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I want to talk a little bit about film and television adaptions, and why, at least in the last ten to fifteen years, they've done such a bad job at adapting the source material. The first guilty party on this front, is of course Nolan's Odyssey, which I saw this past Tuesday. While entertaining and beautiful to look at, this film failed completely to capture the experience of reading or listening to the poem it's based on. The dialogue was flat, wooden, and filled with exposition dumps. The gods aren't present in any meaningful way, other than through storms and other weather events, which can easily be interpreted through the eyes of atheist Christopher Nolan as natural phenomena. And most importantly, the characters and themes are unrecognizable. Odysseus is just Matt Damon who feels bad about being Matt Damon: there's none of the flirtatious, prideful intelligence that defines his character in the poem. Because of this subversion of Odysseus, Telemachus's character also falls flat— how can you have an effective coming of age story when you subvert and deconstruct every part of what it means to be a man/king/father figure by tearing down Odysseus?
I don't think this phenomena is limited to the Odyssey. The newest version of Wuthering Heights is basically a porno. The final seasons of Games of Thrones devolved into a nihilistic gore-fest, which the source material most certainly is not. Even the Hobbit all the way back in 2012-2014 tried to make the charming, relatively low stakes kids book into another version of The Lord of the Rings.
It's tempting for me to blame woke for a lot of these changes, and that's undoubtedly part of it. If many of the values that were historically important in Western Civilization are now taboo, of course there will have to be heavy modification of the source material. However, I don't think this is the full picture. Many of these movies are doing really well at the box office, and I don't think woke has that much cultural appeal to the average American. Rather, I think a combination of the inherent limitations of visual storytelling and the dumbing down of stories in general because of reductions in attention spans is a more likely set of culprits.
Neil Postman wrote extensively about the first problem in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Visual media neither gives us the interiority that allows us to understand a point of view from the inside, nor really forces us to engage with an artists arguments: the movie will play on with or without our engagement in it.
I don't think this critique is entirely fair. You can certainly do a lot of subtle storytelling with television and film. The problem is now that people's attention spans are so fried that you need to beat them over the head with the themes of the work through dialogue and exposition dumps. The Odyssey is extremely guilty of this, which is probably part of the reason I had such a hard time watching it.
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
Counter examples: Dune, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger Games prequel), Project Hail Mary, The Boys (TV) I haven't seen, Poor Things, Wicked (I believe Wicked fans loved it for how it's faithful and enhanced the stage play), Mickey 17, The Housemaid, Running Man, Slow Horses (TV), The Queen's Gambit, I never saw Bridgerton but I heard good things. And so on.
Even for The Odyssey, there is also the alternative choice of The Return (2024 film) which I also haven't seen.
I guess I'm not really sure what quality are you trying to look for? is it specifically faithfulness to the original? It's clear to me that Nolan's Odyssey clearly takes a lot from Judeo-Christianity and is more of a commentary on that than trying to stay close to the text.
And btw, the pipeline of manga/manwha/manhua to anime/aeni/donghua is strong.
Wicked is an adaption of the play not of the book. Much easier to pull off. I didn't care for PHM (although to be fair, I didn't care for the book either). The Boys starts off fine, but goes off the rails when it starts deviating from its source material too much.
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I don't know why you'd list a bunch of movies and TV shows you haven't seen to contradict the claim that movies are bad. How do you know they prove your point?
I counted 3 things in that list I haven't seen.
But anyway, of the ones I have seen I thought they were good experiences and I would recommend to people. I also don't see them as relatively worse than other older adaptations. So anyway, the examples I listed are the reasons why I disagree that "visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade".
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I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted? Has most of Greek myth?
It is hard to say that Hollywood has recently gotten bad at adaptations, if they've never been very good at adaptations.
I enjoyed the movie Jason and the Argonauts, but I wouldn't say it is the most faithful adaptation of the Argonautica. I enjoyed Troy, but I wouldn't say it was a totally faithful retelling of the Illiad.
