11.22.63

I've read just one book by Stephen King. In the summer of 2014, when I somehow got a small slice of tranquility in ages ... Probably that's why I had the required patience with "11.22.63", which is not a weekend book (size related). Well, in 2016 the movie got out. A mini-series ... 8 parts .. as I said, not just a week-end.

Subject: An English teacher (from Maine, of course .. we're talking about Stephen King), finds out that his every-day diner has a time portal that the owner struggles to use to prevent the Kennedy assassination (ergo -> the title), which he thinks triggered the worst events in the US history. The problem is that he fails. The whole operation must start with several years before, the fixed arrival temporal destination being earlier than 1963. And since the diner's owner gets suddenly struck by cancer before managing to go through all years up to '63, the task is passed to our English teacher. That's a very compressed summary of the intro of a subject with many side stories and spanning plenty of branches.

For comparing the book and the movie I should give lots of spoilers. It's complicated without. Generally speaking the the differences are big, and unfortunately not also good for the TV version. First of all we have lots and lots of pieces cut out of the original. You could think that 8 parts are enough to fit everything, but the screenwriter decided no. More bizarre is that there are also added parts, so I don't think that lacking screen time was the problem. What's really bad is that the additions are sometimes senseless, the worst of all - compared to the written version: the main character gets a sidekick for his mission ... spoiler 1: in the movie he finds a "brother" on his way to Dallas; spoiler 2: the presence of the new character varies from useless to utter annoying, finally the screenwriters deciding that he's better gone ... I said I can't do it without spoilers :) But let's stop here ...

Final verdict: If in other cases - check out "The Man in the High Castle" - who wrote the script managed an exceptional adaptation, even including major changes, "11.22.63" is a failure that can be interesting just for who didn't read the book ... And that's without including the lead (James Franco) who I think can get a nod for the most tormented try to play a novel character that I've ever seen (to put it nicely) ...