in the book, when moist asks adora belle, “would you like to have dinner tonight?” she replies (just from memory) something along the lines of “yes, i rather enjoy having dinner every night, thank you very much. ”

in the movie, she replies “with you? i've got things to do but thanks for asking.” cue porn music. scratch that, ive seen some porn with better scripts. did the director/writer even read the book? why change already amazing dialogue?

yet the director/writer tries to fit in the really stupid stuff, like in the hanging scene when drunknott walks up and moist shouts “REPRIEVE!”. wtf? the whole scene was a run on sentence (like this paragraph) in order to stay true to the book, at least dialogue-wise. sadly, the movie even fails to do that.

the movie moist was way too hectic and frantic. sure, one could argue that death has that effect on a man. the thing about moist, though, is that he is suppose to give off an air of complete likeability and nonchalance, so that even when he is begging and pleading for his life, people think that he's just having a good time. i honestly thought at first that the movie moist was criminal number 1 who is hanged before moist in order to illustrate the definitey (is this even a word?) of hanging, because most people don't associate terry pratchet with death (maybe with Death, though), and would not take the scene seriously. lo and behold, however, pitiful criminal #1 turns out to be our beloved hero, Moist.

the thing that makes an adaptation good is not trying to include every little thing from the book, but to incorporate the parts that make it unique. plot wise, terry pratchet books aren't exactly gripping thriller mysteries, but the clever banter and characters are what the books worth reading. all the movie did was take some characters with the same name and ran them through a similar plot. plot=plot does not mean movie=book

I like that :) Thanks for posting!

Of course there's lot that one can nitpick, for example I thought that Moist chose to send a book was cheating. Having Ridcully do it, as in the book, is a fair and a nice surprise. But that's what fans do, we nitpick. It's our way of showing that we really care.

Be careful with those exclamation marks. This is a public forum and someone from Mental Health Services might see them! :)

Spot on with the LOTR series, by the way. The films are much better than the books. I think that's partly because the story had to be compressed a little, so it moved along more quickly than the originals. I hadn't heard of Temeraire until just there – it looks very interesting.

No, I don't agree that the in-movie explanation makes any sense whatsoever. Vetinari would say that to Moist in private, but in front of Reacher??? And this is supposed to raise no eyebrows whatsoever, that the POSTMASTER GENERAL would lose his LIFE, in a PUBLIC HANGING, if he lost a BET against the Grand Trunk??? The caps are supposed to represent my voice rising higher with incredulity, and the multiple punctuation marks my increasing sense of bewilderment and induced insanity…!!!!!!

No it just makes no sense whatsoever, it's poor scriptwriting. I can make plenty of allowances for adaptation decay, for instance I think Peter Jackson did such a bang-on job with LOTR that LOTR to me is the one single instance where the movie ends up better than the book, and I'm thrilled that Jackson is taking on the Temeraire series, I can think of no better person. But when the internal coherence of a movie becomes lacking it's just plain bad.

I agree that they weren't able to portray Moist's transformation fully, and maybe if I hadn't read the book at all I'd be confused by it. I'm wondering if there's a hope (by TP's publishers) that people who've watched the series will buy the book to learn more… That's probably putting too much faith in their marketing ability :)

As for the death sentence – Vetinari says that if Moist fails he will have outlived his usefulness. I think that's fair enough, but I would have imagined Vetinari's style to be more attuned to having Moist snatched in the night and quietly executed rather than going public with it. Still, I reckon the real point was just to build tension before the big finish.

Well, there'll always be adaptation decay. I didn't like the episodes, but I suspect it's because I've read the book and loved it. As a standalone movie, I suppose it works well enough, although the characterization of Moist and his character development is nowhere near strong enough. They were unable to fully portray his progress along the road to redemption, from a low rogue to the avatar of hope he becomes.

This in the Sky series was highly unconvincing, and the moment where Groat says Moist is the best Postmaster General ever is, as a result, cringeworthy. Not if you've read the book however! But the viewer shouldn't be left to fill in the blanks for himself like this.

Also, what possessed them to make Lord Vetinari impose the death penalty on Moist if he lost the wager? Insane, illogical, no justification possible. This was a jarringly bad section, even if you haven't read the book first.