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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.
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 😁
A poetry reciting orc isn't so strange, they may be crude, but they are still intelligent beings with cultures of their own, they even come up with and sing songs.
It really is a shame that the people who write and make these shows have no real interest in fantasy, or at least not a Tolkien’s particular style of dark age fantasy, I've always been fascinated by the glimpses we get of the cultures that fall under the dominion of Sauron (and the Witch King). But you really need someone with a deep appreciation for history to pull that off in an interesting way, I suppose that's why a lot of the OG Warhammer guys did such a good job with their writing when creating their settings and cultures.
The orc artisans who made Grond always go tragically unappreciated.
I mean, orcs are said to be very clever at devices of destruction and mischief. RoP's sin isn't that it wants to discuss orc culture, it's that it wants to claims orcs have culture without discussing it. One orc has.a wife and child? Well, what does that mean for orc society? How do they rear/partner/etc? Is he an outlier, or is this the way most of them are? But it doesn't care, it just mentions it and says "oh, you should feel bad for Daddy's children, they can feel emotions too!" without going in to "well, are they always cruel to the men around them, do some want to learn to be farmers, do they have songs and art and anything that would actually make them a culture rather than just violent mooks?"
RoP claims to want to start a conversation, but the writers either don't want to or don't know how to say anything.
That said, whoever is doing some of the background stuff and minor writing bits clearly knows their LotR and cares very deeply. There's a lot of little stuff that's sadly overshadowed by the main writing.
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