While I agree that Nolan's Odyssey was unfaithful in various ways, I actually thought it was more faithful than a lot of past attempts, since it at least tried to do something with the themes of xenia that almost all modern adaptations adapt out.
I almost wonder if a "faithful" adaptation of something like the Odyssey or Illiad wouldn't use a framing device similar to the Princess Bride. Maybe an opening scene with Homer as a bard, telling the poem to an audience, and then you could include abbreviated versions of the catalogue of ships in the Illiad and other parts that always get dropped in adaptations, while showing how the audience at the time reacted to those sections.
Maybe you could make it so it is not a single bard telling the story, but a series of bards and scholars all adding their own bits. Have the segment where Odysseus first lands back on Ithaca told with a framing story of the neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry telling all of the supposed symbolism of the cave of the nymphs (which gets dropped in almost every adaptation, as a supposedly totally superfluous scene.) Maybe add some of the bits that happen after the Odyssey ends, from the Greek dramas, using the plays as the framing device for that part of the story.
Now granted, my proposed adaptation has the potential to be the most boring and meandering version of the story of the Trojan war ever put to film (people want faithful, but does anyone actually want catalogue-of-ships faithful?), but I think it would at least be a different take some could appreciate.
No one wants a faithful adaptation of the odyssey. It’s be an NC-17 art film, which fair enough, there’s an audience for… but it would also have a much longer runtime than clockwork orange.
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ISTR seeing a TV miniseries version in the 90s that was a pretty direct port -- it's not like the story is super-complex really?
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened, but I think (for instance) the Biblical epics of the 50s/60s didn't do this?
I've seen that adaptation, and I think it dropped central themes of the story. Xenia truly is central to that story, and I don't remember it being emphasized at all in the TV movie adaptation.
I think there are valid complaints you could make of how hamfistedly Nolan crammed "Zeus's law"/xenia into the narrative, but his choice to try and include it at least makes it feel more like the original epic in some ways.
(I say that even if I also think Nolan removed a lot of opportunities to emphasize the importance of xenia in the story, like Polyphemus saying his xenia was to eat Odysseus last, or Nausicaa and the Phaeacians finally showing how civilized folk treat Odysseus with hospitality, which also works as a good reminder of what sacred laws the suitors are violating right before the final arc of the epic.)
I will say that I would have liked Odysseus' cunning and trickster tendencies to shine through more. I couldn't really see Matt Damon's Odysseus attempting to lie to Athena-in-disguise, much to the latter's delight.
The nature of storytelling is that new retellings emphasize different things than the original.
Almost no Westerner retelling the Prodigal Son story ever mentions the famine that happens in the middle of the story. The Song of Hiawatha emphasizes different things than the original Indian version of the story. Sir Orpheo gives the Orpheus myth a happy ending.
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
Surely not -- but at some point it feels like they started doing it themselves -- "The Maltese Falcon" is pretty interchangeable with the book; Cecil B. Demille mostly played it straight in his Biblical epics.
Not sure when this changed -- various mass-market James Clavell/Tom Clancy adaptations into the 90s seemed pretty true to the books, although I'm sure there are counter-examples from this period?
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Pretty much. I also think that movies are uniquely limited in their ability to tell deep, thematically complex stories about psychologically whole characters. Certainly, the most virtuosic films can pull it off, but it's so difficult that we regard it as effectively magical when it happens. A book can have a duration of dozens of hours. It can take you on digressions with little regard for your need to be stimulated. The mental act of immersing yourself in the written word is enough to keep you engaged. Films, on the other hand, plateau at around 3 hours in length. Durations longer than that tend to be quite unpalatable to most audiences. As a result, they cannot spend nearly as much time creating rich worlds and instead have to "keep things moving."
Many people aware of this tend to prefer watching prestige TV shows, so they can see characters develop over the span of many hours. However, TV production has its own set of problems: more stringent budgets, more demanding and intricate production schedules, lower profitability resulting in less ambition, etc.
