While some sci-fi movies improve the books that they adapt, there are also plenty of adaptations in the genre that are nowhere near as good as the books they are based on. It is tough to adapt any novel onscreen, and this holds doubly true in the sci-fi genre. Worlds that felt immersive on the page can become goofy and unrealistic on-screen, where the limitations of visual effects technologies often come into crashing conflict with the endless possibilities of a reader’s imagination.
That said, not every sci-fi movie deserves to sympathy for the shortcomings of its adaptation. Sometimes, adaptations like 2012’s Total Recall remake and I Am Legend make some entirely avoidable mistakes, resulting in movies that could have been great falling way short of their potential. In other cases, movie adaptations like John Dies at the End and Artemis Fowl prove that some books aren’t well suited to the movie format, and arguably should have been shows instead.
2012’s Total Recall was not the first movie based on the Philip K Dick novelette We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, but it certainly is the worst. The success of Ex Machina proves the 2010s weren’t a wasteland for sci-fi movies, but viewers would never know that from this toothless reboot. 2012’s re-do took all the punchy action and R-rated charms of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 version of Total Recall and offered viewers a sanitised, soulless cash-in starring an inexplicably miscast Colin Farrell. Missing both the bawdy humor of the earlier adaptations and its wilder twists, this remake is utterly inessential viewing.
To be fair to Bubba Ho-Tep director Don Coscarelli, John Dies at the End might well be as good a movie as anyone could have made from author David Wong’s cult novel of the same name. The entire appeal of Wong’s novel was the way that the offbeat horror comedy blended the cosmic terror of HP Lovecraft stories with off-colour humor and trippy, hallucinatory sequences that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Hunter S Thompson book.
Within this context, it would have been nigh-on impossible for Coscarelli to condense the book’s anarchic plot into a 100-minute runtime without it feeling both overstuffed and under-developed. While the content of John Dies at the End may simply not work onscreen thanks to its bizarre nature, a miniseries adaptation might have had more room to flesh out its characters and a better shot at replicating the book’s unique balance of toilet humor, surrealism, and genuine horror.
Written in 1954, author Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is a pivotal piece of both vampire and zombie genre history. The book was one of the first to depict a world where almost everyone on earth was wiped out by a disease, leaving the protagonist Dr. Robert Neville entirely alone as he hunts the vampiric monsters this illness turned humanity into. The big twist in I Am Legend’s ending, which gives Matheson’s original novel its entire metaphorical import and its very title, is that the so-called “Monsters” aren’t monsters at all, but rather thinking, feeling diseased survivors who fear Neville.
From their perspective, Neville is a monstrous killer who hunts them for sport, and the protagonist realises in the novel’s closing chapters that he has refused to recognise the sentience of these suppose vampires since he can’t cope with the new reality around him. 2007’s blockbuster adaptation jettisoned this twist entirely, with its story instead ending on Will Smith’s Neville heroically blowing up himself and his lab to wipe out the unambiguously evil monsters. Profoundly missing the point of the novel, this adaptation fumbled at the final jump.
While the upcoming I Am Legend 2 can at least redeem its predecessor by retconning the ending of the earlier movie, not every failed sci-fi adaptation is so lucky. Author Eoin Colfer’s series of Artemis Fowl novels were adored by critics upon release, with reviewers hailing the charm, fast-paced action, and surprising moral complexity of the bestselling books. Director Kenneth Branagh’s long-awaited 2021 adaptation of the series, which fuses sci-fi and fantasy tropes in its complex story, was dubbed “torturously long at just 93 minutes” by Variety upon release.
From the changes the Artemis Fowl movie made to the books to its tone, story, and style, Branagh’s adaptation was an unambiguous flop. What made this worse was the fact that many fans of the series had waited a whopping two decades to see the fantasy sci-fi romp brought to life onscreen.
