Pi in the Sky

Adaptation. The thief of ideas

Posted on February 15th, 2010 at 2:24pm by Pi.
Categories: Reading, Moving Pictures, Untranslated.

Well, here I am with another large article no one will read just because I feel like writing it. This time it’s about movie adaptations. The title itself comes from the spanish title of the movie Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002), which is a movie about adaptations from another medium to cinema. But, instead of doing some large essay about the theory of adaptations, how they have been implemented, and putting some examples at the end, I’ll do something different. I’ll just write about my opinions on some adaptations, why I have such opinions, and the relative merits and faults of such adaptations.

Just basing an entire essay about my personal opinions makes me want to write another essay about critics and criticism, but for the purpose of this article I’ll just state that whether I state them as opinions or affirmations, they’re just personal opinions, sometimes as unbiased as I can, and others not. Any critic is by its own nature biased (a fact that critics often forget), so while you might disagree with the short reviews I do here, I’ll write my opinions in a way that you can’t say that I’m wrong.

Maybe I should start with the heavyweights of adaptations. Actually the essay comes because this past week I’ve been watching the extras from the extended version of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy by Peter Jackson. In the extras they often talk about how to adapt a huge book with so much detail and information into three movies of three hours each. And when they talked about the problems they had with a certain part of the book and how they solved it and why they reached that solution, I also thought whether that solution was the best or not, and also about the mechanisms that drive adaptations.

The basic problem of LOTR is that it has a huge amount of followers, from simple fans to scholars of the whole universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve read and heard many complaints about the LOTR movie trilogy; it’s unavoidable in any adaptation because the adaptation means a change from one medium to another. What works in one medium, might not work in the other. What was just a hint in the original, might be a strong point in the adaptation. Often purists don’t understand that simple fact, and moan, whine and berate about every change. However, the LOTR movie trilogy is not a failure as an adaptation. It has proven to be great cinema, as great as the golden movie age was. And it is also a great adaptation.

Personally, I think that the greatest movie trilogy ever has been The Godfather. Yes, including the third movie, which I enjoy more than the second. The Godfather was itself an adaptation from a book; however I’ll not talk about The Godfather as an adaptation because I haven’t read (yet) the book. I just mention it to give a perspective of my next affirmation: the LOTR movie trilogy is the second greatest movie trilogy ever. And it’s also an adaptation. And why it is so great? Because it’s a great adaptation of a great book. And it’s not a free adaptation. It’s a faithful adaptation.

For me, one of the biggest merits of LOTR as an adaptation is something that not only purists, but that many fans will hate to hear, regardless of if they agree with it or not: And it’s that the movies are actually more entertaining and coherent than the book. I will not use the word “better”. You can’t compare in that way a book to a movie. Often you can’t compare two creations in the same medium! But I can honestly say that the last time I (tried to) read the book, it bored me to death.

Sure that it deals with great matters, in an epic way rarely matched, and has some of the greatest depth regarding the world created to narrate such a huge story. But it’s not an easy book. It wasn’t written by a professional writer, it wasn’t made conventionally, and regardless of how many good things it has, it also has big faults. The beginning is much longer than the end. Some of the main characters are badly developed and more is built in the mind of the reader by the readers themselves than for what its written in the book. The way the different threads are split is badly done, abandoning entire storylines for too long. Some of the events are absolutely superfluous to the main plot. And so on and on. However, let’s focus on the good things from the book: the epic size, the lyrical descriptions, the detail, the complexity of the background. Let’s take that essence and think about it. Does the movie version have it? Indeed. And very well preserved.

Forget about all the people who say that the book has a magic that the movies don’t have. That magic comes from the fact that it’s a book, and while you’re reading it, you build your own movie in it. There’s no way reality can compete with that. And the book as become more of a myth than a reality. But the movies are real, and they can stand up with pride next to the book, as they have their sense of epic, lyric, detail and complexity. Was it really that important that such sentence was spoken by this character instead of that one? Would it matter that Saruman wouldn’t wear a kaleidoscopic robe? The essence of LOTR, its epic greatness, is not there. Trying to nitpick to such minimal levels to turn down the movies does a small favour to the original book, as it implies that the importance of the book is in places where it isn’t.

Often I’ve heard complaints about the absence of Tom Bombadil. But let’s think about it. Did Tom Bombadil add anything to the story? He surely was a great example of how old was Middle Earth, of the amount of strange entities hidden in the most unexpected places, and the dormant powers that could awaken at anytime. But the book is plenty of such examples, so no matter how much we might like the character, in the end you can conclude it’s redundant, and it adds nothing to the story. The movie trilogy did a good job in getting rid of some of the most redundant and unneeded stuff from the book, so it could actually fit in a reasonable length.

