“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
-- Herman Melville
-- Herman Melville
 An adaptation that changed a large amount and still worked | Movie adaptations of anything, be it books, television, comics, plays, whatever, are often first judged on how faithfully they stuck to their source material in everything from characterization to tone to set design, but why is that? If the source material was fantastic, then don't we already have that story told for us? Wouldn't complete fidelity to the original require a) at least nine hours of film and b) be a completely boring re-telling? As a thought experiment, imagine if Hollywood recreated, scene for scene, one of their own movies? What if, instead of creating Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan had just remade Tim Burton's Batman with new actors? The exercise would be pointless; we already have Batman. New actors add nothing to the product, and everyone involved would have variations of the word "unoriginal" attached to them as a stigma. This is, of course, a ridiculous example, but it raises a more important question: why does changing the source media change the answer to the original question? I would argue it doesn't. The easiest way to examine this issue, given the glut of recent examples we have, is to use comic book movies. |
| If we can agree that perfectly imitating a movie to make another movie is ridiculous, why then do legions of "fanboys" cry foul when a character from a comic book is changed in an insignificant way for its movie adaptation? If you think I'm exaggerating, do a quick internet search on people's reactions to Kingpin (a white man in the comics) being played by Michael Clarke Duncan in Daredevil. You can actually find the preposterous claim that it is akin to casting a white man to play Martin Luther King, Jr. in a biopic. Even the people who understand how ridiculous (and more than a little offensive) that is, still say it would be like a white man playing Shaft on the big screen, ignoring the fact that Shaft's race is an intrinsic part of his character, whereas Kingpin just needs to be rich and physically imposing. The implication of any variation of the argument being that once a character is conceived in a certain way, it is as set in stone as an actual human being. There is a strange exception in the case of comic book characters, where as long as a character is re-imagined in comics first, then it's perfectly fine. The fans may complain about the direction the character took, but nobody questions whether they had the right to do it, never mind that when it happens, it's done with a different writer and sometimes artist as well (roughly the equivalent of the different creative team involved in making a movie version): the implication being that changes that occur across media are somehow illegitimate compared to ones that take place in the same media. |  About as faithful an adaptation as you can have without spanning several movies |
 An adaptation that changed little and was absolutely terrible | In age where Marvel and DC control almost all of the film rights to their comics (a few exceptions like X-Men and Fantastic Four are left over from a time when the companies were selling the rights piecemeal instead of keeping them in-house) you can't even make the argument that it's because of different executives. So once you debunk the arguments in favor of fidelity to the source material being important, what is left to say filmmakers can't make changes? Actually, not much. In fact, the best adaptations are produced when filmmakers are given a wide berth to change what they want. Christopher Nolan, for one, has said that his Batman doesn't exist in the same universe as any other superhero, and created several new characters, blended old ones and mixed established storylines with his own imaginings, and ignored plenty of the ridiculous accoutrements of his characters (Lazarus pits for Ra's al Ghul being a great example; pits naturally scattered around the world that one can use to heal from any injury and achieve immortality) to create what is almost universally acknowledged to be the best superhero film franchise to date. |
| The point of this Rant is simple: judge movie adaptations on their own merits. Penalize them when they omit details from the source material that would make things clearer (one of my biggest pet peeves with movie adaptations is when something doesn't make sense, and a fan's response is that I "should read the book"; No, movies shouldn't require homework), but don't take points away when they deviate from that same material for creative gain. Suppress your initial reaction of outcry when you notice the change, and wait to see how the change plays out. If it's worse, then the original you love is better, which is neither a rare nor tragic occurrence, but either way, the movie should be allowed to succeed or fail on its own without any preconceived limitations. This isn't to say there aren't limits to adaptation; if, for example, Christopher Nolan had given Batman true superpowers like telekinesis and x-ray vision, it would've been fair to ask if he shouldn't have just made his own superhero movie without invoking the Batman name. This rarely happens, however, and if changes were met with patience and allowed room to breathe, these same "fanboys" might be shocked at how much they appreciate them. Except Ben Affleck. He should never be cast as a superhero. Ever. |  I have no idea if this changed anything, but we can agree it's terrible |
RSS Feed