28th June 2018 - Adaptations

Today's Topic - 28th June 2018

Submitted by @Peppers

What are your thoughts on the most recent book-to-film/TV adaptations (e.g., Altered Carbon)? Is the concept itself flawed, or is it how they're handled? Furthermore - why are adaptations considered 'bad' much more often than 'good'?
❤3
Argo - Last Thursday at 11:56 AM
Well adapting book to film in my opinion will flop over 99% of the time since the amount of information that is able to be conveyed in a book is so much larger than a 1:30h movie. The challange for these adaptations shouldnt be to try to retell the books, but use the advantages of the different medium to convey "story" differently. A.k.a show dont tell. Since large amounts of information about character can be shown through simply the environments of the characters. Using the visual medium to its fullest so to say, but sadly few director even understand this, even fewer can execute on it. Therefore most adaptations will fall flat
Mad Pigeon - Last Thursday at 11:58 AM
I haven't watched any recent adaptations, but I do have an opinion on reasons behind people generally being unhappy about them.
I think it's got something to do speed limits: when you're adopting something you're essentially adopting your vision of the project, and since people are so different, it's highly unlikely to be same as everyone else's. Some people are doing radically different things, like Stanley Kubrick with "Shining" and you either love or hate this new thing. When adaptations resembles most of ideas however, you're seeing that some things that you found important are missing. Pretty hard to forgive that.
Also you're making this old thing in a new environment, you're not assigned absolute creative freedom and some choices are more harmful if kept same as in original.
♠TepidNameChange♦ - Last Thursday at 12:08 PM
Alterted Carbon wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't a disaster.

"why are adaptations considered 'bad' much more often than 'good'?"

Is that even true, do we consider adaptions bad more often than good? I know of plenty of great adaptions. Ultimately, I think many people are prone to calling adaptions bad even though they weren't, because the adaption wasn't what people expected/pictured in their heads. I think a challenge of adaptation is that people don't realize how seriously different literature and film are as mediums, and how you can't make 1 to 1 copies from one medium to another and expect good results. Another problem is often things are adapted because of marketing, there's already an audience for whatever content your producing so it's safer. This also means that artistic oriented motivations aren't always as present, and potentially leads to worse products. I think adaptation as a concept is fantastic and can allow an author to take inspiration from either their own or someone elses work and make something new and exciting. Ultimately if an adaption fails, nothing was lost, the original work still remains intact. If the adaption was successful, the work that the adaption was based on can be held responsible for the production of even more enjoyable material. I also would be hard pressed to believe adaptions are substantially worse than original movies/shows or literature in general. In fact I might even charge that adaptions are MORE likely to be good, comparative to the vast amounts of material that is awful and entirely original in either medium. (though I don't think people commonly adapt from film to literature, mostly the other way around)(edited)
To add, I think within all artistic mediums, the majority of material existing in that medium is going to be considered bad, original or otherwise
Nighttagle - Last Thursday at 12:18 PM
If I think about a lot of adaptations that have been received well, quite a few of them are based on books that they take ideas and themes from, rather than the actual plot itself. To me, there seems to be a correlation between the intent behind lifting elements from other mediums, and whether or not the adaptation will succeed.

The big complaint against a lot of bad adaptations, is that the themes, or the message, or the atmosphere, or all of the above, is lost. Usually that means that they stuck too much to the plot, and tried to crunch a story into a 2-hour movie, whereas in the original medium , it would take a lot more to consume that piece of media.
👍2
Peppers - Last Thursday at 1:13 PM
Hey, it's my question. Just gonna chime in here:
I feel book adaptation movies are usually held to an unfair standard - there's a bunch of crap ones, sure, but there's also a bunch of crap movies in general.
Some movies are done superbly well - see John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing, (one of my favourite sci-fi/horror movies, which was adapted from a 1938 novella by John W. Campbell) - sometimes barely break even ($19.6 million box office for a $15 million budget)
Then see Ready Player One, adapted from Ernest Cline's book, which (in my opinion) was a terrible, terrible adaptation of the book, was widely criticised, and made over $550 million box office, with a $175 million budget.
Sure, there's a lot of elements that go into those figures and the overall quality that have nothing to do with the book - The Thing has amazing practical effects and an even more amazing score by Ennio Morricone, and Ready Player One 'nerfed' a lot of the semi-dystopian elements and harsh looks at human nature (in the book, Wade goes into a depressive slump, becomes morbidly obese, and lives with a sex doll), in return for really generic cliches.

I dunno. There's a lot of aspects to what makes a good movie good, and a good book good. Sometimes literature just can't be translated effectively into audio/visual without either losing the movie, or losing the book.



Who's excited for Mortal Engines?
June 29, 2018
Grinch - Last Friday at 3:16 AM
I think a lot of it just has to do with the mediums in general. In a book, the pacing is more controlled and more importantly you create the scenes in your mind. This is obviously different from a movie where the scenes are created in the directors mind and if they don’t quite jive with the audience you’re already starting off on the wrong foot.

This gets further compounded by little things being changed, from my own perspective the audience is pretty understanding if they don’t fully adapt certain things like gore and certain types of violence, but it’s when the director or producers or whoever decide to cut little or even big scenes out of the original source that they start putting the pacing in jeopardy. Other times the adapters will add scenes which are 10x more likely to put people off since not only are you screwing up an adaptation, but you’re now taking liberties with something people already enjoyed. “If it isn’t broke don’t fix it”

I think something that makes a film adaptation “good” is by creating the atmosphere around an already existing piece of work, as well as putting more work into the acting out of the scenes rather than rewriting them. Debatably, if you build up the atmosphere, setting, and acting, enough then you CAN take some liberties with the source material in my opinion.You see this best with something like The Shining or Fight Club. This however takes a director and crew that’s really willing to put in an astronomical amount of effort above that which is already required, and a lot of people don’t want to work that hard if they aren’t already passionate about it.

To sum up my beliefs, I don’t think that the concept is flawed I just think it takes more work than people would think and it gets hampered frequently by the red tape that follows something like this.