Another example is the Council of the Ring. In the book there are like 20 talking characters, most of them barely introduced, so you often get lost about who said what and why. A complete scene like in the book would have taken 20 or 30 minutes of film; and I think those minutes would have been boring. Most watchers would have thought at the middle of it “wouldn’t they thought of something more interesting to put here so the movie is not 5 hours long?” Well, thankfully they did. That’s why you see things that aren’t in the book and you don’t see things that were in it. That’s how adaptations work. Peter Jackson and others mentioned that in the end, the core of the story was Frodo bringing the Ring to Mordor to destroy it. Anything which didn’t help to tell that story was left out. Anything which helped to tell that story stayed, or was created intentionally to make the story as good and epic as the original. The wargo attack in The Two Towers wasn’t in the book, but it adds up to the movie, making a great scene in a storyline which was rather weak and dull until the Battle of Helm’s Deep arrives. That’s how you make good adaptations. Realizing that you’re not copying something, but adapting it to a new medium, and shaping and creating from original source over the new surface.

So instead of enlarging the differences, we should remember the strong points of the movies and how they hold against the book. Besides faithfully capturing the story, strength and spirit of the book, they have returned the sense of greatness to cinema, something not achieved since the times of the great superproductions with thousands of extras and multimillion stars in the cast. Frequently mentioned from the book is the amount of detail and poetry in the descriptions. Well, the movies have much more detail than what we as watchers can absorb or notice. Watching the extras helps a lot, and also gives another perspective of what was real and what not. You see Edoras and the golden castle of Meduseld with the mountains on the background, and you think “ok, more CGI, absolutely stunning stuff but still computer generated”. But no, it was a full size set built from scratch in a real location. The digital gradation (something which you could achieve by optical effects from the original film) sharpened the image, enhanced the colour palette, and in general improved the lookings. But it was real, it was there. Those were the mountains, that was the castle. The same happens with the miniatures, or the Fangorn forest. It’s amazing the amount of things you think were CGI and were actually hand-built and photographed in classic style. So, do the movies have that detail, the visuals have that poetry? Yes, they do.

However, LOTR is actually an exception as far as adaptation goes. It’s quite hard to make an adaptation so faithful to the source that is at the same time so good as a movie. Personally I think that Tolkien was very lucky for having this great group of people to translate his book to the big screen. Let’s remember the disastrous LOTR 1978 adaptation (read my article about it) just to see an example of how good and bad can be adaptations from the same source. I think Tolkien not only would have preferred the version from the current millenium, he could have quite liked it.

Other authors haven’t been so lucky with their adaptations. While the most adapted author is Shakespeare, I’ll rather discuss about a prominent author often carried to the screen with frequently bad results, and it’s no other than Alan Moore, the Stanley Kubrick of graphic novels. Stanley Kubrick did himself some adaptations that were great as movies but bad as adaptations, like Dr. Strangelove (nothing to do with the original book) or The Shining (pretty much the same problem, he reinvented the story and gave it a totally different direction). They were more “based on” than adaptations. As adaptations go, Stanley Kubrick could have done some bloodbaths with Moore’s work, indeed. But it wasn’t needed as others took that honour for themselves. Moore is now so angry with the cinema world that he refuses to be credited.

And it’s no surprise, althought he might be more understanding with the only good Moore adaptation IMHO, which is V For Vendetta. As long as adaptation goes, it barely gets a mediocre five or six out of ten, but the movie is good. I like it pretty much, and although driven in a different way than the original graphic novel, it’s very strong transmitting about the same message. The character V is, as in the original, just a mask, and the mask is just theatre, references, culture, with pretty much nothing but vengueance beneath it. As much as the biggest and only merit of V in the graphic novel was the perfect deus ex machina to tell the story, so it was in the movie. Again, the imagination of the reader has much to do with liking the character in the movie or not. Besides that, the movie fails to transmit the suffering of the people under a totalitary goverment, by cutting secondary characters and plots out of the story, and ultimately has a totally different ending and final message. However, it still transmits in a compelling way the emotions of Evey, and has some interesting twists from the original story to make it a good movie.

The most recent Watchmen hasn’t had the same luck. Although it is better as an adaptation, it has no emotion, no sense of the actual message of the original graphic novel. It’s just a huge and expensive bucket of CGI which follows the main plot sometimes with enervating precision, and making a necessary change with the nature of the threat. It’s nonetheless entertaining, but nowhere near the emotional and personal quality of the original work. And even worst luck had The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, which pretty much has nothing to do with the graphic novel except in its most basic premise: a gathering of extraordinary fictional characters. I must admit that while the movie is quite bad, I enjoy watching it from time to time because it has outstanding aesthetics, and has a steampunk smell that I like more than the original. Other than that, it’s a perfectly forgettable movie. From Hell is another graphic novel which is much more deep than the movie, but at least the movie, while having the same detachment from the original, its quite good. Some of its scenes are absolutely haunting and absorbing. Again, bad as an adaptation, but good as a movie.

