The 2002 Lathe of Heaven is pretty terrible. James Caan is in it and he's good, but everything else is bad, especially the other two leads and the ending. I don't know how the ending feels if you didn't read the book, but knowing the original story it seems like they wrote and shot it in order and then were like "Oh shit, this movie can only be 15 minutes longer, time to wrap it up!"
Yeah, that youtube video is an impressively spot-on Williams imitation.
I don't really want to watch Bicentennial Man, and didn't even like the story that much. The movie seems pretty forgotten.
Oh wait, there's another Asimov adaption I forgot to ask about. There's film version of Nightfall that has a 2.6 on IMDB, with only 735 votes for a movie based on the most anthologized sci-fi story of all time! Jo-Ro likes it:
Whether you like this or not — and it’s quite possible that you won’t — this has got to be one of the weirdest and most original movies around. Written and directed by former film critic and scriptwriter-turned-director Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth), whose previous solo feature never hit these shores, this is produced by Julie Corman, wife of Roger, and harks back to a lot of 60s Corman productions in various ways, for better and for worse; it also may be the first U.S. exploitation film to show the influence of Raul Ruiz in its striking use of colors and color filters, and Jasper Johns springs to mind in relation to some of the set painting. Mayersberg’s starting point and putative focus is Isaac Asimov’s famous SF story, set on the planet Lagash, where it is always daylight, shortly before its civilization collapses; David Birney, Sarah Douglas, Andra Mylian, and Alexis Kanner head the cast, and much of the action and decor reflect a series of interesting solutions for representing an alien culture as cheaply as possible. If you’re looking for something different, make sure to catch this oddity. (JR)
https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/01/nightfall/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095738/
Dave Kehr says,
Unfortunately, when a director can`t get even the basic shots of a single sequence to cohere-as May-ersberg cannot-this kind of experi-mental editing only compounds the muddle, and there are long stretches during which
''Nightfall'' seems a collection of perfectly random imag-es, cut together in the approximate order in which they fell to the edit-ing room floor.
Yet it`s that sense of sheer ran-domness that gives ''Nightfall'' its peculiar charm. It`s a film in which no one event is privileged above an-other, in which the links between those events are either nonexistent or unreadable; and it`s a film with a much higher level of confusion and uncertainty at the conclusion than at the beginning.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-06-09-8801060328-story.html
I'm totally gonna watch this.
Have you seen The Adjustment Bureau? I thought it was okay, but not my kind of movie in the way that Bladerunner and Total Recall are. It has the weakest original PD Dick story that I know of being adapted into a movie, so most people like the movie better. I understand why, but I still think the story is more appealing.