My dad made me watch some Stephen King adaptations and here are my thoughts

Hi everyone! Today’s post is a bit different but I hope you enjoy it!

*Click the book or movie titles to go to the Goodreads page*

A bit of my history with Stephen King

Before 2019, I had only read two books by Stephen King: On Writing, which I found fascinating, and The Mist, which I liked but didn’t love. In 2019, I was looking for more detective stories because I’m a huge fan of them and after hearing great things about the Mr. Mercedes series, I finally decided to read the firt book and I ended up really enjoying it, specially because of its two main characters Bill and Holly. Inmmeditely after fnishin it, I read book two, Finders Keepers, and unfortunaely, it was one of the biggest disappointments of 2019. I let some months go by so the disappointment would fade before I decided to finally read the last book in the series, End of Watch, which I’m happy to say I enjoyed a lot. So much so that I convinced my dad to watch the tv show based on this series with me (so yeah, my dad didn’t make me watch all of the adaptations…).

Anyway, as you can see, my history with reading King has been full of ups and downs. Nonetheless, I actually was really excited to read more of his book and one of my christmas presents was the paperback of IT, which I was planning to read in January. Unfortunately, Stephen King said some things on twitter that I didn’t agree with and that made me not want pick up his books at the time, even if he clarified some of the comments later on (if you don’t know what happened, here and here are some posts to catch you up).

Even if I wan’t sure if I wanted to read more of his book, after having my dad insist repetedly, I finally agreed to watch The Outsider and Doctor Sleep, which my dad really wanted to see, and we actually saw The Shining too because I had never watched it and I didn’t want to watch the sequel without knowing what happened in the first movie. In this post, I’m gonna talk about all of those adaptations:

The Adaptations

Mr Mercedes (tv show)

Rating: 2.5

This was the one adaptation that we watched because of me and it was my least favorite. I was so bored that we had to give up watching after the first two episodes of season 2. For that reason, I’ll only talk about season 1 of the show.

The episodes felt endless because they were slow and repetitive, basically the pacing was off and I think in part it had to do with the way the episodes were edited. Those issues were the reason I felt bored while watching. I’ll admit that it was worse in the first few episodes and it got a bit better with time, but they didn’t manage to solve the problem completely. Moreover, the changes they made to the characters and the story from the book didn’t add anything so they felt pointless, which maybe was such a big deal to me since I had just finished reading the books. And while the actors were good, the characters felt flat, which I think had to do with the writing, and that made it hard to connect with any of them.

The Outsider (tv show)

Rating: 4 stars

This is the second show we watched and my dad didn’t even know it was a Stephen King adaptation until I mentioned it and I had to explain the connection between this and Mr. Mercedes. My dad just wanted to watch it because the trailer looked great. I have not read the book, so I didn’t have any expections.

The first episodes of this show were so much stronger than the last couple of episodes, it’s almost as if when the story started to become bigger involving more elements and characters the writers lost their grip on it. But even when that’s true, it managed to be captivating and interesting the whole time. The acting was amazing and the start of the show was so suspenseful and mysterious in a very contained way that works really well. Nonetheless, the supernatural element was not handled as well as it could have been, specially when it went from being a one town thing to something with broader implications.

The Shining (movie)

Rating: 4 stars

I hadn’t watched this movie before (which I know may be shocking) and my dad had watched it but he didn’t remember much about it. I haven’t read the book and I’m not sure I want to.

The Shining kept me on the edge of my sit the entire time even when not much happens in it. The movie is so atmospheric, the music and the impressive shots help drive the slow build-up of tension. Also, Jack Nicholson is brilliant in his role of shitty husband and father who slowly looses his mind until he becomes this deranged character that’s genuinely scary. Nonetheless, I have some qualms about the way race is handled in this movie both because of the use of the N-word in more than one ocassion and because of the ending.

Doctor Sleep (movie)

Rating: 3 stars

Lastly, we watched Doctor Sleep and I had hide expectations because I had read reviews and most people seemed to like it. Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed.

This was way too long and the last 30 minutes were so anticlimatic. This wasn’t as creepy and suspenseful as The Shinining, but it had one truly horrific scene involving the murder of child that was very well done and I was actually very disturbed while watching it. Also, Rebecca Ferguson did a fantastic job in her role and overall the acting was pretty good.

Have you watched any of these adapatations? Are you a fan of Stephen King books? Which Stephen King bboks and adaptations are your favorites?

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