Hacker Cinema
The Lawnmower Man
1992 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Brett Leonard
A simple man is turned into a genius through the application of computer science.
5 positive8 negative1 mixed29 neutralfrom 43 commenters
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46 comments on Hacker News
> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago
If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.
Watch this movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
How long before all phones ring at once?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
> virtual reality was a thing back in the mid- to late-90
even in pop-culture, see the movie Lawnmower Man.
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
I recently rewatched "The Lawnmower Man" [0] and was not disappointed. The vast majority of the comments I see promoting the notion of "AI" achieving AGI sound like the Jobe Smith character from the movie.
[0]: Seemingly legit upload by current license/IP holders/owners? https://youtube.com/watch?v=cm2FbJE2wsQ
Mr Beast isn’t the internet. He’s a TV show host. And there’s been exploitative TV shows for decades. This isn’t a format Mr Beast invented.
As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).
The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.
Time for a remake of Lawnmower Man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
Better to talk about the Gartner Hype cycle and it's stages compare it to technologies that clearly followed that cycle such as;
- Virtual Reality: big hype in the early 90s (arcades, movies like Lawnmower Man) through to use cases today like surgical training, aviation training
- Mobile video calls: hyped in early 2000's with 3G and pre-iPhone devices. Actually took off with 4G and 5G plus iOS and Android phones
- 3D printing: back in 2013 we were expecting "a 3D printer in every home" ... today valuable in industrial prototyping
Looking back at 2025 we'll be saying "Remember when they said everyone would lose their jobs to AI..."
It's like computer graphics and VR: Amazing advances over the years, very impressive, fun, cool, and by no means a temporary fad...
... But I do not believe we're on the cusp of a Lawnmower-Man future where someone's Metaverse eats all the retail-conference-halls and movie-theaters and retail-stores across the entire globe in an unbridled orgy of mind-shattering investor returns.
Similarly, LLMs are neat and have some sane uses, but the fervor about how we're about to invent the Omnimind and usher in the singularity and take over the (economic) world? Nah.
Lawnmower Man is probably the strangest license ever. IIUC the story is licensed from Stephen King. That story has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the movie. It's entirely about some person who morphs into a lawnmower. Has zero VR. There's a like 3 second VR scene in the movie of Jobe becoming a lawnmower but otherwise, zero connection. I guess the director or the producer just used it as an excuse to get funding then made whatever they wanted to make
Shameless dual-plug:
The director of Lawnmower Man (and Virtuosity), Brett Leonard, presented at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup recently. After everyone thanked him for his movies, he talked about how he is currently involved in using VR for remote physical and mental therapy.
https://www.ubiquityvx.com/about
> The big breakthrough work was The Lawnmower Man (1992), a conceptually absurd film where scientist Pierce Brosnan uses VR to somehow turn an intellectually handicapped gardener into a psychic genius. What made The Lawnmower Man a hit was the ground-breaking computer graphic effects used to depict the virtual environment. An even sillier work was the sequel Lawnmower Man II: Beyond Cyberspace/Lawnmower Man II: Jobe’s War (1996), which had the psychic genius trying to become a messiah in cyberspace.
Lawnmower Man was both awesome and ridiculous. Loved it.
And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992).
I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
Eh, there's room for 'Cadillac Man' in there too, throw in 'Lawnmower Man' and you've got the whole gen-X Man trilogy.
Not Encino Man though, that film never existed.
Very fond memories for that particular moment in software. Another company in a similar space was Xaos Tools. I was too young to have access to an SGI, but I somehow or another got hold of a promotional VHS tape of theirs. Sadly, I can't find much online. But they were kind of a high-end version of the Kai tools geared towards film and TV animation. Kai's interfaces were on a different level from everyone else's, but Xaos had some similar vibes along the lines of surrealistic effects. Lawnmower Man apparently used a bunch of their apps.
http://www.aaronjamesrogers.com/misc/hotmix16/vendors/xaostools/pan/pan.html https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/11-6-rhythm-and-hues-xaos/
Oh man, I can remember when the Windows 9x/Motif/Nextstep look was so modern, we thought the future of UI was going to be more of the same: huge bevels on the buttons with maybe a texture map. Think the buttons from the menus in Super Mario 64, and then go watch some old 90s scifi or other technology-themed movies and see how much their "futuristic" UIs looked like that. The Lawnmower Man and some scenes from Hackers come to mind.
The Lawnmower Man (1992)
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0104692
The Lawnmower Man?
I was just the right age for that to be a mind-blowing movie. Have me a lot of enthusiasm for our technological future, which I primarily squandered on gaming...
