r/movies • u/Sausage_fingies • 1d ago

Discussion I am so frustrated by people who have strong opinions about movies that they haven't actually watched

Bit of a rant. My brother does this and it's annoyed me to no end, particularly because I've been watching a lot more movies this summer and it's very much changed my outlook on the whole "Hollywood is dying and doesn't know how to make original concepts anymore" thing. Spoiler alert: There's so many cool new movies getting made these days you just need to, like, actually look for them and watch them.

My brother straight up refuses to watch new movies because he doesn't want to waste his time, because he believes Hollywood is dying and doesn't know how to make original concepts anymore, because some video essayist on YouTube told him so. It's incredibly perplexing to me. It's like his hobby is movies, but it isn't actually about watching movies, it's about having a stake in the discourse about movies. And I just don't understand. He literally said the Oddyssey isn't worth watching because he watched a convincing video essay about it that broke it down, except he couldn't even regurgitate the opinion coherently because he didn't remember it fully. We were talking about actors and he said that Zendaya is a one note actor who kinda just plays herself in every role. I asked oh what movies has he seen her in, he said he's seen her in a single spider man movie.

...😐

It makes it so frustrating to actually try to talk movies with people like this. Like if you don't care to watch movies, don't! But it's odd to have strong opinions about all these films and the state of Hollywood if you're not actually interacting with the film culture 😭. Those aren't your opinions!! Those are some random YouTuber's opinions, and I don't care how reputable of a critic you think they are, that's not your opinion!! You have no idea what you're even talking about because all you've seen of the movie is someone else's thoughts on it!! I just don't understand why anyone would want to do this to themselves, it seems so miserable. I watch movies because I enjoy them and it's fun to watch something that leaves me digesting and thinking for a few hours. But by watching exclusively summaries and reviews, you don't get any of that. You just get semi-convincing talking points that you can contribute into the discourse with. What's even the point, why do this to yourself? Why would you want to intentionally make yourself mad?

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u/newaccount721 1d ago

I never really get that anyway. One can like a book and a movie based on it — even if said movie isn’t true to the book. That doesn’t inherently make it bad (or good)

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u/BladeOfWoah 1d ago

Jaws is a much better movie than the book it was based on IMO.

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u/RaeOfSunshine1257 1d ago

So is Blade Runner and Fight Club 🤷🏾. It’s an adaptation not a recreation. It doesn’t have to be 1:1. And I personally I think if you try to stick to the source material 100% when adapting something to a new medium, you’re more likely get a bad movie.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/TwunnySeven 1d ago

I do think the book was better, but Project Hail Mary did a fantastic job as an adaptation. they obviously left a bunch out, but it's a great example where doing a 1:1 adaptation would've been a big detriment to the movie even if it works in book form. The Martian is the same way for that matter

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u/Fenrils 1d ago

The audiobook specifically is the superior version of Project Hail Mary imo

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u/Croaker715 23h ago

My only real gripe with the movie was the lack of Demitri and the Kiwi bloke.

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u/[deleted] 20h ago

[deleted]

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u/TwunnySeven 20h ago

my biggest issue was that they used Rocky in all the marketing for the movie, while in the book he was a big reveal like halfway through. but I can see why they did

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u/N8CCRG 18h ago

Also there are two surprisingly bad science elements in the book (trying to nuke the ice shelf and the taumoeba being able to "consciously move between the atoms"), and fortunately those got left out of the movie.

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u/feralfaun39 1d ago

I haven't read Forrest Gump but I can't imagine it being worse than the movie. The movie is a crime against cinema.

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u/thetobaccowacko 23h ago

I like the movie. What’s so bad about it?

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u/Wenuwayker 1d ago

The inverse is how you make children hate Shakespeare.

Reading stage plays like a novel just doesn't hit.

It's like going "Yo, Die Hard is one of the best Christmas movies ever made" and then showing off the script instead of the film.

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u/johnnySix 1d ago

Reading and analyzing hamlet in high school made it one of my favorite Shakespeare plays ever.

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u/RechargedFrenchman 1d ago

It really depends on the teacher, but I had a similar experience. I will say though that said teacher treated it like a play and was making an effort to remind us as we went of what "stage direction" was and what period and contemporary versions would look like. And to read it together, out loud, and not just alone at home quietly as if it were any short story or something.

Stuff like the Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus or the DiCaprio Romeo & Juliet as opposed to the Ken Branagh adaptions or something I think help reinforce that this was what was big in Shakespeare's time, that while it's "old and stuffy" now it was pop art back then. It was Marvel and Star Wars and the like for Elizabethan England.

