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Without Remorse - Amazon

 
 
 
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Jimmy Higgins

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So saw that Amazon is going to be releasing Tom Clancy's Without Remorse starring Michael Jordan.

Question 1: Will this put to an end the bad films from good Clancy novels?
Question 2: Will the movie not suffer from woke right-wingers whining about Clark not being black?

This novel was pretty gritty... making sense as it is about Clark. It has been over 20 years since I read the book, so the details are somewhat fuzzy, so I'll probably be able to avoid small details being an issue. Hopefully this is more Red October and less Sum of All Fears.
 
Saw the trailer... started to cry. Kind of like Old Man in the Sea film about Arnold facing a sharknado.
 
This was one of the first grown-up novels I read as a teen (my Dad had a pretty one-dimensional taste in fiction) and it stuck with me.

I can tell from the trailer that they've changed the subject matter quite a bit. Doesn't even look like the same story.
 
Clancy novels are not something that should be made into movies. You have to gut so much that you can't do more than the basic idea within the limits of a movie, and Clancy novels mostly do not have anywhere near the action needed for a movie. Books are books, movies are movies, don't mix them!!!
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Clancy novels are not something that should be made into movies. You have to gut so much that you can't do more than the basic idea within the limits of a movie, and Clancy novels mostly do not have anywhere near the action needed for a movie. Books are books, movies are movies, don't mix them!!!
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This isn't about subtraction from a book to fit a movie. This is about the movie using a book title as the basis of the plot. It'd be like calling Ironman I, Robot.

The Hunt For Red October was great, Clear and Present Danger was also very good, though they did stray a bit from the novel (and the opening sea trial scene was awesome, but not included in the book) and went a bit more cliche with the conflicts. Patriot Games was entertaining, though the ending sequence had very little to do with the book. So it can be done! Granted, those are his shorter novels. Sum of all Fears, I haven't even watched it. Ryan is played off as some rookie, not a significantly weathered veteran, which told me not to bother as his veteran status is critical for the plot! Jack Ryan, was Anne of Green Gables IV for spies. I fear that reference is way too obscure. It was a reboot... a needless reboot.

The trilogy would be awesome! But that would be hard to put onto screen because of the depth of the material. Without Remorse's issue would be the grit involved. The plot isn't too expansive, so it could definitely work into a screenplay, but one of the main driving aspects of it is a curiosity of Clark. Without being into Clancy books, the mainstream viewer has less connection with the main character. But it appears they are going with a 'taking one page from the book' approach to the plot. Which is annoying.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
This isn't about subtraction from a book to fit a movie. This is about the movie using a book title as the basis of the plot. It'd be like calling Ironman I, Robot.
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They kinda did. Asimov wrote repeatedly how much he hated the "robots as Frankenstein's monster" trope. So of course that's the fucking plot for the movie.

On topic, I don't think Clancy's novels have aged well. They are very Team America with every other nationality being an obvious stereotype. Even if you take out the final chapter, Debt of Honour was very problematic towards Japanese, I can't imagine India and Iran forming an alliance and Pakistan would ever be cool with it like in Executive Orders and the Chinese Government being overthrown like how he described in The Bear and the Dragon is fucking laughable. Honestly, re-reading them feels like I'm going through a 90's Stephen Segal movie with better production costs.
 
Post 9/11, I couldn't read Clancy anymore. I tried to read The Bear and The Dragon, but just couldn't get past a few chapters. It felt contrived all of a sudden. I don't know if I grew up (not that my politics changed) or if 9/11 exposed where danger actually exists or whether something else came about. I really like his books when I read them otherwise. Red Storm Rising would probably still hold up today, as would Red October and Cardinal in the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games (to a point as that is even history now), but otherwise, some of the later stories probably suffer from no longer existing in the time they were conceived in. But when you write about what he writes about, you need big bads.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
The Hunt For Red October was great, Clear and Present Danger was also very good, though they did stray a bit from the novel (and the opening sea trial scene was awesome, but not included in the book) and went a bit more cliche with the conflicts. Patriot Games was entertaining, though the ending sequence had very little to do with the book. So it can be done! Granted, those are his shorter novels. Sum of all Fears, I haven't even watched it. Ryan is played off as some rookie, not a significantly weathered veteran, which told me not to bother as his veteran status is critical for the plot! Jack Ryan, was Anne of Green Gables IV for spies. I fear that reference is way too obscure. It was a reboot... a needless reboot.
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Yeah, the movies have an utterly different Ryan than the books. I wouldn't call any of them great, but that might be a reflection of how badly the book got butchered to make the movie.

