who remembers Tom Clancy? - despite being dead, his name still pops up...

skykiii said:
So, apparently there was an attempt to turn Tom Clancy's character Jack Ryan into a franchise, first with a movie (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and then a TV series (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan). While the latter is still running, the fact that I never hear anyone talk about them makes me think they're failures and won't be remembered in five years.
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I remember hearing about it on a video that shat on the series. Didn't take long for me to find it.


Basically the 1st season was just about ok with Jack Ryan stopping a ISIS plot to blowup Washington D.C. up apparently. Then season 2 is when shit hit the fan as they set it on Venezuela and had it say that not!Maduro was elected on a "Wave of Nationalist Pride" and then ruined the economy in 6 years can caused all the wrongs. And his opponent is a "history professor turned activist, running against him on a Social Justice plataform" and whose speeches in the show sound almost exactly like old Chavez ones from his campaign in 1999 and early terms.

What makes it worse is that season 1 had established Jack as financial analyst, exactly the kind of person who would look at Venezuela and spot the complete of their economy and who would know that it isn't collapsing just because "evil dictator".

Then they had a pause because of the cough and two more seasons which were apparently better but I doubt the rotten tomatoes score, before being canned. Also apparently a spin off featuring some latino is "in the works" because God forbid we have white straight males as leads, though it probably will never see the light of the day.
 
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General Emílio Médici said:
Also apparently a spin off featuring some latino is "in the works" because God forbid we have white straight males as leads, though it probably will never see the light of the day.
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FWIW there was a prominent latino character in Clancy's actual novels--I think his name was Chavez or something and he becomes the leader or second-in-command of Rainbow Six, after first being introduced in (I think) Clear and Present Danger as a soldier John Clark knew.

Not that this justifies woke pandering but at least its not a straight-up case of them making up minority characters out of nowhere just for brownie points.
 
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I saw that, it is who the spin off was supposed to be based on. But the thing that makes me consider it ESG box ticking is the fact that the show was not that popular and the jump to a spin off seems forced. Especially given how long ago it was announced and the lack of updates.
 
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I liked a lot of his book but towards the end I seriously felt he could have cut like multiple pages from his books but was too famous/powerful for his editors.

After playing The Division games I think Clancy would have had a lot of fun playing around writing stories in that universe.


skykiii said:
FWIW there was a prominent latino character in Clancy's actual novels--I think his name was Chavez or something and he becomes the leader or second-in-command of Rainbow Six, after first being introduced in (I think) Clear and Present Danger as a soldier John Clark knew.

Not that this justifies woke pandering but at least its not a straight-up case of them making up minority characters out of nowhere just for brownie points.
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Domingo Chavez pretty much becomes John Clark sidekick/second in command and even marries Clarks daughter at some point. He only met Clark cause Chavez was apart of the secret op in Clear and Present Danger that got abandoned (with Clark) by the government.
 
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The Hunt For Red October is a high-tier boomer thriller, but I just couldn't read anything else by him because of just how far up the ass of any and all three letter agencies he gets.
 
I enjoyed his work ( did not read anything past Rainbow Six) and I find "the sum of all fear" to be his best book.
I do prefer Forsyth thriller books, as his protagaints are way more morally grey.
 
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Are they bringing Michael B. Jordan back as Black Clark? I will lol if they do.

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Scout Trooper said:
Incorrect. He was an insurance salesman.

His books are essentially a narrative storytelling talking about various organizations and technologies, with some geopolitics worked in. It's like a wargame in story form (particularly true for Red Storm Rising where he literally used the game Harpoon to wargame his engagements; he also provided supplementary materials for the game).

I can see why it's not everyone's cup of tea. As a fiction writer he stuffs a ton of autistic detail into the story that can make it a slog to get through.

My favorite book of his was the non-fiction MARINE (https://www.amazon.com/Marine-Expeditionary-Clancys-Military-Reference/dp/0425154548) which provided an operational and technical perspective that I leaned on heavily later in life.
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What an absolute autist
Let’s Plays as literature
 
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Originally from the "Things That Work in Literature That Don't Work in Visual Mediums" topic, brought here to avoid making that topic go off the rails.

BScCollateral said:
Absolutely. One of the writers thought a Lithuanian killing Russians was "killing his countrymen," an opinion I've only seen echoed in Soviet propaganda.
Apologies for drifting off topic.
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Its a lot more than just that. The movie never even tells you Marko Ramius' motive for defection, except for a brief, unexplained mention of his wife. The book talks a lot about how Soviet society works and how Ramius had a lifetime of suffering under it, but this is all excised from the film. All we get to see is... one Soviet leader has a nice-looking office.