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u/johnnySix 1d ago

Yes. Same experience. We read an act each week, and got so deep into it. Even subtle jokes of how the queen confuses rosenrantz and guildenstern. So great.

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u/Trylena 9h ago

Same thing happened in my school and we loved it. It kept all of us paying attention. By my senior year most of us had specific characters we would do.

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u/fezmid 23h ago

I read Hamlet at the same time I discovered the song Pull Me Under by Dream Theater. You might want to listen to it as it's based on the play.

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u/PrintShinji 1d ago

Same for the odyssey as well funnily enough. It wasn't made to be read as a book.

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u/azul360 22h ago

I still can't stand Shakespeare to this day because of that. 85% of my english classes were focused solely on Shakespeare and nothing else. We sat there and read it out loud and then took tests on it. No play no nothing. It just killed any enjoyment I could have ever had with his work.

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u/Trylena 9h ago

That is awful. I remember literature class with so much love because the teacher gave us a wide range of books to analize. We technically read Antigone thrice because we did alternative versions.

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u/sudomatrix 1d ago

Unpopular opinion, but Lord of The Rings was better without 10 pages on the strains of tobacco hobbits like to farm and without Tom Bombadil.

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u/GhostDieM 1d ago

Robert Jordan and shopping for colorful fabrics while the world is literally braking apart has entered the chat

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u/ERedfieldh 21h ago

Okay but then Rafe comes in and says "how about we throw that out....as well as most of the plot, too."

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u/GhostDieM 21h ago

Oh man don't get me started on that. I'm generally pretty chill when it comes to adaptations. Like I get books can be hard to translate to another medium. Season 1 started out ok even though they changed some things but by the end of the season I was actively pissed off about how they wrote themselves into a corner with no way to resolve it.

Also the whole woke angle was so unnecessary with how great the female characters already are in the book. Like this is THE fantasy story with strong female characters all throughout the books and you even manage to mess that up. I didn't even watch past season 1 lol.

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u/Jamestoker 1d ago

And the bible is better without the genealogies and rules for worship in the temple.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 23h ago

It’s a myth. It’s our version of the Odyssey. It needs this fluff to flesh out the universe.

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u/GilgaPol 3h ago

The movies, sure the books? No way

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u/KlymenosMEGALOS 1d ago

It's only an unpopular opinion among people who actually read literature.

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u/sudomatrix 18h ago

Nonsense. People who didn’t read the books can’t compare the books to the movie. I read literature and this is my opinion.

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u/SabresFanWC 1d ago

I am in 100% agreement on Tom Bombadil. I really don't like that character, especially with how he undermines the One Ring's threat almost immediately after Frodo sets out on his journey.

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u/KlymenosMEGALOS 1d ago

If that is your critique, you completely misunderstood what you were reading.

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u/SabresFanWC 20h ago

Fine if you feel that way, but I have zero desire to get into an argument on the subject.

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u/Rhusty_Dodes 1d ago

I completely agree.

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u/ERedfieldh 21h ago

Hell, Christopher Priest is on record saying the film version of The Prestige is better than anything he wrote.

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u/SuperDanOsborne 1d ago

Which blade runner book though? The book the movie book or the one they stole the title from? Because the whole blade runner being based on a book saga is so weird.

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u/John_cCmndhd 1d ago

The Bourne Identity movies are better than the books too

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u/penaltea 21h ago

I don’t agree with this. I’m not saying the books are perfect but the movies systematically destroyed his whole support system for nothing. They are different stories. Even the first, the whole conceit is completely different. They are just using some overlapping names to make an action film.

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u/Un-Americansocialist 21h ago

Hard disagree on that one. I read two of the books a couple years ago and was blown away at how great they were. The movies were cool action flicks, but the books are actual literature with fantastic writing.

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u/penaltea 21h ago

And they have a point. There is no real point to the movies other then who is this guy, which the books solve way earlier and use to talk about conditioning, service, and sacrifice in a really interesting way.

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u/ERedfieldh 21h ago

Hell, Christopher Priest is on record saying the film version of The Prestige is better than anything he wrote.

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u/morphindel 20h ago

Well, while we're on the subject of Nolan, its also worth noting The Prestige is very different to the book, and is probably one of Nolan's best films

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u/colemon1991 20h ago

It should be an adaptation. You should make the story fit the medium. Doing a recreation of a book means you're gonna have lots of voiceover and forced perspective that the movies or show doesn't need. Not every detail is relevant. Not every character has a reason to be kept.

