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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 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".
I don't mean to be a snob, but what is your level of exposure to cinema? I have serious doubts that someone who name drops Wicked as an example of a visually qualitative piece of art can really meaningfully contribute to the discussion, as it's such an indisputably cheap, commercial money-grab project that looks and sounds horrible from start to finish.
I mean, just look at this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=amgPXKrFZVg&list=RDamgPXKrFZVg&start_radio=1
The colour grading and lighting is amateurish beyond belief, the camera does NOTHING to match the rising rhythm of the song, the editing is either bored or downright sloppy - I see nothing of quality here whatsoever.
To exemplify what we mean by "declining quality", we can stay within the Musical genre (not my favourite, but for the sake of argument) and just look back 10 years at the way La La Land looked and felt: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_8w9rOpV3gc
I'm not saying this clip is perfect beyond reproach, but look at how much they do with such a simple set-up! Great blocking, expressive colours, a smooth, sailing tracking shot that both drives home the intimacy of the moment and captures the rising, sweeping melody of the music. The visual humour of Gosling and Stone's characters going from tense and distant, to mocking each other's movements, to finally dancing together also feels effortless in its precision. Everything is in its right place.
Still staying within the Musical genre, we can go even further back and look at a scene from Singin' in the Rain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DPBKYwJo3nQ
Once again - look at how much the camera and actors can do with such a simple set-up! 3 men in a small, mundane rehearsal space, wearing normal clothing. The visual haptic quality of the colouring is impeccable, every surface feels graspable and delightful to the eye. The camera movement is disciplined and yet still feels free and light, the editing is dynamic and seamless, the actors positioning and motion makes every single frame look competently composed, there isn't a second of ugliness or excess to be found. And this is, once again, a scene of 2 guys singing and dancing while a third guy watches in a small, unremarkable interior. Massive Hollywood studios today shovel tens of millions of dollars into visual effects, luxurious costumes, huge set pieces, and yet the outcome still feels smaller and more constrained than extremely simple scenes from 50 years ago, because they simply do not know or do not care for using the capacities of the art form to their fullest extent. Great editing can make the most low-stakes situation seem gigantic. Likewise, bad editing can make a 1 million dollar set piece feel cheap and stuffy.
I know I'm being an arrogant prick - forgive me - but I desperately recommend expanding your horizon. There's so much great stuff out there in cinema, and none of it can be found in Wicked. I don't even really like Musicals as a genre! But even Musicals can be great examples of what moviemaking can accomplish.
As self-appointed judge, I sentence you to watch Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. You'll like it, I promise.
I agree with everything you say. But the examples here are some of the greatest movies of all time and seems to me like survivorship bias. Also the changing dynamic of the attention economy compared to 1950s is certainly a factor: how many Hollywood live musical movies in 1950s are there compared with 2020s? I'm also saying there can be a lot of rose-tinted glasses about the past as well.
You're absolutely right about survivorship bias, the vast majority of movies made in the "Golden Age of Hollywood" are tedious, boring kitsch. I would nonetheless wager that the average blockbuster big studio production of the 1920's-1950's was more artistically inclined, visually disciplined, and willing to take risks than their contemporary analogues. They are, on the whole, still substantially better and more interesting. Consider that Citizen Kane was a massive crowd pleasing box office sensation, directed by an unseasoned stage actor in his 20's endowed with a massive budget by a studio willing to take an enormous gamble - and is today considered a high watermark of American cinema to the point of being an elitist preference. We just don't see the stars align like this anymore in Hollywood, the corporate profit-incentive and the byzantine system of legally negotiated regulatory relationships between studios, the SAG, and unions has completely devoured the appetite for risk and exploration.
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