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The first time I saw The Shining, it rocked. Then I read the book, and the movie didn't measure up. The TV version was truer to the book, but lame. Question: In your opinion, did Kubrick do a good job?
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Kubrick messed up big time because although he essential changed it from a story about both madness and the supernatural to one about madness, he still cheated in the movie by letting the supernatural in, specifically in the unlocking of the freezer door and the picture at the end with Jack in it as the old caretaker(which of course makes no logical sense), and because he didn't believe in the supernatural or feel particularly inspired by the feeling of it. The supernatural was tossed in only in a few jarring cheats, actually lessening the coherence of the movie.
Nevertheless, he put out a very watchable movie with some classic moments, brilliant camera work, and some real chills and eerie moments. The casting was great, and good attention was sometimes paid to atmosphere, the foundation of horror.
The use of the axe instead of the croquet mallet was probably regretable over-all, but it's hard to miss the blunt, as it were, scariness of an axe, and Kubrick used its effect well, even in camera moves.
A terrible waste of time and huge cheat was the endless draggy progression of handyman Scatman Crothers back to the Overlook Hotel only to be immediately hacked to death without even a fight. This wasn't a subversion of audience expectation to throw them into a more disorienting, unknown world like Janet Leigh's death in the shower shortly into Psycho was; it was the same world expressed no more interestingly or precariously. It was simply a very padded waste of time and a cheat of audience expectations to no end, except to give Jack someone to kill besides the other main characters. It seemed to show his distaste for the material, the genre and its conventions, and the audience, at once.
It was ultimately a project he couldn't quite believe in even as he took it on. It winds up being in many ways watchable despite him rather than because of him. When he surrendered to the material and worked with the brooding, lonely atmosphere of the hotel to create creepy moods with the kid, and when he focuses on letting Nicholson's talent loose, the movie soars. It's material he needed to let find its own rhythm more, as his own interjections showed a great deal of his own indifference.
P.S. -- the hedge maze scene in the book was easily one of the best, and it is missing from the movie. Although it would have been hard to create with the special effects of the day, it was a gigantic loss.
And the end was pretty much a loss all around.