I know a lot of you saw my Storm of the Century thread a few days ago. Well I decided to continue my journey through 90s-era Stephen King mini-series, and over the last few nights I watched the 1997 adaptation of The Shining.
Immediately I'll go ahead and say that comparisons to Kubrick's film are inevitable. And it cannot stand up to that version, at all. In fact, it's not even especially good. But with that said, I also didn't that it was completely without merit.
One interesting thing to note is that Stephen King himself wrote the screenplay and he wanted to have this version made specifically because of the issues he had with Kubrick's film. As I'm sure many of you know, he hated Kubrick's film.
According to Wikipedia:
Having read about half of the book, one thing I can definitely confirm is that the mini-series stays MUCH closer to the book than Kubrick's version did. Much closer.
On the upside, I thought that Steven Weber did a pretty good job as Jack. While the sets for the Overlook do in fact look like sets, they look like nice sets. And Rebecca De Mornay is obviously WAY more good looking than Shelly Duvall.
On the downside, the film moves at a pretty slow pace, when the supernatural shit finally kicks into gear it's not actually very frightening, and the kid who plays Danny is barely even passable in the role. I don't like to be too hard to child actors--they're just children, after all--but there was a lot about his performance to NOT like unfortunately.
The bottom line is that The Shining is no Storm of the Century. Whereas I found Storm of the Century to be a hell of a lot of fun, I found The Shining to be only decent entertainment but never anything more than that.
6/10
Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?
