MovieChat Forums > Heaven & Hell: North & South, Book III (1994) Discussion > WTF!?!?!

WTF!?!?!

posted 18 years ago by nicole43
12 replies | jump to latest

I couldn't even watch without fast-fowarding and believe me I was done with the movie in less than 5 mins. Book 1 and 2 were BRILLIANT!!! This garbage...NOT. I have to say this:

1. What is up with all the new characters...ughh.
2. Who is Cooper?!?!
3. What is up with killing off Constance and Orry?

4. Where is my Billy and Brett dammit=(?
5. I'm really supposed to believe that George and Madeline are suddenly in love when they didn't really interact that much in the previous books...puleeze!
6. Also, we get ANOTHER Isabelle...I didn't mind Mary but this one was wasn't doing it for me.
7. Wow you can really survive a huge explosion like that? Bent is superman.
8. I guess most of the characters in the previous books disappeared.
9. It looked so cheap compared to the previous=(.

I came to this conclusion:

Positive: There is only ONE thing I can say I loved which was Stanley finally growing a pair and kicking Isabelle out.

Negative: 99% of the movie. They should have left it alone...

I'm soooooo disappointed=(. Ok rant over lol.

[–] rodvince 17 years ago

I totally agree with you. It's like seeing a totally different series (only the characters' names were retained).

[–] duckncvr 16 years ago

for some reason, I'm watching book 3. I guess just because it came with 1 and 2. I hate it, naturallly, but in the beginning, John Jakes narrates backstory to catch everyone up to speed, and after saying that Bent is killed in an explosion, we see Bent and Ashton together and Jakes says something like "...in an odd twist of fate, Bent survived." oh! I see!. It is hilarious. Plus, Bent totally has no visible injuries from such an explosion. Oh, actually a scar on the side of his face. Though just after he kills Orry, he does show us how, lik,e part of his shoulder is burned. I knew I was in big huge trouble right then. but i think i will watch the rest, just to see.

Dainty things never shrink from Lux!

[–] p-mcgowan 16 years ago

I totaly agree on this,Why make a follow up on N&S.
The first 6 episodes were the best,And sould of kept it that way.
And who the heck is Cooper Main,Never mentioned in the first 6 eps.
i have all 9 parts of N&S.
But only watch the first 6,then the story ends for me...

[–] kegan-3 16 years ago

Cooper Main is Ory's older brother. He IS a character in the the books.

[–] IBAmyB 16 years ago

They changed the plot of Book II (Love & War) so much for TV that Book III (Heaven & Hell) tries to get back to the plots of the novels and people who haven't read them before seeing the films are very confused.

[–] jayehawk 15 years ago

Terrible. Just terrible.
Books 1 and 2 were great and I enjoyed them immensely, but 3 is just a turd and it is understandable why seveal of the cast - most notably Swayze - wouldn't want anything to do with it.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW - though this show does a good job spoiling things without any help from me.
Do yourself a favour if you loved Books I & II, DON'T watch Book III as it will only ruin the story for you.

*******************

John Jakes should have had his knees broke for doing that awful narration at the beginning where he says that Bent was killed and then soon after says Bent survived! Couldn't he at least have said Bent "appeared" to have been killed?
I have read all the novels and enjoyed them seprately, but they are not an exact translation to the screen. Orry's injury being a destroyed arm rather than a gimp leg, for example, is a pretty big difference.
The argument that Cooper was a character in the novels, etc is just nonsense, since this is a third chapter of the mini-series, not the novels, and if he was not mentioned in the previous, then he should not be mentioned now. It just comes across as bizarre and stupid.
George and Madeline becoming romantically involved is also ludicrous, considering how much they were in love with Constance and Orry, respectively, and now all of a sudden they can look at each other as though they have not been life-long family friends. I'm sure it COULD happen, but does seem far-fetched.
I could go on, but I'm already depressed enough about it.

Cheers,
J.

[–] taylorje 15 years ago

Heaven and Hell was a total disaster. In one of the first scenes, a good-as-new Bent and Ashton discuss asking Orry for money. WTF? There's no way Orry would given them a cent. That set the pace for the rest of the movie.

By not including Cooper in the first two movies (he's a major character in the books), his appearance is bewildering. Also, Robert Wagner was far too old for the part.

George and Madeline's romance doesn't occur until toward the end of the novel, and then it's rather antiseptic. No torrid lovemaking or, if I remember correctly, any kissing except on the cheek. Madeline writes a series of letters to the dead Orry and admits she doesn't love George, but is only marrying him for companionship.

