I think I am on nearly every other show, but when it comes to Dune I find myself yelling online to friends that they don’t UNDERSTAND this is VERY IMPORTANT (pleasebegoodpleasebegood)
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I don’t feel that way. For example, I’ve seen Disney cartoon versions of a number of stories written for children, and they’ve rather uniformly been substantially different from the source material, dumbed down, and had stupid humorous bits added. I would never watch Disney’s version of The Jungle Book under any circumstances. I have seen Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings more than once, and liked some bits of it (Gimli’s grief when he learns of Balin’s death, or Boromir’s last battle with the orcs), but it has too much meaningless physical action, too many stupid jokes, and ghastly characterization like the portrayal of Faramir, or like Gandalf’s murder of Denethor. If I think a work is really good, I don’t want to see someone do an adaptation that craps on it. (And I must confess that my toleration for Peter Jackson has diminished greatly since C and I saw the first two parts of The Hobbit.)
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Do you feel similarly worried about a production of Jane Eyre or a Shakespeare play? I am not challenging your critical eye by the way, just interested how far it extends. I can see a poor production of a work, not like it, not need to see it again, even advise people as to why I don’t think it was good, but I don’t have the emotional angst that some seem to have, i.e. the mind-killer effect. To say that a production has crapped on its source is a very strong response.
My life isn’t ruined and all I have lost is a few hours, and even then I may have gained an insight.
The trailer for Dune looks awful, to be honest.
And by that I mostly mean that it didn’t seem to have Kyle McKlacklan (I refuse to Google how to spell that) in it.
I’ve just finished watching Staged. It was absolutely hilarious and I highly recommend it.
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I don’t care what people do with books I like; if I did, I’d just be made unhappy. It doesn’t really matter to me, unless the original gets entirely lost (and you don’t need an adaptation for that; my wife remembers the huge popularity of The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s-1970s, and all the new readers who thought it was Really Deep Man while failing to get anything beyond the basic surface story and not a whole lot of that). The books I care about most are ones that nobody’s ever likely to adapt anyway.
(Always remember Terry Pratchett’s report of talking to the film people about Mort, which was the first one for which the film rights were sold. “Terry, we love the book, but can you lose the whole Death angle?” That one lapsed, in the end.)
Back on topic: I’m not watching much at the moment. More youtube than broadcast TV or film. Hydraulic Press Channel, Forgotten Weapons, 3dbotmaker, and various boardgaming things.
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I’ve never read Terry Pratchett, but did they think that ‘Mort’ was just a guy’s name?
Forgotten Weapons is a superb channel. I was trying to think of a specific thing about it that I love, but it’s basically everything.
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Death is also a central character, and takes Mort as a sort of apprentice, IIRC.
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Yes, trying to do Mort without Death is like trying to do Treasure Island without Long John Silver
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Well, I have to make several comments on this.
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It seems to me that phrasing it as “my life isn’t ruined” is biasing the argument. Do you actually think that I’m not entitled to have a negative reaction to something, or not entitled to object to being exposed to it, unless it’s bad enough to ruin my life? I mean, for example, I’ve tasted coffee once (I was offered a bite of tiramisu, not knowing what its ingredients were), and obviously it didn’t ruin my life, but I found the taste quite unendurable and never want to experience it again.
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As for “all I have lost is a few hours,” I could point out that I’m 70 and have reason to minimize wasted time. But in fact I’ve never had much liking for spending time on unrewarding things. C and I have walked out of movies and stopped watching videos after just a few minutes.
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I find it odd that you talk about “a production of Jane Eyre.” It’s a novel, not a play, and novels aren’t “produced.” Doing it on stage, or screen, or as a recorded song cycle, or whatever, I would call “adaptation.”
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Shakespeare, of course, does get produced. But I haven’t seen many plays on stage (or screen) that I’ve also read, or that I’ve seen before in other productions. So I don’t actually know what my reaction would be to a bad production starting from the same script.
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As for adaptations, I can’t comment on how I’d feel about an adaptation of Jane Eyre, because I couldn’t endure to read more than a third of it. I got to the part where Jane was talking about her school friend’s spirit of Christian self-sacrifice and I wasn’t willing to read any more.
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My reaction to a bad adaptation has multiple elements:
° When I say “a bad adaptation” I don’t mean merely one that changes the source, because that may be necessary in going from one medium to another. I mean one that distorts or ignores the theme of the original, while still keeping its title. For example, Gounod’s Faust tells the story as if it were about a man seducing and impregnating an innocent girl, whereas Goethe’s Faust, from which it was taking, is about the refusal to accept limits. I find such adaptations intellectually unsatisfactory.
° If the adapter intentionally distorts the original, or attacks it, or doesn’t care whether their version is true to it, that strikes me as a kind of fraud and I disapprove of it. Everything I’ve heard about the film Starship Troopers, for example, makes me think I would have that opinion of it if I ever watched it.
° However, at the visceral level, I’m affected only when this is does to a work I know and love, one that is engraved on my memory, so that I repeatedly see things that invite my response to the original work, and then repeatedly get confronted with something not merely different but inferior. For example, I like Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea a lot, and partly for the characterization of Ged as proud, silent, and eager for knowledge; when I saw the video version (I think it may have been made for PBS) that turned him into a whiny adolescent farmboy rather like Luke Skywalker, I found it disgusting, and it helped turn me against the whole “heroic arc” structure where no one starts out as a hero, but has to be forced into it by external pressure—and so I’ve seen only the first few minutes of that adaptation and will never watch more of it. -
None of this says that people shouldn’t have the legal right to do such things (with the consent of the author, of course). But I have the right to dislike their doing so, too.