Yeah, I rhink longer short stories/articles to shorter novellas are more the right length if a good film adaption.
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I've been toying with the idea of working out whether faithfulness to the source material is correlated with quality of the end product.
Lords of the Rings was pretty faithful to the books, and an excellent series of films, while the Hobbit was less faithful and much less good, although I can easily imagine a faithful adaptation that was bad, since I'd say the main problem with the Hobbit was that it allowed Peter Jackson complete control to bring out his worst impulses.
The Dune films have been very faithful to the books and I would say good films in general.
The Watchmen film was infamously too faithful to the graphic novel and suffered for it.
Shogun was very loyal to the book and was excellent.
I can't think of any adaptations that are very different to the source material but still good, but I suspect in those cases the film/TV adaptation could end up eclipsing the original, which fades from public memory.
The Shining? Most Hitchcock movies? The Shawshank Redemption departs from its source material in lots of subtle ways. LA Confidential retains the feel of its source novel, although the plot is dramatically simplified and the more extreme content toned down. Trainspotting is more like a collection of short stories set in the same universe compared to the film's streamlined plot. Minority Report had the exact opposite message to its source material. Children of Men is brilliant, but my understanding is that it has little in common with the source material beyond the basic premise of a fertility crisis and some of the characters' names. The director didn't even read the book his film was based on.
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There are quite a few movies that are usually considered to be better than the books on which they were based. Unfortunately, most of the classic examples here (Jaws, The Godfather, Fight Club, Forrest Gump) I haven't read. Not to mention that the order you're exposed to them could matter.
I have seen that claim for Jurassic Park, but I'll say I quite like both.
Fight Club is worth reading once, but the film is definitely superior. Even the author thinks the film has a better ending.
It's more than twenty years since I read The Godfather, but the film was wise to drop one of the novel's most bizarre and out-of-place subplots.
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Lords of the Rings was pretty faithful to the books, and an excellent series of films, while the Hobbit was less faithful and much less good, although I can easily imagine a faithful adaptation that was bad, since I'd say the main problem with the Hobbit was that it allowed Peter Jackson complete control to bring out his worst impulses.
The problem with the Hobbit movies was the attempt to stretch the material to three films. I have a theory that Tolkien (and CS Lewis) had a secret sauce that the culture has now lost such that any attempt by moderns to flesh out the material he only sketched will fail - with the most visible examples being the Radagast and Dol Guldur scenes in the Hobbit and Amazon's execrable Rings of Power
They're going to give us a talking Balrog and a poetry-reciting Orc. It's going to be so bad. I can't wait.
E.g. Sauron is stymied in his efforts to make the One Ring because he killed Celebrimbor, the only guy who knows how to make the magic rings. You remember, the guy he had to teach about "alloys" in season one? Car crash train wreck doesn't even begin to describe how effed-up this disaster is. It will be spectacular. I'm already anticipating the video reviews, I have no idea if Critical Drinker's liver will survive 😁
The poetry-reciting Orc sounds like something in the tradition of Douglas Adams' Vogons. Except it won't be funny.
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They've re-invented Vogons!
We'll have to wait and hear what the little rhyme is before we can compare the poetic output.
I've gone through all the stages of grief out the other side. Now I can calmly contemplate that this is not a Tolkien adaptation, this is bad original character fanfiction. Watching and reviewing it on its own merits just makes it fun ('So the monster living under the mines is going to tell us its back story? Can't wait. No more Harfoots? What happened, did they get eaten by the Balrog?') I'm just hoping we'll get something as hilariously terrible as floomp-monster Sauron from the second season.
(Glads was snuggling up to that. Yeah. Lovely.)
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Watchman was a bad graphic novel and a bad movie so I guess that is technically correct?
I think the poster child for a movie deviating from the source material because it was necessary for the medium is Jurassic Park. I love the book, and from time to time would lament the deviations, but realistically Spielberg and company mostly made necessary cuts and changes to both keep the pace high, keep it from getting too in the weeds of the science and, ultimately to preserve the PG13 rating.
