I’ve been thinking a lot about adaptations. The Percy Jackson book series received it’s third official cinematic adaptation (we don’t talk about the first two movies) in the form of a Disney+ Original Series, excitement about Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part II has been slowly building, and to top it off, I recently watched the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie – it was pretty good.
If that sounds like a random assortment of things, that’s great, because it totally is.
These days, it feels inevitable that some studio executive will read whatever book, comic, or video game is currently trending and slap down a hefty chunk of change (to the tune of 100s of millions, I assume) to develop it into a movie or TV series that will wrap up in 10 or less episodes and be both less fulfilling and less interesting than the original text.
Book adaptations – which I’ll mostly focus on, seeing as they seem to be the primary source materials of most adaptations – are as frequently lamented as they are praised. “The book is better than the movie!" most people will scream as they turn on the Lord of the Rings extended edition for their yearly rewatch1.
There’s some truth to their outcry and it’s because of one shocking fact: movies are not books. I know, I know, wow, what a shocking revelation! What people usually mean by the above complaint/declaration is that the movie cut out their favourite bit of the book in the name of pacing or some other suitably nebulous storytelling device. Yet books don’t transfer 1:1 all that well to screen. There’s lots of interior thought and lots of emphasis on describing things. If films spent whole minutes describing structures and things in the environment, audiences would be bored out of their minds.
Some changes are good, but, there are certainly adaptations that truly eviscerate their source materials – Need I mention M. Night Shyamalan’s Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation? For those that don’t know, I turn to the indomitable Roger Ebert, who gave the film half a star and said this about The Last Airbender film: “I only hope that the title proves prophetic.” Ouch. Please read the whole thing, it’s absolutely electric.
Narrative fidelity is the most common indicator people look for in a good adaptation, but not every film has the scale or directorial freedom that Peter Jackson or Denis Villeneuve had with their adapted films.
In my mind, the best adaptations are always the one that capture the same feelings as their source material. It’s much more nebulous than direct narrative comparison, but it also pays much greater dividends. One of my favourite films of all time is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It’s a little one off Ben Stiller movie based on a 1939 short story of the same name by James Thurber. To put it bluntly, the movie is almost nothing like the original short story. Both have a similar charm but differ so vastly that it can really only be an adaptation in the passing “we used the name” sort of way. Yet it is a film that cares so passionately about being a good film with a good story. That’s the problem with most bad adaptations – it’s not that they’re bad adaptations, it’s just that they’re usually bad movies too. There’s also a respect and admiration for the original text that comes through the film.
I think it’s obvious when a creative understands and respects their source material. In the same way, I don’t think people actually care about narrative fidelity as much as they say they do. People actually care how the characters and the themes they already know are treated. In this case, sticking 100% to the source material is a largely unnecessary pursuit that adds information that might take away from the emotional core of a film.
Take, for instance, Jurassic Park. I love both the original novel by Michael Crichton and Spielberg’s classic film. The story lines and themes of both are broadly the same – the classic quote from Ian Malcolm “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Yet the book remains manifestly different from the film. The affable, but misguided film John Hammond (played by the formidable Richard Attenborough) is contrasted with the arrogant and egotistical CEO billionaire type who meets his untimely demise at the hands of his dinosaurs (spoilers, sorry). Even Dr. Grant has a little bit of character reversal, instead starting the book liking children. There’s a host of other small changes, but the film’s infamy has easily outgrown the book’s. Yet the screenplay was penned by Chrichton himself2, who knew and (hopefully) respected his own work. Spielberg took that story and helped transform it into something that captured the terror and the consequences that the original book managed to capture so well.
Other adaptations like Arrival and Princess Bride took similar routes and have similar stories. Each of their writers and directors were enamoured with the source material and profoundly inspired by it. They then went on to create films that overshadow the original text at the very least. They didn’t do so by making a 1:1 book to movie mix, they did it by being enraptured with the original text.
I, in a very scholarly way, call this “vibes-based adaptations.” Essentially, a director or writer reads or sees something and says “I love this vibe, let’s make a movie” – and that’s pretty much it. I don’t think the creative process should be any more complicated than that. Of course, there’s a ton of work that goes on in between the inception for a film idea and the actually creation of a film, but the essential goal should be to capture the emotional truths of a story rather than just a narrative – it’s almost like there could be hidden themes and meanings in stories.
All too often we over-simplify this book vs movie debate into one where we lob catchalls like “the book is always better” at things. In reality, it’s just as easy to make a bad adaptation as it is to make a regular bad film. Yet I hope that having a good story to start with and another artist to collaborate with makes it just a little bit easier to make a good one.
News! News! News!
It was the Super Bowl last weekend and the award for best coverage seems to be going to… Nickelodeon? That’s right, the kid’s TV station put on a SpongeBob themed coverage the Super Bowl that lead to some raucous and viral marketing. (via the Guardian)
A raccoon is Toronto gave thousands of people a shocking surprise by nibbling on and interfering with some power cables. The unfortunate raccoon didn’t survive his experiments but did manage to cut power for 7,000 people. (via Reuters)
A garage in Bellevue, Washington had a Cold War era nuclear missile inside it. Thankfully, there was no nuclear warhead or rocket propellant inside – making it essentially a big tin can. Police were suitably concerned. There’s no mention of how it got there. (via AP)
To be fair, I do know a few people who do a yearly or near yearly re-read of Lord of the Rings, so I suppose it’s not as ironic as it originally seems to be.
In tandem with Steven Spielberg and David Koepp