No one ages except the ten years between the first two movies and the third. The ages of Orry's son and Charles' son are wrong. And the new Charles is much younger than he should be.

The only thing worthwhile is the soundtrack, parts of which I found beautiful.

[–] abs_is_back 15 years ago

It would be much easier to list what was right about the 3rd miniseries, because it would be a MUCH shorter list than what was wrong.

... Okay, what was right? I'm overwhelmed by all the wrong. Let's see, Constance and Orry are dead (even though Orry died in the war in Book II) and Madeline and George end up together at the end... and Bent kidnaps Charles's son. That's about it. The rest is either twisted beyond belief from what happened in the book, or the book was ignored altogether and crazy crap was written to replace it. Crap like giving Brett a whole 2 scenes just so they could list Genie Francis prominently in the cast list was frankly distracting because you are busy the whole time thinking "WTF!?!?!"

I understand why they change things from books to TV or movie; any process of taking hundreds of pages and condensing it into a couple of hours of script means some things must change. I think that the first estimate Selznick made for Gone With the Wind was that the film would be 24 hours long if he filmed every scene he wanted to include. But they must have thought they would never get to Book III because they overhauled so much that the series that this book could never match this series even on some major plot points. Which leads us to crap like Bent killing an Orry lookalike in the first 3 minutes. And trying to make Prudence a prominent character because they had killed off Virgilia. And Charles' big decision about whether to return to Mont Royal for the showdown consisting of 45 seconds of insanely dramatic waffling: "This is good-bye George... wait, I'm going with you George... I can't go... I must go... I'm never leaving you Willa." If I were Willa, I would have shouted, "Oh for Pete's sake, would you frigging GO already??"

And yes, after they so carefully aged Charles in Book II to show how much toll the War had taken on him, he turns up in this one looking like he's 15. A different actor playing Charles, a third actress playing Isabel, Isaac and Jane replacing Semiramis and Ezra like interchangable Legos, even a 2nd actor playing Grant for pity's sake, you had to listen closely to figure out if you were seeing a new actor in a previous character or a totally new character. Or didn't anybody else have to play "Match the Cast List" with IMDB? Ugh!

What a waste of time. I can't say they wasted their money since they obviously didn't spend much on it.

[–] olleo 15 years ago

SPOILERS

I remeber watching Book I when it came on TV. I'm a fanatic reader and have to know the whys and hows. So I picked up North and South because I thought there had to be more to the relationship between Orry and Madeline than what the movie portrayed. To my surprise there was less. But I'm straying from the point. I've since read all three books and enjoyed them. As for the movies some of the changes I thought were good ones and some bad.

I thought cutting out Cooper was a good idea. He would've distracted from Orry. Bringing him in for the movies after a twenty year period when not a whisper of him was made was a dumb thing to do. I liked that Orry survived the war in the movie but hated that mess where Madeline runs away from Orry. In the book she stood her ground and I would've liked her better for it in the movie. As far as Bent in the movie he was a blend of two different characters from the books. (I also thought that was a good idea). And he had amnesia for a long time before he murdered Constance because of his injuries.

All that to say this. I refuse to watch Book III simply because I already know it went way too far outside the plot of the first two movies.

Matthew 28:19-20

[–] rodthman 14 years ago

Man, I am so glad that I'm not the only one....I just got the whole series and when I started Book III, I was flabbergasted at Bent being alive, and the appearance of Cooper....so bad....it seems as tho it is No Country for old Men....a movie about the hunting down of a serial killer (Bent/ aka/ Michael Myers or Jason)

ugh.

Quo Vadimus

[–] selenabeth 14 years ago

The third movie was a waste not sure why they bothered but i think they did what they did because they never intended to do the third movie. The fist two were done a year apart and by the time they did the third one most of the actors had moved on. I think they tried to rewrite history the first two movies were changed for more of the hollywood happy ending and in the last they tried to be more true to the book the problem is that they lost the flow. In the first two movies the characters flowed into the stories and made sense in the last movie it was so different that it really didn't flow into the series. I think that we fell in love with the charactes in the movie, the love stories and then they totaled all are illusions to a point we didn't want to watch.

[–] josborn828 13 years ago

I can't wait till part 4. Bent meets Jason! Seriously, the only thing that's missing is the big giant spider.