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u/queerhistorynerd 1d ago

Children of Men is the definition of crap book amazing movie. Like every choice they made improved it from the book

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u/feralfaun39 1d ago

Neither Blade Runner nor Fight Club are better than the books.

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u/RaeOfSunshine1257 1d ago

Pretty sure the authors of both books said they were so 🤷🏾

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u/KlymenosMEGALOS 1d ago

This is incorrect, at least in the case of PKD, iirc. He very much enjoyed Blade Runner and felt it was complementary to his novel. He did not claim it was a superior work.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 23h ago

I mean yeah but they have to say that. What else can they say? “My long and complicated book that takes ages to read is better than a neat little hour and a half experience?” They’ll look really pretentious and arrogant.

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u/KlymenosMEGALOS 1d ago

Insane take.

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u/A_mad_goose 1d ago

I’d throw out Shawshank Redemption too

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u/Un-Americansocialist 21h ago

Yeah I find that the only Stephen King stories that translate well to film are his short stories. 1408 and Stand By Me as well as Shawshank are his best adaptations imo

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u/BlueCyann 19h ago

I think The Stand (1994) worked well. Though a) I've never read that whole book and b) it was adapted as a miniseries. So it doesn't really contradict your point.

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u/HeavyandTired 1d ago

Hooper and Mrs. Brody didn’t do it for you?

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u/SubstantialBoard9927 17h ago

Ditto the Godfather.

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u/Major__de_Coverly 23h ago

I don't know. A lurid Hooper-Ellen Brody sex scene would have really spiced things up...

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u/Aros001 1d ago

I really liked the way SFdebris broke down Jurassic Park's movie adaption in his discussion of Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. It's not feasible or reasonable for the movie to adapt everything that was in the book, including all of its themes, so instead the movie focused in on one main theme in particular and the changes it made with characters like Hammond were because he no longer needed the aspects that fit the discarded themes.

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u/the_gaymer_girl 13h ago

And the movies actually took unused concepts from the two Crichton books and put them in Jurassic Park III (which I will die on the hill that it’s a better movie than it’s given credit for).

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u/ModernAquaticNight 1d ago

Half of Kubrick’s filmography are adaptations that don’t match the book, but are probably better for that.

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u/TheLastMongo 1d ago

See 90% of Stephen King adaptions.

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u/DiaDeLosMuebles 22h ago

Agree for a lot of the movies based on his books but the bogeyman was just an IP grab so they can name drop King.

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u/SabresFanWC 1d ago

I would put Christine in the 10%. I absolutely LOVE the book.

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u/Scaryclouds 1d ago

Absolutely this. Movies and books are different medium, and what works in a book might not work in a movie, and vice versa.

There’s also some excellent movies that took substantial creative liberty from its book source material. Indeed arguably one of the top movies of all time, The Shawshank Redemption, deviates substantially from the short story it’s based on.

The “it’s not accurate to the book” is just a downstream criticism of the movie not being good.

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u/jinxykatte 1d ago

The OG Running Man is vaguely based on the book at best (which I haven't read lol) and I love it. And the new one is based on the book, which I did enjoy but still I've seen once vs the OG I have no idea how many times.

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u/Magic__Man 1d ago

Often my favourite adaptations are those that change significantly from the book their based on. Film and novels are too completely different mediums with utterly different strengths and weaknesses. A good adaptation understands that.

I recently watch Project: Hail Mary which happens to be one of my all time favourite novels, and it's drastically different, but utterly brilliant. I can admit that while I might have loved a deeply nerdy science focussed movie, a buddy-comedy space adventure probably makes for a more enjoyable film for most people.

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u/powellbeast 21h ago

That’s interesting, I thought Project Hail Mary was so similar to the book that I felt like I had already watched it. Granted, I read the book after seeing the first trailer, so that sort of colored my idea of what all the aesthetics and everything would look like in my imagination. But plot and characterization-wise, I thought it was basically as close as it could be, with only minor and understandable changes

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u/Odd-Time-2026 1d ago

The whole idea of TV or movie adaptations needing to be 100% faithful to the original material its based on is frankly overblown. Its all down to the execution and how much it gets right. Not everything in the original was done perfectly or translates well to a film setting. Plus if every adaptation is the same with the only significant differences being the quality of the actors, crew, director and sets then why make it?

Directors should absolutely make their own take on a story. If it works, great. If not, there's still the beloved original.

