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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?
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
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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.
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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 ;)
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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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