Then it adds lines where Ramius and his fellow defectors talk about how they would like to see Montana. This is a complete break: novel-Ramius actually thinks America is just like the Soviet Union, but he's so mad at his home country he doesn't even care that he might be helping a country that's just as bad.

On Jack Ryan's side too, the story becomes a "one man figured out the truth" narrative, which then allows the director to make the Soviets all really proper and intelligent while all the Americans are a bunch of meatbrained hicks (who even attempt to kill Ryan for being the smart one!) It even goes so far as to change a British naval officer to an American one and make him, again, a southern meatbrain.

The whole tenor of the movie is then at odds. It's essentially saying "this Ramius guy is pretty retarded for wanting to leave Soviet utopia for American squalor, isn't he?"

Like I said before, this is the first time I was ever aware of Hollywood's left-wing bias. No other movie puts it on greater display.
 
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Clancy is overall a good author of his particular genre, even if in some of his works of fiction he can tend to drift off into the weeds of technical details and contrived but believable internal and external politics. I still have all my old paperbacks and a few hardbacks, and the only one with only his name on the spine I remember disliking was Teeth of the Tiger, because so many character and plot points felt so ridiculously forced. Red Storm Rising, Red Rabbit, The Sum of All Fears, Without Remorse, Cardinal of the Kremlin, Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, Clear and Present Danger, and of course Hunt for Red October are all worth reading once. Some do drag a bit like Executive Orders and Debt of Honor, IMO.

If you want to read his works, you have to remember the timeframe they came out in, and anything post USSR collapse reads quite differently for obvious reasons.

Regarding the movies and games, I've only ever seen the Hunt for Red October, which is a good flick, and the only game I've ever played was siege, which I played for an hour and promptly uninstalled and never looked back. I hear some of the older titles are good, I may look into them, but I have a large game backlog, and I don't play games nearly as much as I used to even 3 years ago.

I think Tom is worth reading, but YMMV.

Edit: Just for shits and giggles, I remembered this old site that is somehow still around:
Tom Clancy plot generator
 
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I got Hunt for Red October as a gift years ago and liked it, so I've been slowly making my way through the Jack Ryan series in publication order. Patriot Games I almost quit since he spent almost 100 pages having the British government practically fellating Jack for saving Charles and Di, but then the plot got back on track and I got back on board. Really like Cardinal of the Kremlin.

I just finished The Sum of all Fears, which ends with Jack getting pushed out of CIA and declaring he's done with the game. Was that meant to be the last book or was Clancy always going to have Jack come back?
 
I remember reading Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell decades ago, I think I also read Politika. Neat stuff, always wanted to get to Sum of All Fears. Definitely plan on reading or re-reading some of these in a little bit.
Just a shame that most people know the man for ubislop these days, and the kind that would have the man turning in his grave if he saw what they did to his name.
 
I read one of his books. Was told its a good war story, and builds into wider universe. What I read instead was a boring slog for the first half and us-wank for the other, with every shortcoming that usa might have on field filled with made up equipment because god forbid usa isnt #1.
 
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Yak-130 Mitten said:
I read one of his books. Was told its a good war story, and builds into wider universe. What I read instead was a boring slog for the first half and us-wank for the other, with every shortcoming that usa might have on field filled with made up equipment because god forbid usa isnt #1.
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This sounds like one of his later books (probably The Bear and the Dragon). I've heard he indeed got bad about that later on.

Death of an Ego said:
and the only game I've ever played was siege, which I played for an hour and promptly uninstalled and never looked back. I hear some of the older titles are good, I may look into them, but I have a large game backlog, and I don't play games nearly as much as I used to even 3 years ago.
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I can vouch that the original Rainbow Six for Windows 98 is a solid game. It is, however, a game that a lot of people find difficult... largely because the game actively misleads you into thinking that the pre-mission "planning" part where you set waypoints and tell the AI teams what to do, is more important than it really is.

PROTIP: It's actually better to make every alternate step a waypoint, because the AI routine is "get to waypoint, check for hostiles, get to waypoint." And never have an AI team automatically blow open a door. Once they get to a door its better to have them sit until you're ready to assume manual control, which can be done with a keyboard button.

PROTIP 2: You should always bring a heartbeat sensor. This thing is almost like Rainbow Six's version of the Soliton Radar, but with way more distance, just you have to be looking in the general direction of a hostile for them to pick up... and its not that hard to just stand in a safe spot and spin to see if anyone shows up.
 
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I read one of the books once. The American characters have way too much plot armor and somehow always win because of the comical incompetence of the "bad guys"
 
Yak-130 Mitten said:
I read one of his books. Was told its a good war story, and builds into wider universe. What I read instead was a boring slog for the first half and us-wank for the other, with every shortcoming that usa might have on field filled with made up equipment because god forbid usa isnt #1.
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Literally THIS
 
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