Oh yeah, there are always going to be tensions between 'fans who want absolute fidelity to the source material' and 'necessary changes because film is a different medium'.
But I honestly think Nolan's Odyssey would have been better all round if he had been brave enough to do a totally different adaptation, let's say set it in the aftermath of the Korean War. He could more easily have had his returning 'war is hell' war hero male lead, staunch home front keeping it all together female lead, war profiteer suitor, 'alas alas the destruction we wreaked on those faraway lands we fought over' messaging etc. and wouldn't have turned the source material into I'm The Goddamn BatMemnon.
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Does Apocalypse Now count? Or is it too similar to be considered very different, or is it too different to be considered an adaptation, or is it not good? For bonus points, where does Spec Ops: The Line sit?
Blade Runner and Total Recall are also both quite different from the source material, but arguably not good, though I'd argue against that.
I'm not sure if spiritual adaptations should count. Although I suppose Heart of Darkness is in the public domain.
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Strongly disagree that the Dune movies were faithful to the books. But to be fair, so much of the book was driven by Paul's internal conflict that making a movie which matched it thematically may be impossible. Still I would say that on the scale of faithfulness, if Lord of the Rings was an 8/10, Dune would be 6/10 at best. The elevation of Chani to a main character and the viewpoint shift that frames the Atreides as the next in a series of colonizers make the first movie almost unrecognizable, tonally, from the book.
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I don't trust the taste of anyone with this opinion. The problems with that film were all the opposite; things it misunderstood or outright trashed from the comic.
To be fair, a good number of fans of the original seem to actually prefer the change Snyder made to the ending.
I wouldn’t consider those to be "fans".
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What about Green Knight? I read the original for fun in high school, and I enjoyed it as a film despite it not being a very faithful adaptation.
I have more mixed feelings about them but Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Frankenstein were at least interesting films, even if some of the changes were quite baffling.
I absolutely hated the Green Knight, and felt it was just another example of Hollywood thinking "If we subvert the original that makes it deep and interesting!"
I loved his Frankenstein actually, my favorite adaptation of any I've seen. It's like he saw the midwit meme about Frankenstein being the name of the doctor, not the name of the monster, and leaned into it 100%.
https://i.redd.it/9wxxw22oqis91.jpg
I was personally pretty lukewarm on Frankenstein. (Spoilers below for GDT's adaptation.)
I feel like making the monster immortal undermined the way Frankenstein actually overcame death (by animating a creature made out of dead people), and while I thought it did a good job highlighting parts of the original novel I hadn't picked up on the first time I read it (such as the implicit comparison between the polar expedition and Frankenstein's experiments), I also just think it made a lot of del-Toro-esque changes that actually undermined many strengths of the original story.
Having no aborted female creature, and making Frankenstein kill his fiancee instead of the monster, actually felt like weird attempts by del Toro to minimize some of the worst things the monster does in the story, but it makes the monster less human not more. In the original story, the monster is a true tabula rasa, and it is because he is treated like a monster by most of the world that he lashes out and kills people around Frankenstein. But in del Toro's telling, the monster is a sort of living embodiment of the trauma of the war that killed the people he is a composite of, and not truly a blank slate. And he doesn't do bad things like kill Frankenstein's relatives, because del Toro thinks monsters shouldn't do bad things or something.
Like I get it, this is the guy who saw Creature from the Black Lagoon, and sympathised with the woman-kidnapping creature instead of the woman, but does he not see how Frankenstein's monster is actually more compellingly human if he does horrible things?
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No adaptation (used loosely) can ever beat Young Frankenstein for me.
Young Frankenstein is in second place for me after del Toro's
Can’t say fairer than that :)
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Excellent series of films, absolutely. Faithful to the book, absolutely not. They made serious changes to the source material in the LOTR movies, ones which I think made the movies worse off.
Is it leaving the Shire un-scoured?
