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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?
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.
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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