Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Has A Rotten Tomatoes Score Around 50%, But I Get Why

Growing up, I was a huge Hunter S. Thompson fan. Take from that what you will, but I devoured everything the man wrote. Like many, it was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that first grabbed me. It’s an incredible book, and the movie, from director Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke, was as close to a visual representation of a book like this could probably be on film. Still, I was surprised at how low its Rotten Tomatoes score is (currently 51%), but thinking about, I get it.

I Think Fans Of The Book Fans May Not Be Fans Of The Movie

I’m not someone who gets super pedantic with book-to-screen adaptations. It’s hard to take the story from one medium and adapt it to another. Changes have to be made, and I’m sympathetic to the choices directors have to make. I think Gilliam and company did the very best they could with Feath and Loathing, but I still don’t love the movie. Thompson's writing is just that hard to adapt.

That’s not their fault; it’s really no one’s fault. I just love the book so much that there was no way the film was going to stack up for me. By the time the movie was released in 1998, I’d already read the book multiple times, and I argued at the time that there was no way to make a movie that would do justice to the manic nature of the story, as so much of it was in Duke’s mind. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either. I think plenty of people who loved the book didn’t love the movie because of this.

Interestingly, it was just announced that Depp will be adapting another of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita, which I've also long held can't work on film. We'll see how that goes.

Some Who Aren’t Fans Of The Book Don’t Seem To Like It Either

Judging by some of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, those who dislike this classic Vegas movie aren’t fans for other reasons. It’s too druggy, too chaotic, or it’s too disjointed. All of that is by design, of course. The book is very much all three of those things. Thompson's mindset was very much like that, too, both in his writing and in real life, if the stories are to be believed (and I certainly believe them). It’s a chaotic movie because it’s a chaotic story; there is no other way to tell it.

This all leaves the movie as a very polarizing one. Not only does its 50% score reflect that, but people either love it or completely hate it. It doesn’t garner middling reviews. I’ve talked to people who call it their favorite movie of all time, and others who say they’ll never watch it again, and get squeamish just thinking about it. You can see that in the reviews. It’s even been called the “worst Terry Gilliam movie ever,” though I think now that moniker belongs to The Brothers Grimm.

Terry Gilliam is an iconoclast, and so is Hunter S. Thompson. The combination of the two might not work for everyone, so I get it. For me, though, the movie will never match the book’s intensity and insanity, but I fully recognize that only Gilliam could have come close to making a great movie from it.