That's bad, yeah. The hobbit characters lost the final part of their arcs as a result. But the worst thing IMO was discarding Tolkien's story themes because they weren't the story he wanted to tell, like the changes to Faramir or the "go home, Sam" scene in ROTK. The movies are great movies, but when you discard core themes of the original story you aren't making a very faithful adaptation.
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In the spectrum of movie adaptations, the Jackson movies (while I have my problems with them) were fairly faithful. You cannot set the standard at "nothing whatsoever is changed."
Certainly as a Tolkien überfan I wish that certain things had been done better, but there are some elements that one would never hope in a million years for that got included.
My standard is not "nothing whatsoever is changed", but I do expect an adaptation to uphold the core themes of the original work. The LOTR movies do not: one of the most important themes of the book is that the One Ring is a powerful temptation, but that there are stronger things still. Friendship, like between Frodo and Sam, is stronger than the pull of the Ring. Faramir is so dedicated to right action that he says "even if I found it by the highway I would not pick it up", and lives up to that claim. Jackson chose to discard those moments (per the movie commentary) because they didn't fit with the story he wanted to tell of the corrupting power of the One Ring, and felt they diminished that aspect. But in so doing, he eliminated one of the core themes of LOTR. That makes them not particularly faithful adaptations.
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How would you rate starship troopers?
I don't even think the director read the book. The two pieces really don't share anything but a name. The movie is fun, though.
I love both the book and the film, despite them being at best sharing only names.
My favorite parts are the news clips and I think of the mom cheering the kids stomping on bugs propoganda every time I stomp an invasive lantern fly.
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According to the director, he read the first two chapters, got disgusted with it, and then asked one of his assistants to read it for him and give him a summary. Forget the parody of the book aspect, it must have been a terrible summary because half the movie should have been bootcamp plus another 20% with Johnny going to OCS to be a truly faithful adaptation ;)
AIUI, he wanted to do a completely unrelated sci-fi action movie, but only got greenlight with an established IP attached. The end result was a sort of bitter compromise that somehow merged into something excellent.
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"The Hobbit" should have been one movie, it was the studio with visions of $$$$$$ dancing in their heads that wanted a repeat of the LoTR trilogy. I thought the changes were bad overall (though the parts where Jackson got it right were fantastic) and hoped future adaptations of the works would be better and less money-grubbing.
And then we got "Rings of Power", and I threw myself sobbing and wailing at Jackson's feet going "Forgive me, Peter! I didn't know when I had it good!"
I haven't seen "The Odyssey" and have no interest in seeing it, but most of the reviews I've seen have been "good action movie, you won't find it too long, but it ain't Homer's Odyssey". What I've taken away is "Nolan - great cinematographer, totally crap at scriptwriting and not interested in the characters as characters".
EDIT: I mean, the guy puts in this line, and it's not a parody or joke but really in the movie: "Our Age of Bronze is collapsing!" Well, isn't it convenient PTSD returnee knows precisely which historical epoch description future historians will use?
There was already a perfectly good Hobbit movie; there was no need for another one.
But, of course, the Lord of the Rings trilogy made a billion dollars each, and asking Hollywood not to make a sequel to a commercially successful film is like asking the scorpion not to sting.
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I have a vague theory that it's because the writer's room is now part of the establishment.
The 1950s and 60s are generally considered to be the golden age of sci-fi. A lot of the writers during that period were some form of communist at a time when it was not a good idea to publicly be a communist. (I'll get to Heinlein. Take your hands off the keyboard and let me finish.)
Heinlein is an interesting case, because he also had some fairly controversial and unorthodox opinions for the time - just in the other direction.
The 1980s and 1990s are generally considered to the the golden age of syndicated network TV. The writers at the time were disproportionately into gay rights at a time when it was not a good idea to be publicly into gay rights.
There's also the area of literature and film outside of samizdat in Soviet Russia.