Fortunately, not all comics or graphic novels have suffered the same fate. 300 is a great adaptation, with epic fights, comic-like visuals, and faithfully following the original. Sin City is also a great movie based on comics, but I can’t tell much because I never read the originals. However sometimes you don’t need to read the original to appreciate how good or bad is a movie, and the recent failure of The Spirit is one of the most prominent examples. It had all needed to be good: good source, good precedents in Sin City, good budget, and the own author doing the adaptation. But after watching it past night, I must say that it’s nothing short of a joke. Only Eva Mendes rendered a decent performance; the stunning visuals from Sin City were overdone and unconvincing, and the main villain is something that works in a comic but not in the big screen.

It’s not the first time, and it will not be the last, that the own author did the adaptation. And this brings me to what is probably the best book to film adaptation ever, The Princess Bride. William Goldman had experience in movie scripts, and did a superb translation of his own book, following the golden rule of adaptations: what works in one medium, might not work in another. He also had the luck of adapting a very visual story, and narrated by a background character. Narration is probably one of the things that could help the most to a movie adaptation, and it could be not enough or too much. Goldman got the perfect balance. Although I think it has got old a bit badly, it’s the greatest example of an almost perfect adaptation. Anyone who has read the book and then watched the movie will agree that it’s an awesome adaptation.

Another author who has taken his own work to the big screen with great success is Katsuhiro Otomo and his seminal work Akira (read my article about comparing the movie with the manga). Akira is one of the greatest anime movies ever, you can see that in any ranking. And of course it has so many parallelisms with the original manga, that you might think it’s a good adaptation. But I kind of see it as a free adaptation, as the author kind of tells a different story in the movie. Or as I said in my article, he tells the same story from two different perspectives. One has to be understanding with Akira because Otomo did the movie before ending the manga, so it’s a rare example of simultaneous creation. Another example is 2001: A Space Odyssey where Kubrick did the movie while Clarke did the book, both working together.

Let’s go back to book adaptations, and since science fiction is my favourite book genre, it’s the genre where I can put more examples. I’ve written articles about Dune, a cult movie, and A Scanner Darkly, although I’ve not read A Scanner Darkly. But I did read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and as many people do, I consider Blade Runner as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever. However, the movie has almost nothing to do with the book. 1984 has two “big” film adaptations, and the one with John Hurt is quite good both as a movie and as an adaptation.

So we seem to see a pattern. There are good adaptations, there are bad adaptations, and there are different adaptations which work well as a movie regardless of its faithfulness to the original movies. But I’d like to introduce a fourth category, and it’s the adaptation that is largely better than the original. Right now I can only think of one example, as it’s quite a rarity: Forrest Gump. The book is not very good, neither too funny to me. It’s purely anecdotic, a reading easily forgotten. The movie is great, emotional, funny, and uses the potential of the story to retell the recent story of the USA. Although it’s about USA, and it’s a rather commercial movie, Forrest Gump is a fabulous movie with absolutely great scenes. One of my favs actually.

However, there are many free adaptations, or movies based on books rather than adaptations which are as great as the source. Dr. Strangelove can’t really be treated like a free adaptation as much as The Shining, but there’s a third great example of this kind of adaptations: Apocalypse Now. It’s an astonishing free adaptation of Hearts Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The same premise, in different environments, with different scenes. The driving force is the same, the tortuous thoughts of the main character as he sails up a river in a savage jungle full of menaces, ending with the meeting of a dark character.

Well, this is gone overboard and too long, so I’ll finish with another strange breed of what adaptations are: the remakes. What, a remake is not an adaptation? It is an adaptation, a retelling with different visuals, differently built characters, different performances, different imprint. The story of movie remakes is full of failures, a list so long that it could become a larger article than this one. So to finish now, I’ll just mention two remakes. One is The Departed, the Scorsese adaptation of a movie I’ve written about, the japanese Infernal Affairs. Both quite good movies, with different ways of telling the same story. The other is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers; the 1978 remake was not only as good as the original 1956 B-series masterpiece, it also extended the story in a great way. Too bad the 2000-ish re-remake “based on free adaptation taken to modern times” was so awful.

And yes, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers was actually an adaptation from the Jack Finney novel. And the remake of the adaptation was great. Not like The Day The Earth Stood Still, but that’s another story…

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