We’ve all said or heard someone say it as we walk out of the theater after watching an adaptation of our favorite novel. “It just wasn’t as good as the book.” While that is almost always the truth, is that really the standard we should set for film adaptations of any other kind of media? With novels and even TV shows there is more room to explore in more depth characters and story ideas. In film, there’s a certain narrative structure that is required in order to keep the audience from losing interest.
People pick up novels to be taken to extraordinary worlds through the words on the page and want to swept away by characters. Authors can get away with side stories loosely related to the main plot as a way of developing their characters, however in film more focus is needed in the storytelling. And the characters can be developed visually and through tone rather just in word.
No film can possibly contain every single piece of a novel, it’s how the film portrays the overall themes and story on the screen that makes for a great adaptation. It also doesn’t hurt to look at the subject matter from a new perspective and try to bring something new to the table, or emphasize a different aspect of the story.
Nothing shows the difficulties involved in adapting a book into a film better than the film Adaptation, written by the great screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. He was approached to adapt the non-fiction book the Orchid thief into a feature film. The book was about a plant dealer who was determined to poach rare orchids from a state preserve for profit. Kaufman took the job and somehow turned the book into a film about the adaptation process by injecting himself and his fictional twin brother into it as the main characters.
The film became about Kaufman’s own struggle to adapt the book into a film. He becomes obsessed with getting the story right and actually turning the rather dull topic into a serviceable film. His obsessions leads him to follow the author of the book and the main subject and try to get to the root of what he believes to be an incomplete story. The reality is that the film ends up having very little to do with the subject Kaufman was commissioned to write.
Sometimes that’s the problem with adaptations, they stray too far from the source material. That’s hardly a problem with the film Adaptation as what Kaufman brings to the screen manages to stick pretty closely to the themes of the book he was adapting while bringing a whole lot of new to it. Other adaptations end up being unrecognizable. A good example of this might be World War Z. The novel is written as a series of interviews with people who survived the zombie apocalypse. The film is an action film about a team going around and trying to find patient zero to see if that will offer a solution to the zombie plague.
This is one of those strange cases where the book would be incredibly difficult to turn into an interesting film. A novel made up of a series of interviews is likely going to turn into a very difficult film to watch. It would be very reliant on narration to connect the different stories and any film so reliant on narration tends to be a bit dull.
The film ended up being the man conducting the interviews in the book actually going to each location described in the book and seeing the aftermath of what was described in the interviews in the book. It makes for a film that shouldn’t be call World War Z, but I get what they were trying to do with the adaptation. It was ultimately a failure, but it was an admirable attempt to adapt a very difficult book to film.
Sometimes adaptations can suffer from being too true to the source material. They got bogged down in hitting every plot point instead of developing characters and creating a cohesive flow to the story. The example that immediately came to mind was actually an adaptation of a television show and not a book. However like books, tv shows have the freedom to explore smaller storylines as part of the greater storyline.
The film I’m thinking of is The Last Airbender, based on the anime series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. This film was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the script is downright terrible. Shyamalan seemed so focused on including so many of the plot points from the original series, that he forgot to actually develop the characters. When you focus so much attention on explaining the story, you tend to bog down the dialogue with extensive exposition.
The Last Airbender ends up being a movie with a bunch of characters doing martial arts and then explaining what their actions mean to the overall story. We get no glimpse at who they actually are and the dialogue is just horribly boring. It’s no coincidence that in the final half hour when the story slows down enough for characters to have real bonding moments and emotions, that the film gets better. The first hour of the film attempts to cover nearly seven hours of show time and it attempts to cram all of those plot points into that hour. The final half hour covers one hour of show time is much better because of it. It’s a real shame the script was so poor, as Shyamalan really brought a beautiful looking film to the screen, it was just a horrible script. It takes over an hour to get a single line of dialogue that isn’t just pure exposition. It might be one of the worst screenplays ever written.
Now that’s enough of the negativity, let’s talk about an adaptation that was handled well. Watchmen is probably the most acclaimed graphic novel ever. Time magazine called it one the 100 best novels of the 20th century and was widely considered to be unfilmable. Not only did it have a rather unconventional ending that would not play well on screen, it also has a series of publications within the novel as a whole. There is a comic within the comic that is scattered throughout the rest of the novel and between chapters there are chapters of a book or news articles painting a more complete picture of the universe it is set in.
While it’s not perfect, the Ultimate cut of Watchmen is about as good of an adaptation as could possible be done. The film opens with a beautiful montage with opening credits laid over it. This montage shows most of what the in between chapter items told us in great detail. We then jump right into and get an introduction to the character through what is essentially a frame for frame remake of the first few chapters of the graphic novel. The script focuses on showing us the world the characters live in and developing them within it before it starts pushing the story forward at a quicker pace.
The theatrical cut of the film didn’t include some very important aspects of the story, but this was largely resolved by the Ultimate cut which not only includes added scenes to the main story, it even includes the comic within the comic in the form of an animated film cut into pieces and shown throughout the film. As a huge fan of the graphic novel I can’t imagine a better presentation of the it on screen than what was done. There are plenty of people that disagree with me, but I’ll still hold this film up as the ultimate adaptation from another medium.
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