Interesting that this movie bears no relation at all to the Stephen King short story of the same title on which it claimed to be based.
(In the short story, the titular lawnmower man is a faun-likely creature, working for the god Pan, who literally eats the lawn's grass with his own mouth)
See also the 1992 film https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
Really? I remember hating the movie because it was about as plausible as Lawnmower Man. Even with quantum computers here a mysterious black box that can decrypt anything is as of now outside the realm of a state actor.
I've sat through some bad film translations of books before, but Foundation is worse than any Stephen King treadmill. I think maybe Lawnmower Man was probably a bigger delta between book and movie than Foundation (a short story about a satyr who eats grass naked vs. virtual reality!)
Virtual Reality promises have been around since the 1990s and probably before that.
Lawnmower Man (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104692/) and The Cell (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209958/) showed us how amazing it could be and how it was going to change our lives.
Someday soon we are also supposed to get flying cars.
I love lawnmower man. Best movie. I basically designed my career around making that happen. I'm happy with that.
I opened the article and saw an aging muscleman with a prop straight out of The Lawnmower Man on his head. I thought, this is going to be the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen on Hackernews. (Whether you're talking about the place or the TV show.)
> But at the end of the visit, I happened to mention the time I underwent a mental healing ritual that involved a Chilean shaman burning holes in my arm and pouring poisonous frog secretions into the wounds. (I do mention this a lot.) Excited, Johnson replied that he had a personal shaman in Mexico and doctors in California who guided him on drug-induced mind journeys. Based on this common ground, he decided to tell me more about Kernel’s work and his own adventurous health practices.
Wellp, suspicions confirmed.
This guy FUCKS!
>No sane person thought it would be a total disruption- that's absurd.
Whether it's absurd, tons of pundits still did tout it to high heavens, big media outlets, tech startup sites, etc. The usual BS propping up they do, like they did for stuff ranging from fuel cells to grid computing and autonomous cars at different times.
"The VR revolution", "The next big thing", "How VR will disrupt everything", "revolutionize the economy", and so on. This started around 2012 and peaked around 2016 or so.
>However you seem like someone who enjoys pretending like VR is a little fad and doesn't offer anything new to the game space- so whatever.
"Offering something new to the game space" is a spectacularly low bar compared to the oversold promise of consumer adoption and applications of VR.
And even at that, VR thus far didn't even make a real dent in the gaming space, now that you've mentioned it. So much for all the 2012-2017 hype of the tech finally being "nailed".
It's doubly funny to me, because I have memories of the first VR fad, in the 90s. At least then besides the media hype, we've also got a few camp movies out of it ("Lawnmower man" and co).
VPL's Eyephone was featured in the 1992 science fiction film The Lawnmower Man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4RJetzDyOY&t=28m18s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
https://www.pioneersofdigital.com/about-book/about-pioneers/jaron-lanier
>Here’s an excerpt from the Jaron Lanier chapter in the book [Pioneers of Digital]:
>“In the early 1990s, Lanier got a call from movie director Brett Leonard saying he’d got the film rights to Stephen King’s short story, ‘The Lawnmower Man’. Lanier remembers that Leonard told his reluctant celluloid subject that he’d leverage the King story option to get the project funded but then do a ‘weird science fiction biography of you and your company.’ All the director needed was some explanation of how virtual reality kit worked and some old prototype gear from the era that ended up actually being used in the film.
>Lanier’s entrepreneur character was played by then unknown actor Pierce Brosnan, and real life appears to have mirrored the outlandish plotline as Lanier claims ‘it turned out VPL was part of a justice department investigation later, on the French Intelligence Service using the investment arms of French companies to do industrial espionage on American start-ups in Silicon Valley’.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
Conversely, maybe the people who should be replaced by such AI are teachers and professors.
What if you could beneficially weaponize an AI to teach children/people a vast body of knowledge quickly on any given subject.
Please see the movie; Lawnmower Man
While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.
My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.
God, the memories...
Well I can only say what I felt and feel. I'll try and describe.
First VR set I tried was driven by a powerful (for the time), expensive, Unix workstation, or may even have been a pair of them, one for each eye. Whatever the best graphics Sun or SGI offered at the time it had, ie the expensive option. It was intended as a technology exploration and dev kit for the "coming soon" huge wave of arcade and home VR systems. A wave that never arrived outside of a couple of rubbish arcade machines, and the awful, but massively hyped "VR is here", film Lawnmower Man.