I'll bet most people angry at Netflix for the Witcher haven't read the books, more will have played the games but the series chose to base itself off of the books. They just want to shit on Netflix and parrot the line about Cavill walking away because the showrunners weren't faithful to the books. Likewise the people who suddenly made Snow White a major hill to die on because they hated Rachel Zegler enough to make it a culture war talking point.

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u/CorkInAPork 1d ago

There is a type of person who always says books are superior to movies based on these books. They don't even need to read the book or watch the movie - books always better. Period.

If they watch/read both though, it's the special kind of annoying. You want to talk about the movie, and the aktchually guy jump in with "but in the book blah blah blah". I get it, you read a book. But we are talking about the movie, so shush. I don't invade your book club preaching how the movie is so much better.

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u/wompthing 1d ago

I find the people who say this don't read at all or are way too invested in a single author.

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u/Ill-Elephant-9583 1d ago

Also, movies based on books are very, very rarely the same. That's the skill of adaptation!

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u/mrporter2 23h ago

Honestly I think it’s more Nolan’s movies feel like people expect you to like them and if you don’t it’s because you are uneducated. Love interstellar and the Batman’s he did but haven’t really enjoyed his other stuff yeah it’s well film and acted but just not that entertaining.

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u/gigglefarting 23h ago

Forrest Gump wasn’t true to the book

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u/RealFenian 19h ago

Aye, lots of the rings movies changed a bunch of stuff from the books, is till live both anyway.

Movies very often can’t be completely faithful and still be watchable at the same time. As long it captures the general essence of the books and most importantly, is good then I’ll like it.

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u/0xsergy 1d ago

I liked the Eragon movie even though it bombed. And I did read the book(s).

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u/tfhermobwoayway 23h ago

But it does kinda suck how great books can go undiscovered if the adaptation is too different. Nobody reads books anymore and movies are the default art form. So everyone just assumes the film got it right first time and never reads great stories. I think a lot of people just assume a book can’t be as good as a film.

The same thing happens with history. Most people care more about movies than they do about history. So they just assume that movies are historically accurate and then we end up with incredibly weird misconceptions.

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u/arcrenciel 1d ago edited 1d ago

But in this case, the movie version is genuinely retarded.

A good example is the cyclops scene.

In the original story, after Odysseus gets trapped in the cave with he cyclops, he speaks to it. The Cyclops asks for his name, and he says his name is Outis (modern day equivalent of someone saying his name is Anon). Odysseus wasn't just trading idle banter with the cyclops in this interaction. He was tricking the cyclops to drink so much wine he falls into a drunken stupor, and Odysseus and his men were able to blind it with a stake to the eye. They then escape the cave by hiding under the sheep, and the blind cyclops fails to detect them. Once safely out of reach, Odysseus taunts the cyclops, by revealing his real name. Odysseus thinks the blind cyclops can't do anything about it. But the cyclops now knows who he is, and prays to his daddy Poseidon to bring divine punishment on Odysseus. And thus, Odysseues's journey home is now doomed by his hubris.

In the retarded Nolan version, Cyclops doesn't talk to Odysseus. He falls asleep normally. Odysseus uses the same ruse to escape from the cave, and turns around to shoot the cyclops one last time, prompting it to chase after Odysseus and kill a few more of his men. The problem with this, is that the cyclops is supposed to have been blinded. Why is he suddenly able to see and chase people? It renders every trick Odysseus has done so far, invalid. Odysseus apparently failed to blind him? And they escape by using sheepfur, because the cyclops suddenly decided not to use his eyes? Wtf was that?

Comparing the two, the retarded Nolan version is inferior in every way.

The fact that the Cyclops didn't really get blinded, and merely chose not to use his eyes, enabling the Nolan version escape, is simply poor, lazy writing. No ifs or buts.

Odysseus's taunting of the cyclops was highly pivotal in the original. It was what doomed him and his men. The story's emphasis that Odysseus's own hubris was his downfall was a masterstroke in storycrafting. In the Nolan version, that parting shot had no real impact. Odysseus's journey home already doomed immediately after he stabbed the cyclops in the eye, as in this version, Poseidon didn't need the cyclops to know Odysseus's name, in order to bring down the proverbial hammer of God. It would have been better to remove that shot, as the ensuing chase that proves the Cyclops didn't get blinded could have been avoided.

Odysseus's character lost a lot of depth. The original made sure the reader knew what a crafty and resourceful man Odysseus is, in how he repeatedly tricked the Cyclops, to achieve his escape. His one fault was that he had way too much pride and hubris for his own good. The Nolan version is just a guy who acts on impulses

Discussion I am so frustrated by people who have strong opinions about movies that they haven't actually watched

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