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I have pretty much the same feelings about adaptations as you. Though, I grew up on a specific slice of Disney cartoons, so it is the modern remakes that are abominations to me. Every beat is like a hollow mockery of the original.
I know I’m not likely to convince you to watch it, but The Jungle Book is certainly an achievement in hand-drawn animation, by a small team of some of the best animators ever. But you could just watch a behind the scenes if you’d like to check it out, if the movie doesn’t interest you.
I could go on for a fortnight about all of my problems with Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings Trilogy, not even mentioning The Hobbit(ses), but it would be a massive thread derailment. The books are simply my favourite books, and especially now that I’m older I can’t forgive many of the liberties taken. The change to Faramir, as you mentioned earlier in the thread, is practically character assasination.
I found it interesting that you picked out the ‘Hero’s Journey’ as an annoyance. I have been aggravated by the same thing, especially because everyone seems to follow the Campbellian pattern almost slavishly. Even stinking Superman goes through the Hero’s Journey in Man of Steel, despite being already essentially perfect. They crowbarred one in for Aragorn in the Peter Jackson Trilogy, taking all of the mythical power from his character in order to make him ‘relatable’ or someting. Every other character is downgraded (especially Arwen and Eowyn) as a result.
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The Jungle Book also has an amazing soundtrack.
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Heck yes it does.
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It also addresses the fundamental issue at the heart of masculinity that a boy will abandon his best mates as soon as a girl flutters her eyelashes at him.
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That version infuriated everybody, not least UKL herself. You’re very much in the majority there.
I think that’s when adaptions get me: when the original story is something our society needs to hear, with an unusual protagonist who approaches life in a new way we could really do with more people following, and instead we get the same dross as usual. The gap between the source (and its potential) and the end movie is bigger.
I think that’s why even some fans of Starship Troopers didn’t hate the movie changes - it still ended up saying something interesting and valuable, instead of losing the book’s message just to become boringly standard.
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As I’ve said, I’ve never seen the film and don’t intend to. But it seems to me that the book has some original ideas on political philosophy, which make it worth reading even though to my mind it’s one of Heinlein’s lesser efforts at fiction and I understand why the publisher of his juveniles had problems with it. From what I’ve heard, the film assimilates it to a conventional opposition of “democracy” = good! and “fascism” = bad! (and rejects Heinlein’s ideas as “fascist”). That’s a cliché of political rhetoric that has no analytical substance whatever. And it seems to me that what Heinlein is actually doing is envisioning a radically democratic society AND adopting the ancient Roman symbol of the rods and the axe (the literal fasces) for such a society’s self-defense, which is a lot more interesting.
And there’s also the loss of the novel’s central technological idea, the treatment of powered armor, not quite original (E.E. Smith had it in Galactic Patrol) but the first time the concept had been developed in such detail . . .
Thanks for your comments.
I deliberately choose Jane Eyre since it is a book, and many people have real issues when one media is converted to another.
I chose Shakespeare since the sparsity of stage directions and the archaic language, not to mention the breadth of multi-lingual productions can make almost every production an adaptation and often a controversy.
Of course you need not waste a few hours of your time, nor should you not like or dislike something.
It’s the deep visceral passion to hate something or someone associated with a piece of work that I find puzzling.
It’s not new I suppose, see the major classical diva composers, but it seems spreading and sometimes very destructive.
I like the various versions of Faust, in particular Christopher Marlowe’s. Once a work is in the public domain I enjoy the reuse of it.
Maybe that is it. I like the potential for reuse, of reimagining, not than the stable reiteration
Must be Chaotic then!
I had no idea Starship Troopers was a book adaptation, or even had a ‘message’, genuinely thought it was a daft B movie with good looking people in it.
I feel so low brow on this and the book thread.
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Not that I’m ashamed of my tastes, I’ve been waiting to grow up for years and it’s never happened.
Disney are brilliant at what they do.
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Growing up is overrated anyway 
I just had to put that out here.
I’ve read quite a few books over the years and think of myself as reasonably well read, but just like with boardgames: we can’t read / watch / play them all.
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Don’t! Nothing wrong with not knowing the Book/Film differences of one particular SF piece 
The short version is, Heinlein’s original book was… complex. It could be argued that he was pro- some elements of fascism, such as only people who had served active duty in the army counting as full citizens and able to vote. He was coming to it from a direction that this meant they were altruistic, taking risks for others, but it was easily seen as his (also genuine) personal right-wing reaction to the 1950s US needing more discipline and losing morals and… whatever. His book is very pro-military.
The movie was made by someone who hated the book, hated blind military authority and propoganda, and decided to just put the ideas down on screen where they’d look like a macho parody which could only lead to the terrible failure of society. It had a lot to say as a SATIRE - the same way Robocop does by the same director - but from totally the other direction. If you like one you’ll probably hate the other because it takes the opposite stance, but at least the movie was a deliberate intelligent piece of art that tried to say something instead of dropping into the normal clichés out of laziness as many bad adaptions do.
Here’s one article on it, I’m sure there are LOTS out there: