10 Cinema-Defining Movies That You Completely Forgot Came From Books
Adaptations can sometimes be tricky. Taking someone else's work and changing it to fit a new medium can sometimes ruin what the original stories set out to tell. Characters cut, scenes removed and changed endings are all common when it comes to changing a book into a film, for better or worse.
However, someone can take the story and improve it to the point where people sometimes forget where it originated from. Some of the films we consider milestones in cinema came from the page of something overlooked by the average film fan. It's important to know where these stories came from as they helped shape cinema to this day.
10 Apocalypse Now (1979)
Strange that a film all about the Vietnam war has its roots derived from an 1899 novella. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a social commentary that follows a group of Englishmen, who decide to travel up the Congo River. On this journey, the book's narrator continuously draws the reader's attention to the fact that he has now realized the two nations are more similar than he initially thought.
With Francis Ford Coppola's classic war film, it translated the story's ideas with Captain Willard having to kill Colonel Kurtz, who has become unhinged after deciding to act as ruler over the natives. The change in setting really helps get across the point of Heart of Darkness in a way that modern audiences will understand.
9 No Country For Old Men
Sometimes very little needs changing when something is taken from the written page and put onto the big screen. Cormac McCarty's No Country For Old Men follows a sheriff and an assassin trying to track down someone on the run with 2 million dollars.
With the Coen Brothers adaption, it tells the story beat for beat. However, where it really shines is in the performances. Javier Barden, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones all give amazing performances and bring to life characters that one could only experience on the written page.
8 Starship Troopers
Shifting the tone of the original story sometimes has to be done in order for people to get its messages. Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is from the perspective of a space marine fighting in a war with an alien species called the Arachnids. Written in response to the suspension of nuclear tests, the book is a straight-faced satire of the US military.
Paul Verhoeven's take on it is more comical and feels like it goes deeper as it tells a similar story but has intercuts with propaganda, trying to get people to join the Mobile Infantry. It plays out like a typical action movie but also seems like it's making fun of those too with its deliberately cheesy lines and special effects that one would see in most 90's films.
7 I Am Legend
Leaving any story on the shoulders of one character is risky but sometimes can pay off. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend follows the last survivor of a world where an infection has turned everyone into vampire-like monsters. Experimenting on these monsters in hope of finding a cure so that he can save humanity.
Francis Lawrence's film tells the story mostly faithfully and respects what the story was trying to tell with its alternate ending. After capturing and experimenting on these so-called monsters, they break into the main character's lab where one would assume to kill him. In actuality, they just want their people back. For them, he is the monster and they will depict him as so in the stories, just as he did to them.
6 One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Hard to trust everything you hear when your narrator is in a psychiatric hospital. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest tells the story of Randle McMurphy, a criminal who pleaded insane to get out going to prison. Now in a psychiatric hospital, he finds out the place is run by a nurse called Ratchet who has an iron grip on the place and the people in it.
Milos Forman takes the story and really gives you a new take on the story with McMurphy. In the book, the readers only see his actions through the eyes of another patient on the ward so one can't trust everything one hears about him. Yet, the film shows you McMurphy's actions and everything he does in the name of a good time.
5 The Thing
The visual aspect of movies does, at times, give it an advantage over the written word as seeing a monster can sometimes be better than reading about it. John Campbell's short story Who Goes There? is about a group on an arctic research base, trying to uncover an alien that can disguise itself perfectly as anyone.
John Carpenter takes that premise and dials up the horror with the same story but with much more gore. Being able to see the alien split and replicate people adds to the horror and makes it insanely scary as any character could burst into a fountain of gore at any given moment.
4 The Godfather
When films take inspiration from real life they often overdramatize it for the sake of entertainment but real-life can be just as interesting. Mario Puzo's series of books follows the rise of the Corleone crime family as they take over New York. The series has a number of books in it but the most famous is The Godfather.
From the page, Francis Ford Coppola made something audiences, at the time, hadn't seen which was a very raw crime experience. Most films of the genre often followed a noir-like feel or painted the crime family as villains but this film sees them as people and not just mindless killers out for money.
3 Fight Club
Getting too deep into the daily grind can sometimes leave people craving something a little different. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club follows a guy stuck in the motions of life while struggling with insomnia. This changes when he meets a soap dealer, who creates an underground fight club to let out their aggressions on life.
David Fincher's adaption bends your mind in a more intense way, using its visuals and main characters to show you the lengths the narrator will go through just for this change he so desperately needs. That and using subtle hints to makes the stories twist that much more a surprise.
2 Jurassic Park
The imagination helps put together some fantastic settings and films do their best to keep up with it. Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park is the story of a theme park that's managed to recreate living dinosaurs using genetics. The park loses power, the dinosaurs run loose, and the crew and guests all try to escape the park.
Where Speilberg does follow the book faithfully, the main attraction is the dinosaurs themselves. Recreating something that's being extinct for millions of years, using CGI and practical effects, gave us effects that still look amazing for a film over twenty years old.
1 Blade Runner
Science fiction gives us a glimpse into the possible future we may live in and the problems that might come with it. Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is a future where androids are so real it's hard to tell them from humans. The book also focusing on the life of Rick Deckard, a man who hunts them when they go rogue.
Ridley Scott's adaptation of this story is a visual masterpiece of a world that, at the time, could have very well reflected the future. Its bright colors and dark backgrounds contrast heavily with its noir film roots, creating a film filled with atmosphere and thought-provoking things that could become relevant soon than most would think.