HBO's email spam said
Doctor Sleep was leaving soon and I'd never gotten around to watching this because I read the book and it was a pretty mehtastic book. I'd heard everyone liked the movie so it was an improvement.
It's an improvement in the fact that this story, which is just not very interesting (especially for a Shining sequel), is ~2.5 hours instead of however many dozens of hours it takes for King's books which are like 800 pages+ these days. Felt pretty much like how I remembered the book and was middle of the road fine, but nothing special.
I just find Danny & kid vs evil psychic vampire hippies to be a pretty whatever story idea.
That said, the one part of the movie that was different was the final act, which was my favorite part of the book. Since in the book the overlook hotel blew up in The Shining (book) and so the finale takes place in the ruins, whereas in the Shining movieverse, the hotel's still there so there is hotel shenanigans. This gave them an opportunity to do interesting things.
I liked the scene at the bar with young Jack Nicholson.
But otherwise I didn't think the movie finale was very good and was weirdly retreading both the original movie & book at the same time. I looked up a book summary and yeah the story was totally different for the final battle stuff and I think the book's final battle and ending is much, much better than what they did with the movie.
So overall it was a good/better adaptation of a mediocre book but had a worse ending. It was fine, not sure where people praising the movie came from. I did think McGregor did good though in the role.
Brandon Cronenberg’s POSSESSOR
fantastic.
Thoroughly fucked up.
The apple has not fallen far from the tree.
Will probably watch again soon.
I wanna see this.