Hand tracking was there - you got special gloves. Headset tracking was there too, and worked flawlessly. The graphics were clearly orders of magnitude different, as was latency. The level of hype is about the same too, with similar absurd predictions back then as this feature article! Yet the reaction was one of "ooh, neat demo", just as my reaction to Oculus was "ooh, neat demo". Then happy to put it back on the shelf until it's ready. Still just as much a gimmick as 3D tv is to the sibling commenter and me.
The limitations were the same, just scaled up. Headsets are annoyingly heavy still, enough to quickly distract (well oculus was/is) and hugely limit my wish to use. The first set was this, and more. Obviously with added cable harnesses. Both about as attractive in the home as sitting on my sofa with my motorcycle crash hat on, just now we have a fairly lightweight full face helmet. Nowhere near as forgettable as wearing a pair of specs or a baseball cap.
They still cause feelings of sub-nausea for some that better latency was meant to fix, yet didn't, weird isolation, and a feeling that it's almost, but not quite there. Current incarnation is clearly much nearer than back then. Yet it's funny, it felt, going on my fallible memory of the demo we played with that it would be there "quite soon" back then. I feel just the same now. So that quite soon turns out to be very, very subjective. I think that must have been the impression of most of us as the company didn't come close to buying, but it was certainly a talking point in the following weeks. They spent plenty on unnecessary and absurdly expensive toys just because they could or that might be the next interesting thing to develop for. Yet didn't on that.
So they seem destined to stay something that's a niche gaming addon, or niche industrial use like working on something remotely because it's on the sea floor or in a nuclear plant etc. The niches are clearly bigger, and you no longer need a brace of £20k workstations, but still to my eyes not likely to break out of those niches any time soon. If the killer game(s) arrived for VR I'd probably buy one and it would get used to play an occasional hour of those games. Yet those killer apps still haven't arrived, I think because for most a mouse, joystick or controller is more than enough. It's still more a tech to get me a divorce than of the family room. :)
We have a long way to go for the games that transplant you, the relative in Australia sitting on your sofa in place of Facetime calls, or eventually the Holodeck in every home. That seems like the point VR might actually become mainstream. I suspect I won't still be around.
I think hype results in skepticism, and things can be hyped on a far larger scale now than ever before.
If I think back to my early internet days, I remember email (Eudora!!) being the most useful and exciting thing. After that I remember Yahoo and ICQ being really important for me. People were certainly excited in the 90s, but I think the hype was less around the internet in general and more around some of the things it would enable (e.g. Gateway PCs and PCTV or whatever it was called).
I remember more hype around the CD-ROM and CD-R's than I do hype about the internet. The capacity of CD-ROMs and the ability to play video reminds me of the current talk about VR/AR. What we got out of CD-ROMs was Windows 95 being easier to install and cutscenes in video games - not what happened to Edward Furlong in the "Brainscan" movie or Lawnmower man.
Compare that to blockchain or any of the current hyped technologies like Deep Learning or Big Data(3 years ago). "Thought leaders", tech and non-tech companies (small and large), journalists - everybody wants to show they are the leaders and have the answers. You then have a strong reaction of skepticism against this.
I feel old writing this post. I remember Brainscan and hoping something like that was right around the corner...ouch.
Ahem, I would like to refer you to The Lawnmower Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104692/)
I kid. It's a movie from the 90's about VR turning groundskeepers into geniuses. I'm over simplifying. Watch it. I dare you. I might watch it again.
Now I want to watch the movie Lawnmower Man, lol
Jaron Lanier: Why people should pay more attention to me and not Web 2.0
When I noticed myself getting mean online I thought, “Something has gone terribly wrong.” It was obvious the rest of the ARPAnet had a social problem, not just me being some sort of asshole.
My book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is ruffling virtual feathers across the ARPAnet. And so it should, because I invented virtual reality. Wikipedia, which is a tissue of lies, says so. Prospect magazine’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll lists me. Also, my hair is much better than yours. And I’m fifty. According to Wikipedia, so I’d better change my birthday.
Today, the web is a bland place. It’s all user-generated content — silly clips on YouTube, spiteful anonymous comments on blogs about my books, endless photographs of people at a bar with their friends or up a mountain with an ironing board. It was much better back in the early days of the ARPAnet, before we let the commercial users on. These words will mostly be read by numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. You know, the peasants. Virtual reality is far more ennobling, but you never hear people talking about that any more.
The ARPAnet only creates banal mashups of old culture. Salvagers picking over a garbage dump. Only the old-world economy of books, films and newspapers creates original content like Lawnmower Man or Battlefield Earth. Everyone knows that real artists have no influences. This stuff the kids are into these days is just noise!
