Not sure why the downvotes. Perhaps it’s due to referring to Fear and Loathing as a movie instead of the book it’s based on. The movie is actually a good representation of the book and almost all of the dialog is taken word-for-word
Las Vegas is a tiny book. It's a great book, a story about excess and the American dream. And the movie is the dialog word-for-word, but it adds nothing to the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson. It's Depp getting famous by riding the fame of Hunter. And it is generally thought as a movie about taking drugs and doing crazy things. And, I might be wrong here, but this is how I see it after many of my schoolmates watched it and were quoting the scenes.
And I like the movie. I love his writing. And I think Terry Gilliam was the right director to do this movie. I still kind of want to reject this idea of this movie to be the first thing people think when they talk about Hunter. He was so much more.
Depp was already more famous than Thompson when the movie was made, not that that counts for much.