(no subject)

[andrewducker]

With The Hulk, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, X-Men, etc. all taking varying amounts of liberties with the original source material, how much liberty do people think is reasonable to take?

[Poll #132310]

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

Adaptations are a funny thing. They are, after all, adaptations. Often a movie adaptation of a work is done by people who have little understanding of the original, and want merely to cash in on the succcess of something amongst geeks, and sell it to a wider audience.

Looking at other media than film, there are a lot of adaptations. The Old Testament in a lot of places consists of "adaptations" of Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, and there are a fair few million people who would tell you that it's a corking read. Stories, myths and legends are adapted between prose, poetry and music, translated between languages, mutated, recombined... it's what people do to stories. Changes are obviously more serious in film adaptations... but to take an example, if you had to explain the plot of the X Men in half an hour, you'd miss out a lot of detail through lack of time, and because you were the one telling the story, you'd emphasise the parts which were important to you and had stuck in your memory, at the expense of others.

The quote from William Gibson is "the street finds its own use for things", and I think that's appropriate (there's a good rant by Cory Doctorow here). The only "problem" with film adaptations is that they are not normally executed with diligence, love and respect for the original material. The reason that The Matrix shines as a movie is not the technical excellence of the special effects, but the passion which inspired Gaeta to invent new cinematographic techniques for the action sequences, which lead the cast to spend six months in heavy training for martial arts. If the Wachowski brothers made a live-action version of, say, Akira, then that passion would have shown through, even though it would have been very different from the animé, just as the animé is very different from the manga.

I appear to have started ranting... but my point is that changes should be made, since film is a different medium to comics. But those changes should be made because the media differ, not to market the characters to a wider audience.

[andrewducker]

It appears that your point is also that films should be made because people love the idea of the film they are making and don't just want to make money :->

I agree entirely on all fronts - I want people to take old ideas and make them their own. I don't care how much gets changes, so long as the people that make the changes are making them because they're passionate about them.

[davecleghorn.livejournal.com]

I voted for the fourth option but I think it depends how serious the topic is. I’m totally against filmakers rewriting important historical events and then claiming it to be ‘a true story’ for example.

[paddie-gal.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, to a point....in something like "Titanic", certain details were considered to be inaccurate, based on family members of those involved...but I don't think it dramatically changed the point of the story (the boat still sank, after all.)

Something like "The English Patient" is like 2 different stories, but again, as the whole thing was fictional, I don't think it matters so much.

[davecleghorn.livejournal.com]

The one I was thinking of was U-571, which was based on a true story. However, the story portrayed America finding the Enigma device when it was the British. Something like that is quite irresponsible.

[davecleghorn.livejournal.com]

Oops. Meant to say I do agree with what your saying. As long as the point of the story says true and more importantly its a good film...