Today on the 5: While I've been a fan of the film version of The Warriors for many years, I've never made the time to read the book the movie was adapted from. I finally corrected that oversight, and what I read was not what I expected in so many ways.
Ozone Nightmare
The Warriors Book Review
Welcome to your daily five for Monday, July 15th, 2024. Lando and I have mentioned I think more than a few times on the show that were both fans of the Walter Hill film The Warriors. And I knew that that movie was based on a book by author Saul Yurick with the same title, so it is titled The Warriors. It generally uses the movie poster for its artwork, which I don't like, but regardless, I just had never gotten around to reading it. I knew it was a relatively short read and there was no particular reason I didn't read it, but I had heard that and seeing people say that it was a lot different than the movie. And so when I finished up the William Gibson sprawl trilogy, I said, "Okay, I'm going to finally read this book because I'm kind of curious. Is it a lot different? Is this something where you see one or two elements that then got blown up for the movie or is it largely the same with just a couple of things changed?" But those things maybe are really, really significant changes. So I got the book, read it. I will say at the end of the book there is a nice epilogue, not epilogue, but some author notes, which I think were really beneficial, because this book, wow, this book, when people say it's very different than the movie, that is both true and false. It is true in that the first half of this book is some of the most brutal stuff I've read in a while in terms of you're going to, for the protagonist, to be this unlikable, to be this vulgar and offensive and crass and mean and generally evil, depending on how you want to apply that term, that's unusual to hang your entire story around as the main characters. They make the characters in the movie, the Warriors, which in the book they're called The Dominators, but the same characters more or less. They make the movie characters seem like choir boys compared to what these characters do and how they act and how they talk. And you will get just about every offensive slur for every type of person and gender and whatever that there could possibly be in this book. So be prepared for that. It didn't offend me, but I have not read something that that was this unapologetically vulgar in quite a while. It's been a while. So I was kind of reeling a bit in the opening and then I just got used to it and then at the halfway point and up to that halfway point, the movie in the book are largely the same in terms of the general story beats, but you will definitely see what they sanded back where they knew, okay, we can't make the characters like this or no one will want to finish this movie and everybody will want them to be dead. So they make the characters far more likable in the film, but the basics of what happened are largely the same up until that halfway point. And at that halfway point, not only does the story diverge massively from the film, but the book becomes a different book. Totally, it shifts radically. And I think honestly becomes much better. So, you know, if you're going to do a 50/50 thing where it's good and bad, better to do your bad 50% upfront. So in that way, I was actually really happy with the way the book ended, but it really becomes a much different story. And I don't want to get too specific. I like to keep these weekly shows spoiler-free, but it is such a shift that if I didn't know better from reading the authors kind of stuff at the end, I would think that maybe this was a William S. Burrough situation where the author had two parts of a book and they managed to fuse it together by changing a couple of names or something because it just seems like it becomes a completely different focus. The story dials down quite a bit in its scope and it becomes much more of a character study in a way that from the first half I would never have expected. So it's sort of a weird book to recommend. I would say if you've seen the movie and you enjoy it and you can handle the fact that this is a very vulgar and crass book, it's worth reading to use as a comparison point. If I had read this in the vacuum of never seeing the movie, would I have liked it? I don't know that I would say I would liked it. I think I would have talked about it as a fascinating example of how a book whipsaws from one type of story to another. It would have been worth discussing, but I don't know if I would recommend it to people who weren't fans of the film. I don't know that you would enjoy this book. I don't know that I really enjoyed the book, but I am fascinated by it because not only of its comparison to the film, which I enjoy quite a bit, but also because of the way it operates, it is a weird book to experience and that does make it noteworthy. Again, I don't know if I could just say to any random person you should read it, but I think as a study in how the tone of a book can really, really shift as a comparison thing to see as the inspiration point for the film, it is worth reading for that. I just don't know that I'm going to say you're going to have necessarily a good time with it. So it is a weird recommendation, but I would say if you're a fan of the film and you have the time, yeah, you should read it. Otherwise, I don't know. And that's all I can really say later.