In all the hoopla, I never got around to having my bubble bath, which is just ridiculous because I really did want to have one. I supposed I could go ahead and have one now. It’s about to be 11 pm but if I stayed in until midnight I’d have close to an hour in the tub and I’d still be in bed around my usual time. Thing is though, I don’t think I’m going to. As much as I’m annoyed with myself for not taking the opportunity when I had it, I think I would’ve made a point to have the bath had it really been that important to me to have one this weekend. I really thought I was going to want to have one this weekend, but I just ended up not making my way around to it.
Today I thought about it, but my to-do list was pretty long and I decided that I wanted to see “The Meg” again more than I wanted to take a bath I guess. I do enjoy baths a lot. Especially, with bubbles and bath bombs and shower oil, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But I’m just obsessed with “The Meg” for right now. Which is very aggravating because it’s only just come out in the theater. It’ll be months before it comes out on BluRay. Argh.
I’m listening to the first book right now, and so far it’s pretty good. If I had read the book first, I can say that I would probably be livid about the movie. The movie is absolutely nothing like the book. It’s about as close to the book as the “Blood and Chocolate” movie adaptation is to the source material. It’s another one of those scripts where someone read the first couple of chapters and went, “Yes, let’s make a movie! It’s gonna be great.” In the case of “The Meg,” I do feel like they did a little more than read the first chapter or two and the description on the back before they made a movie. The movie is wildly different, but I also see where they had their own answer to scenes that happened in the book.
I still have a couple of hours left to listen to, but as an example, there’s a scene 75% of the way into the book where helicopters crash into one another because they’re distracted by the shark attack and some other stuff. There’s a scene in the movie where helicopters crash, but the set up of the scene--why the helicopters are there, what’s going on below--is different. In the book, a character named Mac is flying one of the helicopters whereas in the movie he’s on the boat below. In the book, Jonas has a wife that’s cheating on him and the relationship is pretty much over and she’s a bitch. In the movie, Jonas has a lovely ex-wife who is cool as shit but things just didn’t work out between them. She also has a different name.
Actually, most of the surrounding characters are either altogether different or have different names. So far my favorite difference (and I’m sure this would infuriate me had I read the book first) is the one between book DJ and movie DJ. In the book, DJ is the son of the Asian guy who is researching all this stuff that leads to the discovery of the megalodon (Zhang in the movie, Tanaka in the book--I think in the movie the guy and his daughter are Chinese (the daughter and granddaughter are played by people from China and he’s played by someone from Tawain) but in the book they’re Japanese (Tanaka is a pretty common Japanese last name I do believe and he calls the main character “Jonas-san”). In the movie, DJ is hired to remotely pilot the rover they’ve made for this exploration who also happens to be black. I like that they have a pretty diverse crew, so I don’t mind at all that they made that change. What I’m thinking about is how important it was that DJ was the head honcho’s son in the book.
DJ dies in one and not in the other though I’m not telling you which for spoiler reasons. Rain Wilson’s character didn’t exist at all. Suyin was younger, childless, and named Terry Tanaka. Jonas was a Navy man who went on diving rescue missions as well as research and other missions in the book, but where movie Jonas gets drunk for five years, book Jonas studies Megalodons for seven and becomes an “expert.” Heller is an asshole in both, but he definitely gets to be likable in the movie where I still hate him in the book so far. I don’t think Jaxx existed. Mac has more history in the book and comes into the project for very different reasons.
It’s interesting that I have a lot more background on a lot of the characters and their relationships to each other in the book, but I still don’t feel as though I’ve connected to them in the way that I connected with them in the movie.
The “science” behind the book sounds something akin to solid, whereas the movie is just total garbage hogwash. Not to mention a shit ton of problematic other plot points that the book has done a better job building.
And yet I know in my heart that I’m going to like the movie better.
Now, look at the wording there.
The book is technically better, but I enjoyed the movie immensely while I’m “not hating” the book. I know it’s sacrilege, or as close to sacrilege as anything ever really is. I do know.
But, the movie has my heart and will likely be the object of my obsession for a while. I’ve accepted this. I’d tell you to wish me luck, but y’all are more likely to need it than me because you all are the ones who have to put up with me.
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