Have You Read The Book?

[David Meek]

In another post about Lord Of The Rings I mentioned how the images in the film matched the mental pictures I had formed many years earlier while reading the trilogy, and The Hobbit for the first time. This added greatly to my enjoyment of the movie as it gave me a feeling of immersion in this story in which I've built, changed and refined Frodo, Gandalf and the others many times over the years.

Now, the opposite happened with Starship Troopers. I'd waited 30 years for this wonderful, many-layered book to be brought to the big screen. I've probably read it a half-dozen times since that first time in 1968 when I created an entire galaxy and its peoples in my head. When I finally sat down and saw Verhoeven's travesty, it was horribly disappointing. The bugs were just right - no problems there. But the rest, including the lack of almost anything resembling the book's storyline, the troopers' lack of powered armor, the gently chaste relationship between Johnny and Carmen, the focus on the responsibility of persons to their society, were all missing. Maybe, if I'd never read Robert Heinlein's book it would have been a passable Saturday matinee sci-fi flick, but in truth, having built this book into a movie in my mind, it failed almost completely.

Have either of these happened to you? Which book/film was it? How did you feel about it?




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[George Bellefontaine]

Starship Troopers the flick was a disappointment to me also after reading the book.There are many books I loved that disappointed me as a film but I have learned to look at the problem differently.I no longer assume a film version of a book is going to resemble one or the other.The written word is one art form, and film is another.The minute a book becomes the property of a producer or studio, the director enters the picture and he will do a filmed version the way he sees it.
That doesn't mean it's okay. I have just accepted the fact that most books are going to disappoint once they are brought to film. Most authors also realize this once they sell their filmrights, but there are some, like Stephen King, who are in a position to only go the film route if they play a role or have some say in the production of the film.




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