as I said, misses the entire freakin' point. Really, I don't know what William Goldman was thinking.
Here's the last of the Five Things Which Never Happened Between Garak And Bashir. In this one, things went different at a certain point of By Inferno's Light, season 5, and after making one or both of the boys miserable throughout all other variations, I figured they deserve a break. Except, err, well, you'll see.
( Whose idea of a happy ending is that? )
But. Note the "capture the spirit of the book" part. Now Asimov's Robot short stories are just that, short stories, and as such impossible to film unless you either take one as your basic premise or do a TV series. Not to mention the fact that they're really dialogue-centric, which made them very enjoyable to me but possibly not to a cinema audience, and revolve around intellectual puzzles to be solved. So, yes, I can see why a film based on them would introduce new elements. However. Asimov specifically created his famous three laws and the entire world in which the robot stories take place because he was ticked off and bored at the countless "creature turns against creator" stories, which were old by his time already. (And that was decades ago.) He really, really disliked them. And from what I gather by the trailer, the movie starring Will Smith is exactly that, yet another rip-off of the Frankenstein concept.
I remember stomping out of the film version of Misery irritated for a very similar reason. Now that was a good film, certainly one of the better King adaptions, with great peformances by James Caan and Kathy Bates (who rightly got an Oscar for hers), and a good script by Willam Goldman. But then they spoiled it, for me, at the very end. Because of one change (all the others, I had no problem with) that managed to completely turn a central authorial intent upside down. See, in King's novel, Annie might be a psychopath, but she's actually right about Paul's writing. In fact, there is a whole element of black satire because she is the Muse from Hell and forces him to write what he recognises is his best book, far better than the "literary" but ultimately pretentious novel he had finished at the start of the novel which was supposed to rehabilitate him from the fate of being a popular romance writer. In fact, Misery the novel is one of the best things I've read about the process of writing. Paul starts out because he needs to keep his psychopathic host calm but finds that he's also being Sheherazade for himself, that writing this novel is what keeps him alive in the true sense. In the huge passages quoted, you can see his situation inspiring him to increasingly darker gothic twists, with a dash of Henry Rider Haggard thrown in because of the African location. It is this novel Paul publishes at the end. (What he burned were the pages he had thrown out and rewritten during typing - remember, those were the pre-computer days.)
In the movie, however, Paul publishes his literary novel, and finally manages to be acknowledged by the critics. Which, as I said, misses the entire freakin' point. Really, I don't know what William Goldman was thinking.
Here's the last of the Five Things Which Never Happened Between Garak And Bashir. In this one, things went different at a certain point of By Inferno's Light, season 5, and after making one or both of the boys miserable throughout all other variations, I figured they deserve a break. Except, err, well, you'll see.
( Whose idea of a happy ending is that? )
