Shooter

I am a big fan of Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact. I though that the movie baised on his book wold kick and equal amount of ass. I was wrong.

• They changed the war in which Bob Lee Swagger fought. I don't have a problem with this. Get an actor who can run, and fight. An actor that would have been 20 in the Vietnam era would draw the wrong demographic to an action movie.
• Donnie and Bob did not fight a battle that would have got them recognized by the Marines. This is a major theme in the books. Bob feels that the Marines abandoned him, yet all of the modern Marines worship him for what he did. Bob has a hard time dealing with this, and is an interesting point in the books.
• They removed the "Sniper War" aspect of Donnie's killing and Bob's maiming. It is this that draws him deeper in to the plot.
• When a bullet hits something as solid as a stew can, it is going to flatten out, and will be unusable a second time. Because the movie did not go in to the "Accutech" part of the book, understandable as the movie can't be 4 hours long, we don't get a good feel for how the bad guys recover Bob's bullet. In the book they had Bob on a shooting range and recovered his bullets from a sand trap behind the targets.
• Because they don't go in to the "Accutech" part of the book, Nick Memphis is portrayed as a bumbling, nobody, rookie agent, instead of the seasoned, smart, former sniper that he is.
• I hate hate hate that they ignored the part of the book where Bob gets himself "killed" trying to bury his dog. This is a vital part of the book that allows Bob to walk around freely, and a neat part of the book where we learn how careful, smart, and good Bob is.
• I like the fact that they left in the part where Nick is about to be forced to kill himself, and Bob saves him. That was a nicely done scene.
• I hated how they did the shoot out on the hill scene. In the book Bob did not have any explosives, or mines to help him out. He took out the entire squad himself... with a bolt action rifle.
• In the book, the bad guys take Memphis and Bob on a wild goose chase through the Arkansas back woods on the first day of hunting season, where Bob outsmarts them and kills both of them. The revenge at the cabin in the movie made Bob look simply like a killer, not a soldier who only kills when he has to like in the book.