The trilogy would be awesome! But that would be hard to put onto screen because of the depth of the material. Without Remorse's issue would be the grit involved. The plot isn't too expansive, so it could definitely work into a screenplay, but one of the main driving aspects of it is a curiosity of Clark. Without being into Clancy books, the mainstream viewer has less connection with the main character. But it appears they are going with a 'taking one page from the book' approach to the plot. Which is annoying.
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Yeah, it would be easy to chop it down enough, but I don't think Without Remorse stands on it's own very well. It's excellent as part of the series, showing how Clark became Clark. I also think cutting it down enough is going to make it into a very dark movie--it's going to be pretty hard for a movie to show his motivations. From the outside he's little more than a serial killer.
 
Patooka said:
On topic, I don't think Clancy's novels have aged well. They are very Team America with every other nationality being an obvious stereotype. Even if you take out the final chapter, Debt of Honour was very problematic towards Japanese, I can't imagine India and Iran forming an alliance and Pakistan would ever be cool with it like in Executive Orders and the Chinese Government being overthrown like how he described in The Bear and the Dragon is fucking laughable. Honestly, re-reading them feels like I'm going through a 90's Stephen Segal movie with better production costs.
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Disagree--I don't see it as problematic towards Japan. It was scumbags playing puppet master, not Japan as a whole that was the enemy.

And while Pakistan certainly wouldn't like it they aren't exactly in a position to do something about it.

As for the Bear and the Dragon--I think it could happen. We have seen other basically bloodless coups--they play out the same way. There is sufficient dislike for the government, something triggers an uprising and the army isn't willing to fire on their own people. It almost happened in Tiamamen Square--the first army units sent to quell the uprising refused to do so. China had to take an army unit far from the capital, isolate them and feed them a bunch of propaganda. The Bear and the Dragon played out so fast that carefully planned steps like that weren't possible. If the guards were watching the same video I can easily see it happening.

Two problems, though: The Great Firewall would probably have stopped the video (I won't say certainly because the same factors apply) and there's no way it could have been done. You can't simply deploy that kind of bandwidth on a moment's notice even if you're the US government. It could be done quickly through AWS, especially if Ryan were to call Bezos and ask for his assistance in making hit happen fast, but you still need a lot of boxes, a lot of bandwidth and a lot of load balancers. AWS has all the pieces sitting there but it takes time to put them together.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Post 9/11, I couldn't read Clancy anymore. I tried to read The Bear and The Dragon, but just couldn't get past a few chapters. It felt contrived all of a sudden. I don't know if I grew up (not that my politics changed) or if 9/11 exposed where danger actually exists or whether something else came about. I really like his books when I read them otherwise. Red Storm Rising would probably still hold up today, as would Red October and Cardinal in the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games (to a point as that is even history now), but otherwise, some of the later stories probably suffer from no longer existing in the time they were conceived in. But when you write about what he writes about, you need big bads.
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Yeah, his world of course deviated from the real one. That's basically certain to happen to any long-running world set in modern times and it doesn't bother me. I don't think it was his best work, though--he was starting to slip. Red Rabbit really showed he was slipping, beyond that others were writing the books.
 
I just read the synopsis on wiki about the movie. Apparently, the only thing this movie has in common with the book is the title. Which is disappointing because I suspect there would be an audience for a movie about a grieving veteran out for revenge and in the process exposing corrupt cops in the current climate.
 
Which makes it worse that it is titled "Tom Clancy's Without Remorse", because unless he wrote the screenplay, it isn't "Tom Clancy's".

It is hard to know if this movie from the actual novel would work. I know Man on Fire, which has parallels, was overly intense and it became a bit numbing. And of course, reading it is different than watching it. Regardless, the novel isn't becoming a movie.

We'll always have The Hunt for Red October (which includes the Professor from the Thor movies), a chopped up Clear and Present Danger, and a decent Patriot Games.
 
Why did they watch it? The trailer (first 15 seconds of it) was all you needed to know what was coming.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Which makes it worse that it is titled "Tom Clancy's Without Remorse", because unless he wrote the screenplay, it isn't "Tom Clancy's".

It is hard to know if this movie from the actual novel would work. I know Man on Fire, which has parallels, was overly intense and it became a bit numbing. And of course, reading it is different than watching it. Regardless, the novel isn't becoming a movie.

We'll always have The Hunt for Red October (which includes the Professor from the Thor movies), a chopped up Clear and Present Danger, and a decent Patriot Games.
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Well, it has Clark. He lost his family. He lost someone he loved. He got a new identity in the end. Ritter plays a very minor part. That's about the only correspondence with the book. Clancy is probably spinning in his grave about this one.

The movie has more plot holes than swiss cheese.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
Ritter was in the book?
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Wasn't he on the boat at the end that picked him up after he faked his death?
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He also organised the prison transfer so the Air Force pilots got sent to Hanoi and was the liason between Air Force and Navy for the rescue operation. Not a main character, but more important than a minor one.
 
I suppose 27 yrs will lead to some detail losses. Honestly, all I remember is him eating candy bars, waiting to torture people.
 
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