Rewatched 'The Time Traveler's Wife' after rereading the book

I first read it in 2004 when it came out, and the movie from 2009 never quite hit right for me. But I gave the HBO show a shot last week. The book has this quiet, messy structure that jumps around in time, and the show actually kept that chaos. I was nodding along until the airport scene where they meet for the first time (or the second time, depending on how you count). Then they traded the book's awkward tension for a sappy music swell, and I just turned it off. Has anyone else found a book-to-screen adaptation that gets the tone exactly right only to fumble one key moment?

2 comments

2 Comments

wright.jesse8d ago

Is it weird that I actually kind of like when adaptations mess up a scene and it makes you mad? Like, my whole family couldn't stop laughing during the "Misty Mountains" scene in the Hobbit movies when the dwarves started singing that goofy song. It was supposed to be this epic, serious moment from the book and they just kept going and going with the dishwasher noise and the pots and pans clanking. My dad was like "are they really doing a choreographed dinner number right now?" and we couldn't take the rest of the movie seriously after that.

walker.hayden8d ago

@wright.jesse that Hobbit scene is exactly what I'm talking about. My crew had a job painting this house where the owner had the extended edition playing on a loop in the basement, and I must have heard that clanking dwarven dinner number like six times in a day. It went from funny to annoying to kind of endearing by the end. The time traveler's wife airport scene just felt like they let the showrunner's favorite song dictate the emotion instead of trusting the actors.