A Series of Unfortunate Movies...

The Inflight Movie,
from Hawai'i to Portland in April; 2005,
On Hawai'ian Airlines, which cost 5$, ( Free on ATA! )
--was Lemony Snicket's 'A Series of Unfortunate Events'
which was rather disappointing,
because it diverged so wildly from The Books...!!!
-
In The Movie 'Contact',
Book by Carl Sagen;
it left out the two good ideas from the book;
Specifically-- Emergent Complexity & Secret Messages in Pi...!!!
-
In Lemony Snicket's...
They restructured the most charming elements of the books...!
For one thing, Violet is said to be a Masterful Inventor in the books,
but all her Inventions are so Improbable & Useless that they would Never Work in the real world...
In the Movie, her inventions are the typical, over wrought Rube Goldberg Contraptions that actually seem to do something...!!!
How tiresome...!
Then there's Sunny's Babbling...
In the Books; she is speaking CryptoVerse,
In the Movie, it is simply BabyTalk...
( Although, the sound on the plane was AWFUL...
so i may be mistaken about this...??? )
And then, Amoung other innovations,
is the disappearance of The VFD Mystery...
Instead;
to create a visual icon of The Secret Society that they are attempting to Uncover,
they introduced a ubiquitous SpyGlass...!
In fact;
i don't seem to recall that in the first three books,
which this movie was supposed to cover,
The children were even aware of the Secret Society yet...
They'd come across the initials VFD,
But had no idea--
yet
--that it referred to a secret society...
And again;
There is a line mentioned only in one of the latest books;
"That there are people who start fires, and people that put them out."
...Which i suspect; in the books, is a metaphor for;
'All Things of Worldly Importance',
But in the movie;
it refers to just fires...!!!
i really have no 'General Complaints' about Movies that Strongly Diverge from The Book that they're based on,
so long as the Movie is Faithful to the Ideology of the Book,
or becomes an Entirely Autonomous Artifact that may be thought of as something Unrelated to the Original Source,
But this Movie is simply a Populist Rehashing of These Characters into Conventional Pabulum.