The ARPAnet is also killing music, according to my good friends at the RIAA. Did you know there’s no music in Spain any more? It’s true!
Will we — meaning I — be able to live off our brains in the future, or will we just have to give our creative works away for free? If we can’t live off our brains then we’ll need a form of SOCIALISM just to survive. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM! Until the Wikipedia Corporation finally builds a good interface, for goggles and power-gloves.
Open source and open content are a cancer. The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn’t have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, so I’m going to call it Digital MAOISM, which is COMMUNISM. Update, five years later: Here is a detailed retcon explanation of why I was not just trolling for headlines by calling Wikipedia COMMUNISM, but was speaking precisely and you just weren’t thinking hard enough: [snip 10,000 words]
Also, you should get into virtual reality more.
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is published on papyrus scroll and hand-illustrated by monks. You cannot have a copy until you have fought your way up the mountain and proven yourself worthy.
> There's a Stephen King novel called The Lawnmower Man that's basically this premise exactly.
The Lawnmower Man I remember is just a short story and has nothing to do with VR or cyberspace at all. The movie doesn't have anything to do with the story. Like "I, Robot", it's a case where an existing unrelated screenplay had the name of a famous written work slapped on it to try to increase viewership.
There's a Stephen King novel called The Lawnmower Man that's basically this premise exactly. The film version is decent too and kind of fun in a 90s cyberpunk throwback sense too. Stay away from the sequels since as usual they are terrible.
Hey, have you seen The Lawnmower Man movie? Because you have that coming.
I'd like to use it more, but it's a little cost prohibitive for me at the moment.
The biggest benefit for me is I'm able to say I'm going into a big tank of water for an hour so I won't be available for your call/text/yelling/whatever. I have problems feeling guilty about self-care, so I need that excuse to put myself first for a bit.
I went into my first experience expecting some sort of hallucinatory, transcendental experience. I did some meditation, but it felt forced. So I relaxed. That went almost too well. When I jostled back to full awareness, that's when things got interesting.
Normally when I back-float in water, I'm aware of its 2D surface. I need to stay on the surface. Above is impossible, below is bad. In the tank, I could relax because the salinity kept me afloat. I was able to think and move in three dimensions.
The tank became this empty space of three dimensional "white" board, albeit pitch black and a little confined so I couldn't go too crazy. But I was able to think out loud without looking weird. I could thrash my arms around as I visualized things against a blank canvas. I had a really interesting conversation with myself about web design, branding content, and readability.
The closest analog I can think of is movies like The Lawnmower Man where VR was this 3D empty, private space to manipulate with your mind.
Oh I didn't think it would replace HTML. For me the appeal was because VRML was the closest thing we had to the 3D rendered remote mainframe logins that Hollywood hacker films loved to show off.
Running around a VR modelled web page made me feel like the Lawnmower Man or Joey hacking into the Ellingson Mineral Company supercomputer (well, maybe not Joey specifically because he was a n00b)
Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL:
http://pantomimecorp.com/pantomime-technology/virtual-reality/
When Pantomime co-founder Levitt was a research scientist and product manager with VPL Research, the inventors of virtual reality, they had three prerequisites for a VR system:
1) a way to reach in, in 3D
2) shared reality — support for multiple users and viewpoints
3) graphically and physically realistic worlds
VPL offered a DataGlove to provide 3D input, while its flagship Reality Built for Two VR product offered networked multi-person worlds. Expensive graphics computers and custom hardware brought the full 1992 price to $500,000, which only a few huge corporations could afford.
When Dr. Levitt joined VPL, thanks to an amazing infrastructure by lead VPL engineer Chuck Blanchard, he added realistic gravity, collisions, and throwing a ball into the VR system for physical realism.
But two decades later, the public and technologists have become so impatient that the new systems calling themselves VR have punted even on the core original criteria.
Head-mounted systems like the Oculus Rift offer no way to reach in. In demos, visitors twiddle a 1980s style game joystick. And users don’t natively network — in an Oculus demonstration you don’t see the other users in the VR world — not even the other players sitting alongside you in the demo.
David asked Facebook’s VP of Infrastructure Engineering Jay Parikh this revealing question about Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR:
http://pantomimecorp.com/2014/06/10/facebook-vp-to-pantomime-ceo-we-need-interactive-virtual-reality/
David Levitt: "I work in Virtual Reality, and everyone’s wondering what you can say about your acquisition of Oculus VR. In particular, I’ve had demos of it: I could look around but I couldn’t reach in. Do you have solutions for that that you can talk about?"
