It's a great movie, but I feel like some of the themes that are put forward in the first half, like feminism or socialism/social inequality, are not addressed in the second half, so while it remains funny and thought-provoking, it kinda doesn't delevop on its messages. A comment I found on reddit:
There were some aspects of the book that were kept, but those aspects lost their whole point and didn't take on a new one:
Godwin (according to McCandless, but the whole epistolary parts of the novel was removed) being Frankensteinian himself. In the book, Godwin's ugliness is what contributed to him being the compassionate and altruistic person he was. He was the most kind and extraordinarily good person McCandless and Bella/Victoria had ever met. McCandless's version of events made him physically ugly because he was jealous of Godwin (because, according to Victoria, she was in love with Godwin, but he didn't return feelings and she settled for McCandless). There was no obvious point in making him so ugly unless it was just supposed to be that his father experimented on him so he's doing it to others, but the film was not that deep or introspective, so this feels like a deeply (and unearned) charitable interpretation. This example also shows a shift from Gray's worldview to YL's darker one.
McCandless being there at all. It is unclear why they didn't just create a new character and get rid of McCandless altogether. This character is so far from the original, it is unclear why they kept him. In the book, McCandless, like Godwin and Wedderburn, is the illegitimate son of an upper class man who exploited serving class girls and women. According to McCandless, all three of these men were in love with Bella, which can be read as the men carrying out what their father's did; they were now upper class men who were too insecure to be with women of their own class and instead exploited serving class women (or Bella who literally has the brain and development of a child when they meet her). In the book, nobody liked McCandless. Even McCandless's account implied that Godwin didn't like him much (until later), and Victoria's account was that none of them like him but merely pitied him and McCandless grew on them. Tbh in the book, McCandless was giving (complex and damaged) incel, and he had some remarkably funny lines. In the movie, he has no dimension to him at all.
In the book, Bella is Godwin's assistant in surgeries, and this work precedes her decision to become a doctor. In the movie, she out of nowhere is like "I want to be a doctor!" but there is no background to explain why her character is saying this. She had shown no interest or skill in being a doctor or healthcare. The closest was an act of cruelty where she stabbed a corpse's face like 10+ times (which book Bella would not do). That was as close as movie Bella got to acting in a medical setting.
The title Poor Things. The book was called this because it reveals a whole society, where there is a class-based hierarchy wherein people exploit people out of (financial, emotional, intellectual, etc.) insecurity. There is little to no indication that people act on insecurity in the film; instead, they just assume that people act violently and cruelly because that's how people really are, so they have no use for psychology or psychosocial commentary. Another example of departing from Gray's worldview to YL's
In fact, the film's character's are not dynamic. Bella is the closest, and she is honestly a husk. In the book, Godwin and McCandless were whole people whom you empathized with. There is nothing to them in the film. They very boringly made Godwin a cliched paternal figure who controlled Bella and spouted off about Objectivity™ and Rationality™, and those characteristics were the complete opposite of Gray's Godwin. Godwin allowed Bella so much freedom, and he strongly pushed back on the coldness (and wrongness) of Rationality™ and Objectivity™.
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