In all three of these cases, a large contingent of writers were activists in times when being an activist carried real and significant negative consequences. This had two impacts on writing quality:
These days, the writer's room aligns with the broader mores and taboos of the neoliberal elite. There's no risk, and anybody who has opinions that go against the grain get self-policed before they can produce popular content.
In the absence of risk, the stories don't have selective pressure forcing them to be nuanced and well written, so we get what you describe instead.
Starship Troopers and opposition to actual Communism notwithstanding, a lot of Heinlein's beliefs were progressive for the time, and a lot of Heinlein's other beliefs (like the gun rights) would be normal for his time. They just don't seem that way now because of changes in society.
(Consider George Orwell, who was a socialist, even though he wrote Animal Farm.)
Were the gun rights positions normal for the time? I've always understood 1940-1990 to represent the nadir of pro gun stances in the US.
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When were adaptations good in your experience? How did, say, Hitchhiker's Guide and Princess Bride pull it off whereas other adaptations didn't? And are there truly more worse adaptations (or a higher percentage), or just a chunk of high-profile... well, not flops, since a lot of what I'd consider "bad adaptations" are still popular and making bank, as you yourself say.
Was a radio show before it was a book. (Or at least the first two books were - the rather obscure later series of the radio show were based on the later books).
The BBC TV show is supposed to be an adaptation of the radio show, not the book. I'm not sure about the other material in the franchise.
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Making a good adaptation is hard. Making a faithful adaptation is hard. Making a good adaptation that is faithful to the source material is a Herculean task.
Faithful adaptations are hard because when you shift medium, you lose tools that are available to the source material. The easiest example is a book written in first person. Even if you try to approximate that experience in film with tools like narration, you lose the immediacy of the written experience. This is why Stephen King film adaptations almost universally suck, for example.
At the same time, making a good adaptation is hard because you run straight into the problems of Hollywood filmmaking. Writing about things is cheap. Putting them on a screen requires money for fim crews, sets, special effects, actors, insurance, and God only knows what else. At the same time there are extensive pressures at every level for people to "put their mark" on the property, which is compounded by industry-wide disrespect for a lot of fiction (see: The Witcher).
To get both, you need a talented, obsessive individual with a ton of industry clout, fuck-you money, and a willingness to put his own ego aside in service to the original property. Good luck finding many of them.
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Let's have a look at what Rotten Tomatoes considers the 300 best movies of all time:
That's just from the top fifty: according to ChatGPT, 29% of the list are adaptations of one kind or another.
Counterpoint - just because something is a good movie doesn't make it a good adaptation. Have you read the original Wizard of Oz? The movie changed a ton of things for better or worse. Dorothy is younger in the books and they're generally more silly and childlike, almost more akin to Alice in Wonderland just in some of the whimsical scenarios that come up. Wizard of Oz is one where actually the movie had more staying power and firmly grounded itself in the public consciousness, probably thanks to all those syndicated network broadcasts over the years.
Point taken, although I took @thejdizzler's point to be "Hollywood no longer knows how to make adaptations that are good movies" rather than "Hollywood no longer knows how to make faithful adaptations".
Roughly yes. I don’t mind if an adaption strays from the canon as long as the changes reinforce the themes that I think the story is aiming for.
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I liked Hitchhiker's Guide for capturing the atmosphere of the book(s) really well. The Lord of the Rings I also really enjoyed. Anything Kubrick has done (other than Clockwork Orange) is a good adaption in my books. The first Jurassic Park movie is a really good adaption as well.
I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is particularly interesting as an example of a movie and novel that were co-written simultaneously, so neither is directly an adaptation of the other.
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Harry Potter. It had flaws including attempts to cram too much in, but the movies were pretty good.
Strong disagree. The Harry Potter movies are AWFUL. They are like a highlights reel of all the books' best action and dramatic moments (or entirely invented action and dramatic moments, like the burning of the Burrow) without any of the plot threads or character development that actually make those moments MEAN something. They are impossible to follow if you have never read the novels.
Only the first two are good, precisely because they stick close to the source material.
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