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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.
I don't know if this is a great list of counter-examples...
Out of the movies I've seen in that list, only Poor Things strikes me as exceptional and encouraging for the future of the art form. Most of the others you mention fall in the category of "acceptable/mediocre" or, in cases like Dune, "good enough/enjoyable". Wicked is an incredibly ugly movie, no idea why it made this list - all the garish, cheap kitsch of Broadway blown up to the scale of the large screen.
The Queens Gambit is actually a great example of the dumbing-down of Hollywood, as it is a show about a troubled child becoming a chess prodigy that virtually never manages to showcase the game of chess itself in any kind of substantive matter. Seriously, rewatch the show. They namedrop various chess moves yet virtually never actually show them or allow the structure and development of a game to speak for itself. The camera in the Queens Gambit is literally afraid of lingering on the chessboard, lest the viewer actually take an interest in what is happening there - why should we need to see the protagonist get better at the game when we can just have a voice tell us "checkmate" while the camera pans to her opponent making a sad face? The Queens Gambit is not about chess - it is, like every trite and tired prestige show of the last 10 years, solely about trauma and the emotional labour of processing it, with some gender war slop mixed into it. Terrible, deeply anti-intellectual show and I'm glad the actual real-life female chess prodigy Nona Gaprindashvili succesfully sued Netflix for the way it slandered her legacy by namedropping her as someone "who never faced male chess players" (an utter lie) so that the fictional female American chess prodigy's victory would have more narrative impact.
I do think there are interesting and promising things happening on the margins of Hollywood and in cinema broadly speaking - Kane Parson's "Backrooms" movie was a bit of a letdown for me, but the videos on his Youtube channel are still astoundingly impressive, considering they are made by a single teenage individual using a simple rendering tool. Rendering and Visual Effects programs (and yes, also AI) becoming more accessible means that the most expensive art form in human history is being heavily democratised - the monopoly of cinema will no longer rest in the hands of a handful of greedy studios. We are already witnessing the rise of high-quality, high-concept short videos being made with the help of AI that can easily compete with much of what Hollywood has to offer in terms of visual and narrative quality, such as this series of AI videos made by an Italian filmmaker about a young boy documenting his grandmother, the last Giant of her island: https://instagram.com/leo_cannone/reel/Db8IvzCs5Lz/
I welcome the decline of Hollywood. I hope the big studios bet on all the wrong horses and incur tremendous financial misfortune. The art form will continue whether Paramount exists or not.
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