I LOVE Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi action movie Children of Men. I’ve watched maybe six times and every time, the ending always almost brings me to tears. So when I learned it was adapted from P.D. James’ book of the same name, it was a no-brainer deciding what my next book would be.
After finishing the book, it wasn’t difficult to reach to the conclusion that I enjoyed the movie better.
While James’ book gives a more in-depth look at how human infertility and humanity’s slow death march towards extinction affects the sexual dynamic between men and women and almost demented ways humans try to cope with a world without children or a race of dead men walking, I feel the book dedicates WAY too much time describing the failing of human civilization and the Regrets and guilt of Theo Faron. It’s not even until after 2/3 through the book where it feels like the plot and story are properly paced and stuff of consequence actually begin to happen.
The film’s adaptation by, comparison, feels consistent in its pacing and the world building and woe-is-mes of Theo feel more compact a take up less of the audience’s time.
What books do you feel were worse than its film adaptation and why?
Nothing lasts forever. The book that Die Hard is based off of. I have never read a book where I have verbally shouted WTF while reading it before. I did it about a dozen times reading this. The main character is a psychopath. He spends the whole book thinking of the flight attendant he met for all of a few hours. All he thinks about is wanting to bone her. Like every time he murders people it cuts to him thinking about wanting to bone her. When he has other thoughts it’s about how all the women he guns down look like his daughter. Then spoiler alert. At the end his daughter dies and he just immediately goes back to thinking about the flight attendant.
He has no remorse for killing any of the people. In fact he’s a counterterrorism expert who knows all about the bad guys and so it comes off like he’s going through the building killing them in cold blood. Plus they’re all very young and like he keeps commenting on that fact. But not in a way that sounds like empathy and more like they deserve to be murdered for being so naive.
Like I can’t stress how much of a psychopath the main character comes off as. The whole book is just one abuse of power after another.