The mini-series fully deserves 10 stars. The framing device - Gulliver comes back from sea, tells a wild tale of his experiences, is committed to an asylum, tells further wild tales on further occasions, and is finally vindicated - has no foundation in the book, but neither does it alter the substance of the tales Swift wrote. Another major change is in the ending.
Unlike so many adaptations, the film tells of all four of Gulliver's voyages - it is not limited to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The first and second are altered by having Gulliver's voyage from Lilliliput end, not in rescue by an English ship, but in landfall on the Brobdingnagian coast. It is implied that the two lands are a considerable distance apart, but the book has Lilliput and its enemy Blefuscu lie in the Indian Ocean, whereas Brobdingnag is a peninsula off the coast of Alaska. The deviation is an intelligent piece of adaptation, and typical of the care taken by the adaptors to make a film of the book, rather than of something rather distantly based on it.
Special props to Warwick Davis, who turned in a thoroughly convincing performance as Gulliver's dwarf tormentor at the Brobdingnagian court, and to Tom Sturridge: that Gulliver has a son is sort of implied, since the book says he has children.
Ted Danson made the part of Gulliver his own. He inhabited it as thoroughly as Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett have inhabited that of Sherlock Holmes.
Unlike so many adaptations, the film tells of all four of Gulliver's voyages - it is not limited to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The first and second are altered by having Gulliver's voyage from Lilliliput end, not in rescue by an English ship, but in landfall on the Brobdingnagian coast. It is implied that the two lands are a considerable distance apart, but the book has Lilliput and its enemy Blefuscu lie in the Indian Ocean, whereas Brobdingnag is a peninsula off the coast of Alaska. The deviation is an intelligent piece of adaptation, and typical of the care taken by the adaptors to make a film of the book, rather than of something rather distantly based on it.
Special props to Warwick Davis, who turned in a thoroughly convincing performance as Gulliver's dwarf tormentor at the Brobdingnagian court, and to Tom Sturridge: that Gulliver has a son is sort of implied, since the book says he has children.
Ted Danson made the part of Gulliver his own. He inhabited it as thoroughly as Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett have inhabited that of Sherlock Holmes.