Jay Parikh: “You can’t interact with anything. These are big, hard problems … what you do with your hands, because you can’t do anything with your hands — or it’s hard to be using a controller when you can’t see your hands and you have the goggles on — these are problems we have to solve in a good and seamless way.”
More on the VPL DataGlove:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/630181/virtual-reality-VR/253105/Entertainment#ref884340
Zimmerman’s glove would have the greatest impact. He had been thinking for years about constructing an interface device for musicians based on the common practice of playing “air guitar”—in particular, a glove capable of tracking hand and finger movements could be used to control instruments such as electronic synthesizers. He patented an optical flex-sensing device (which used light-conducting fibres) in 1982, one year after Grimes patented his glove-based computer interface device. By then, Zimmerman was working at the Atari Research Center in Sunnyvale, California, along with Scott Fisher, Brenda Laurel, and other VR researchers who would be active during the 1980s and beyond. Jaron Lanier, another researcher at Atari, shared Zimmerman’s interest in electronic music. Beginning in 1983, they worked together on improving the design of the data glove, and in 1985 they left Atari to start up VPL Research; its first commercial product was the VPL DataGlove.
By 1985, Fisher had also left Atari to join NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, as founding director of the Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project. The VIEW project put together a package of objectives that summarized previous work on artificial environments, ranging from creation of multisensory and immersive “virtual environment workstations” to telepresence and teleoperation applications. Influenced by a range of prior projects that included Sensorama, flight simulators, and arcade rides, and surprised by the expense of the air force’s Darth Vader helmets, Fisher’s group focused on building low-cost, personal simulation environments. While the objective of NASA was to develop telerobotics for automated space stations in future planetary exploration, the group also considered the workstation’s use for entertainment, scientific, and educational purposes. The VIEW workstation, called the Virtual Visual Environment Display when completed in 1985, established a standard suite of VR technology that included a stereoscopic head-coupled display, head tracker, speech recognition, computer-generated imagery, data glove, and 3-D audio technology.
The VPL DataGlove was brought to market in 1987, and in October of that year it appeared on the cover of Scientific American (see photograph). VPL also spawned a full-body, motion-tracking system called the DataSuit, a head-mounted display called the EyePhone, and a shared VR system for two people called RB2 (“Reality Built for Two”). VPL declared June 7, 1989, “Virtual Reality Day.” On that day, both VPL and Autodesk publicly demonstrated the first commercial VR systems. The Autodesk VR CAD (computer-aided design) system was based on VPL’s RB2 technology but was scaled down for operation on personal computers. The marketing splash introduced Lanier’s new term virtual reality as a realization of “cyberspace,” a concept introduced in science fiction writer William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. Lanier, the dreadlocked chief executive officer of VPL, became the public celebrity of the new VR industry, while announcements by Autodesk and VPL let loose a torrent of enthusiasm, speculation, and marketing hype. Soon it seemed that VR was everywhere, from the Mattel/Nintendo PowerGlove (1989) to the HMD in the movie The Lawnmower Man (1992), the Nintendo VirtualBoy game system (1995), and the television series VR5 (1995).
nice one. It reminds me The Lawnmower Man movie. Soon, you will be able to physically dive into the code.
Interesting, so we're finally getting virtual reality helmets? I've been waiting since the early 1990s. They seemed to be right around the corner and were featured in several films like Lawnmower Man (1992), that Aerosmith video (Amazing, 1993), Disclosure (1994), Virtuosity (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Hackers (1995).
I suppose it makes sense, every technology seems to take about 20 years to reach the consumer market. I wonder if it has anything to do with patents lasting for 20 years.
I would say two things in response to this.
Firstly, think of the plight of the screenwriter who has to a) adapt a story that will take most people about a week to read into a three hour film; and b) has to create something that will make lots of money. I can completely understand the resentment felt at a beloved book being turned into a very different film - I have seen a number of well liked stories turned into something completely different (see my next point). I think you just have to view film adaptations as a completely different product.
Secondly, there is a long history of books being turned into films that do not bear much relation to the original work. A few examples from my own life. The Stephen King novella "The Running Man" was turned into a film that contained the same themes, but was a very different story. The film "The Lawnmower Man" was also taken from a Stephen King short story of the same name. The story of the film bore absolutely no relation to the film, and to this day I can't work out how they could possibly draw any relation between the two. A long time ago I hired a video of a Dean R Koontz story called "Watchers". I had enjoyed the book and jumped at the chance to see a film adaptation. I was to be disappointed. What I watched, whilst having the name of the book was not an adaptation of that book - the story was completely different. I can only think that they wanted the name of a popular author to help sell their shoddy film.
Oh please tell me the movie will end up being titled Lawnmower Man 2.0.