# Forever War



## RCynic (Mar 25, 2014)

Who thinks the upcoming movie release will do it justice? Ender's Game stayed pretty true to the book but so much "texture" seemed to be missing, which is not too unusual for movies when trying to condense so much into so little time. I sometimes think such things would be much better as a mini-series.


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## Vince W (Mar 26, 2014)

No, I don't think it will. There will be too many changes for the worse that will morph the story into something the studios can sell.


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## RCynic (Mar 27, 2014)

Vince W said:


> No, I don't think it will. There will be too many changes for the worse that will morph the story into something the studios can sell.



I've never understood why Hollywood takes a book that has become enormously popular because of exactly what it is, then change it to something completely different. They can't even get movie remakes right most of the time. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was just awful compared to the original, dated as it is.


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## Vince W (Mar 27, 2014)

It's almost as if they go out of their way to ruin these things.


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## tinkerdan (Mar 31, 2014)

One thing to consider is that there is a mentality that says that they have to have something new for everyone so there must be something in the movie that the reader would never have seen and that's about when they mess everything up trying to turn that into a huge wow factor that falls flat because they don't understand the total story.


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## Vince W (Mar 31, 2014)

I wouldn't mind the 'new' so much, but they always seem to do something so incongruous to the story that it makes no sense but to the people that thought it up.


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## clovis-man (Mar 31, 2014)

With Ridley Scott directing, you won't be able to really predict ahead of time how it will manifest itself.


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## George Ian (May 21, 2014)

Isn't it the case that sci-fi books are supposed to make you think - but sci-fi films are more about quick thrills and the wonders of CGI?


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## Mirannan (May 21, 2014)

The biggest problem with making into films books that include power armour is just that - the armour. The problem being, of course, that properly designed armour would obscure the wearer's face. Not ideal for film!

I just hope that they don't make the mess of it that they made of Starship Troopers. There might be a somewhat better chance, given that the Hollywood "intelligentsia" are completely opposed to many of the messages of ST whereas Forever War was an anti-war and anti-military book to begin with.


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## Bick (Jun 17, 2014)

Forgive me if I've just mis-remembered a detail from the book - but later on in the novel hasn't it become the norm for... {spoiler}  soldiers to be homosexual?{/spoiler}.  
There is no way a big Hollywood studio will go there.


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## Vince W (Jun 17, 2014)

{spoiler}Not the soldiers, but the whole human race except for a few hold outs. Then they have to resort to cloning with a few worlds of 'natural' humans.{/spoiler}


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## JoanDrake (Jun 17, 2014)

RCynic said:


> I've never understood why Hollywood takes a book that has become enormously popular because of exactly what it is, then change it to something completely different. They can't even get movie remakes right most of the time. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was just awful compared to the original, dated as it is.





tinkerdan said:


> One thing to consider is that there is a mentality that says that they have to have something new for everyone so there must be something in the movie that the reader would never have seen and that's about when they mess everything up trying to turn that into a huge wow factor that falls flat because they don't understand the total story.




It isn't a mentality, it's critics (who don't have any mentality IMO because they have no minds.) You can't just update something, according to them, you have to put in something NEW, no matter how perfect the original was, how little it needs any addition and even if you have to completely screw up the original. Otherwise they'll say it's "just a reworking". 


And there is also the fact that Keanu Reeves is very DEFINITELY, not Michael Rennie.



Mirannan said:


> The biggest problem with making into films books that include power armour is just that - the armour. The problem being, of course, that properly designed armour would obscure the wearer's face. Not ideal for film!
> 
> I just hope that they don't make the mess of it that they made of Starship Troopers. There might be a somewhat better chance, given that the Hollywood "intelligentsia" are completely opposed to many of the messages of ST whereas Forever War was an anti-war and anti-military book to begin with.




So was ST, in the book, but I don't think the Director there had even read it. He had some excerpts read to him maybe, or just had an assistant who'd majored in English Lit (and mostly failed)  tell him about it



Vince W said:


> It's almost as if they go out of their way to ruin these things.




True, sometimes they do just that. Lots of them are a bunch of litsnobs who think SF is the reason their Great American Novel of the "steaming-relationships-under-a-small-town's-façade" can't get published. So they have lots of "fun" insulting the 2nd best novel of a guy who published more in a weekend than they have in their lives and won a Hugo for all of it.



Vince W said:


> I wouldn't mind the 'new' so much, but they always seem to do something so incongruous to the story that it makes no sense but to the people that thought it up.




See above, doesn't have to be good, just different.


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## Michael Colton (Jul 22, 2014)

RCynic said:


> I've never understood why Hollywood takes a book that has become enormously popular because of exactly what it is, then change it to something completely different. They can't even get movie remakes right most of the time. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was just awful compared to the original, dated as it is.



Popularity in and of itself is just too big of an opportunity for studios to pass up. It is an instant percentage of the seats filled due to fans and another percentage due to the ensuing hype about the title. Throw in regular movie-goers if you manage to cast well-known actors, and it is hard to miss from a business standpoint.

Essentially, it is the same reason Hollywood is going to beat the superhero genre to absolute death.


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## Vertigo (Jul 22, 2014)

Well I'm going to be a note of discord here, in that I don't think they can do much to ruin the Forever War; in fact they may improve on it. I was massively disappointed by The Forever War after all the hype I had heard first. I found it to be a cheap rewriting of countless bad anti-war books about the Vietnam war with its only unique feature being setting it in space in the future. If it wasn't for it being SF it would never have been noticed.

It's quite possible that they will significantly improve on it by, for example, removing the ridiculous idea that the whole human race would go gay out of a sense of duty to control the population and anyone who was heterosexual would be looked down on. I mean... please! I'm not homophobic and have no problem with gay sexuality but the idea that the entire human race would turn gay through social pressure is just plain silly. I know it was only a metaphor for the Vietnam soldiers returning home to a new social order that they couldn't understand but he could have come up with something a lot more believable than that.


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## Susan Boulton (Jul 22, 2014)

I first read the Forever War when it first came out in the mid 1970's (I think) It caught the mood of the time very well, least for me and was the opposite of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which was very refreshing. I think if I came to it now it would read totally different. So many aspects of it have been copied and copied badly at times.  The,"gay," metaphor for the time, when it was still illegal in the UK was quite a risk to take in a book.


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## Vertigo (Jul 22, 2014)

I'm not sure it was all that big a risk. Back in the '60s and '70s there was a lot of social and sexual experimentation and many SF authors seemed to think that within a few years the human race would have totally changed the social and sexual norms that had been established in the last 100,000 years or so. In fact it was almost required to have some weird marital/sexual/social set up in SF at that time. I have always thought, even as a hippy at the time, that they were mainly indulging in wishful thinking (especially the likes of Heinlein).


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## gdoc (Jul 25, 2014)

I think they will do a poor job. It doesn't really lend itself to a two-hour film format. Also, the bit (if memory serves) where they promote homosexuality to encourage population control will be pretty taboo for conservative studios.


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