Rainey Dawn If you have never read the book and have seen Kubrick's The Shining then there are a few questions left lingering in the mind. I've read that this film is King's book on film so I recommend watching this 1997 version. King himself had a hand in making this one.It is true that comparing the two films is like comparing Apples to Oranges - both are quite different. Kubrick's film is a condensed and somewhat changed version of King's book vs this 1997 film which is basically King's book on film (I want to reiterate for those who might not have given this movie a chance).I won't rehash the differences between the two movies - other reviewers have done a great job with that - but I can say that I like both movies.9/10

nuoipter termer This is an excellent movie. It's very scary and entertaining. I loved the animals carved out of plants coming to life scene. That's one of the scariest and best scenes. I also loved the part with the ghost in the bath tub. That was just wildly intense. It doesn't matter how faithful to the book a movie is. It just matters how good the movie is. Both this and the 1980 version are very good. Jack doesn't use an ax in this one when he has gone completely insane. He uses a croquet mallet but the terror is no less. In fact I would say the terror of that is more intensely done. The music in this is very good too. It's very creepy. Watch this. It's entertaining from beginning to end.

Harry Wilding One of the worst things I have ever seen committed to film. This, on one level, suffers from Kubrick's version been so good but it is not the only reason. Kubrick's changes made the adaption better and the set design just set it apart.This adaption is certainly more faithful to King's book - King wrote the screenplay, so that comes as no surprise. One particular thing is the topiary animals. I love the book, but I thought they were a bad idea in it (they just don't make sense, not even in the supernatural world created) and an even worse idea on film. Kubrick was clever to replace them with the maze. King, however, kept them - cue 1997 TV CGI...need I say more.The acting and dialogue is awful and, thus, hilarious. Even Elliot Gould in his small role as manager Ullman is surprisingly wooden. Oh, and the way they portray Tony is quite unbelievably bad. And the epilogue...wow...ten years later, Danny sees Jack's ghost at his graduation...Jack blows a kiss...Danny catches it...tears in his eyes, he pulls it to his cheek...'that's what I've missed,' he says. Beautifully bad. So, yes - Genius and hugely entertaining. It is so bad, it is good. Brilliant.

Rueiro I am not going to compare this piece of rubbish to Kubrick's film; too many viewers have already done that.In my opinion, "The shining" is one of King's few novels worth reading. Some parts of it are slow-paced and boring, with the usual long descriptions of the characters' past and misfortunes in which King always likes to indulge himself for dozens of pages. That is the most irritating thing about his books. It is OK if you are writing "War and Peace" or "Gone with the Wind", but not for a horror flick. You should stick to the main story instead of creating sub-plot family melodramas.Anyway, "The Shining" is not an easy book to adapt, and only a very competent screenwriter who knows his trade and a film-maker equally effective can deliver a good movie out of the book. Kubrick, who was both things, did it, and that was it. They could try and make a dozen remakes of the story in the next one hundred years and they wouldn't get it any better. I re-read the novel very recently, and then I watched King's only approved and much blessed official adaptation in order to see how true to its title is. I felt pity. It is more faithful to the book than Kubrick's, I gave it that, but still it is not as faithful as the title and all the publicity initially promise, and that is cheating the spectator. All right, it shows Jack's alcoholic past in flashbacks, but was that really necessary in order to understand what happens later at the hotel? Also it shows Tony, and what for? In the book Danny only sees him once or twice and always from very far away, a blurred shadow. Why turning him into a character that is popping up in the screen every half an hour? He can't help Danny at all but only keeps telling him he shouldn't have come to the hotel, so what's the point? It is bloody irritating, and the actor looks silly!Then, there is the topiary. I laughed at the ignorance and ingenuity of many viewers who rave about this remake and put Kubrick's film down only because it doesn't show the hedge animals... Dear cultured critics: back in 1980 CGI was still sci-fi fantasy, and the only way to have shot that sequence would have been by combining live action with animation (go and check "Mary Poppins" to see what I'm talking about if you don't follow me). So Kubrick did very well by leaving the episode out instead of making a silly thing that would have looked laughable in what is supposed to be a a horror chiller. And that is precisely one of the biggest follies this adaptation has, and even the CGI is cheap and badly done and brings more laughs than shivers because the animals look like bird droppings on the snow!Then the cast is terrible. Someone mentioned that a monkey with a telephone book would have done a better casting, and he is right. The actors seem like they never bothered to read the book in order to understand what the story is about and get to know their characters. The kid was just that, so we can't blame him. But Rebecca de Mornay and the fellow who plays Jack (who is he, by the way?) are as plain as cardboard cut-outs, and the same goes for the guy doing Grady, who instead of looking menacing he is a total duck. And Van Peebles looks like he just popped out of a Busby Berkeley musical, I was expecting him to burst singing and tap-dancing any second. The only one of whom it can be said gives a decent performance is Elliott Gould, who plays Ullmann as the cynical, sarcastic, tight-fist snob who thinks of "his" hotel as the greatest thing on earth, just as described in the book. And as for Stephen King's surprise cameo as the orchestra conductor, I didn't know whether to laugh or to be angry because he looks like a Loony Tunes caricature of Xavier Cugat.And then, the director of this mess seems to have thought himself to be a new Stanley Kubrick and tried to imitate the master's trademark of slow tracking shots that precede key events. Didn't he have any self- respect? And the ending... so happy-ever-after that is laughable, and so overloaded with syrup that it could kill a diabetic just from looking at it. This multi-million dollar egotistic heap made only to satisfy King's ego is just a waste of time, money and celluloid.