If you click the link, you’ll see that they changed the plot. I think. There’s at least one scene in WITHOUT REMORSE the movie* that I absolutely don’t remember from the book and I don’t give a [expletive deleted]. Adherence to the book is a good thing, sure. So is getting the character right.
Look, worst-case scenario here? I’m just gonna pretend that Michael B. Jordan is playing a guy who happens to have the same name as one of the characters in a Tom Clancy novel. If I do that, everything’s fine.
Moe Lane
*You’ll know it when you see it. Did John Clark do that in the book? I believe not. Would he have done it? Absolutely.
This looks interesting. But…
It has been a LONG time since I read Without Remorse. Like *cough30yearscough* long. I may be missing something, but isn’t Clark hanging out on a house boat, minding his own business after leaving the service. He takes in a young woman, former… professional who is near death. He nurses her back to health. He falls for her. Then her former associates decide to kill her when they find out she is alive. Kelly then… well, makes his strong disapproval known to everyone involved?
I could be wrong (as I said it was a LONG time ago I read it and I should remedy that) but doesn’t it seem like they jazzed up a story that did not need to be jazzed up?
Oh, maybe I should have included a *spoilers* tag. It was a great book, from what I remember.
She’s not near death when he meets her, iirc.
*spoilers*
His (first) wife may have recently died for reasons that don’t really matter to the plot (I think; I’m not completely sure he was married before the start of the novel), and he has an “interaction” with a young “working girl” he meets hitchhiking on the road. The two of them hit it off and become close. It turns out she’s on the run from her former pimps, and Kelly sets up a meeting with a cop friend so that she can provide information. But she’s recognized by the bad guys before the meeting. They kill her, and critically injure Kelly.
There’s also a secondary plot involving the famous raid on the Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam.
Needless to say, what’s in the trailer strongly contrasts with what’s in the book. But this was pretty much a given since the “wife is a victim” element of the plot was mentioned in the last trailer, as well. And a bunch of heroin dealers aren’t the sort of bad guys that audiences are going to expect when they go see a Tom Clancy movie.
IIRC, this is also the only book that Jack Ryan’s father appears in.
I think the problem is simpler .. both Tom Clancy and Michael Connelly wrote books that were, in part, rooted in a given time.
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Both made their heroes Vietnam vets – Clark a SEAL, Bosch a ‘tunnel rat’.
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Both spent several books talking about the plight of the Vietnam vets. (Connelly is arguably worse about this…)
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Turning that into a movie *sounds* good but .. it couldn’t be a **present day** movie. It’d have to jump, as the book does, from the 1960s to the 1980s .. and that would cut *way* into the audience.
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So .. as Amazon did with “Jack Ryan” .. they simply keep the character and most of their motivations .. and update the bad guys.
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Mew
I wouldn’t expect the prison camp sub-plot in the new movie, due to the reasons that you mention. But the main plot is an urban American plot, and almost everything associated with it would fit right in with a story set in modern America. Off the top of my head, there’s only one item in the main plot that pins the story down to a specific time period. And it’s a pretty minor one that could be updated or even removed without any repercussions.
Or in other words, the Vietnam War-era is part of the backdrop of the story as originally written. But it’s not an essential element of it.
I stopped reading Clancy about the same time I stopped reading Steven King – early -mid 90s – and for the same reason; TC reached a point of fame where no editor could touch him and the books become overly long, unwieldy doorstops.
I’ve avoided going back to TC the past few years since I’m not sure how well techno-thrillers age and didn’t want to tarnhish the good parts of my memory.
Anyone here read them recently?
I kept reading a bit longer’n you .. in part because I had a job in a library, and I read very fast, so .. if a Clancy (or any other) book that I wanted to read came through check-in .. it didn’t go back on the shelves for the day or two it’d take me to get through it.
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I haven’t gone back, for the same reason.
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Mew
I just started reading Bosch a few months ago after watching the series and am liking it as an ‘of it’s time’ curio. The stories are strong all on their own and it’s interesting to me to watch the technology change from book to book as the character ages in essentially real-time (so far) and adapts from payphones to beepers to cellphones and such. I’m in @2003 right now and he’s still writing them so if that trend continues Harry should be 70ish now and on Facebook? A bit long in the tooth for a cop though. Don’t anyone spoil it for me, I’ll get there on my own soon enough.
IIRC, the last one that I read was the first novel in which the protagonist was Jack Ryan’s son. “Tiger by the Tail”, I think? Major eye-rolling was induced, particularly when I realized that the good guys were essentially doing almost exactly the same stuff that had been explicitly warned against in “Clear and Present Danger”.
By that point in time, his name was also appearing on a lot of books that he didn’t actually write.
In any case, “Without Remorse” is one of his good books. You can argue over the ones that come later (I think “Rainbow Six” was the next novel, followed by “The Bear and the Dragon” – which has the much-mocked sex scene). But “Without Remorse” is good. There’s also not much “techno” in it, for a Clancy novel.
I stopped reading TC and King at about that same time as well, but never reflected on why I dropped both of them. I think this was the reason.