At least once a week we have a movie coming out that is some kind of adaptation or another, from this week's small screen opener Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to the wildly popular Transformers series that bombard our senses every summer, movie makers apparently cannot get enough of adapting things. Adaptation brings with it certain advantages, like a built in fan-base and cheap marketing by slapping some obnoxious banner on the source material that says 'Now a major motion picture!'. Not to mention that with these perks also come the ease of already having a solid idea of what the movie will be about, making a seemingly quick and easy job for the screenwriter. However, over this past adaptation-crazed decade, it has become obvious that adaptation isn't as perfect as it may seem. Sometimes movies are too similar to the source material to be translated effectively to film, like 2009's Watchmen. Other times they stray too far away and barely resemble the thing they are based off of, such as 2007's I Am Legend, which of course will lead to a backlash from the original fan-base and begin to make one wonder why they even have the same name. To please both fans of the source material and make a quick buck one must hit an elusive Goldilocks zone between too close and too far, a zone which is different for every piece of source material.
Sticking close to the source material would at first come across as the obvious choice. After all, this is supposed to be this thing transcribed to film right? Changing things would seem counter intuitive and sacrilegious. However, the amount of the original thing one keeps depends heavily on the source material's ability to be filmed. Whole franchises cannot get off the ground because the source material is 'unfilmable', just look at this whole fiasco with the Dark Tower franchise. Before the Dark Tower, Watchmen was the 'unfilmable' movie. Over the course of 23 years Watchmen went through seven different development periods with everyone from David Hayter to Terry Gilliam to Darren Aronofsky being involved at some point or another. Finally, in 2009 it seemed that Zack Snyder had saved the adaptation. Snyder seemed like a good choice, especially given his well done remake of Dawn of the Dead; he changed many things about the original film and updated the setting to suit a more modern audience. It seemed like he was a director who wasn't afraid to change what needed to be changed so that the film would work, so it is perplexing as to how little he was willing to sacrifice during the filming of Watchmen. As a movie, Watchmen keeps extremely close to the graphic novel it is based off of, going so far as to recreate entire scenes panel for panel from the comic. Watchmen is also a movie with considerable visual flair, with strong colors and a great art direction headed by Snyder. So then it is curious why the movie fell flat for fans and film goers alike. The main problem Watchmen faced was that it was too similar to the source material. Watchmen's sprawling narrative works well in comic book form, where you have all the time in the world to get your point across and to set up the characters and events needed to have the ending work. Condensing Watchmen's incredibly dense 320 page narrative into a 120 page screenplay without making some major cuts and having restructuring is a nigh impossible feat. When adapting something to film one needs to think of it less as another form of the source material and more like it is its own work. It is a translation more than an adaptation, and this fundamental rule of adapting was apparently lost during the Snyder production, swallowed up by his well-intentioned desire to stick close to the comic book. Ultimately, despite his good meaning, this desire made Watchmen a weaker film.
Of course changing everything about the original work does not necessarily work either. Year after year remakes or adaptations come out that have the fans of the original work absolutely livid over how far away from the original work they have become. Whether it be a classic novel hollywood-ized for a larger audience with younger characters and hot actors, or old movies remade with no soul for the sake of a quick buck (I'm looking at you the Wild Bunch remake). It makes sense how angry the fans get, after all this is a piece of work that they have a deep reverence for. The movie will likely be more popular than the original work, and some people fear rightfully that the movie could inadvertently 'Doublethink' the source material out of existence, a case I have encountered numerous times when it comes to 2007's Will Smith drama I Am Legend. The original Matheson novel admittedly needs some changes to be adapted to screen. After all, the vast majority of the book takes place in his head and there are no other human characters. But the book posses an uncanny ability to be easily transcribed to film, it is a moody and mature story about the end of the world, carried by the weight of an incredibly interesting psychological study of a normal guy going through this ordeal. From his interactions with a lone dog he finds to the drunken rage he expresses night after lonely night of drinking and listening to the vampires outside taunting him, we get an inside look at the inner workings of a lonely and incredibly frustrated mind. Then there is the ending, a great twist that flips the entire narrative on its head and makes one question the classification of 'monsters' and brings up considerable moral ambiguity towards the actions of the main character. Sure, it was written in the fifties and some things needed to be changed, but the brisk 160 page story could have transcribed fairly easily into a low to mid budget post-apocalyptic character study with both atmosphere and class. But then... money happened. What we got was a bloated 150 million dollar action movie written by the always 'lovely' Akiva Goldsman. The movie is admittedly more of an adaption of the Heston movie Omegaman than I Am Legend, but this brings up the question as to why they kept the name of the book if they were going to stray so far wildly off course. The setting was moved from a suburb in LA to the heart of New York City, the character changed from a lonely factory worker to a scientist/super army guy who is both mega smart and good with guns, and the monsters of the movie are no longer the deranged but intelligent vampires featured in the book but poorly CGI created zombies. Though these changes could have been forgiven if they kept at least the core theme of the novel, but even that was not done. The movie instead opts out for a Hollywood ending that puts a smile on your face rather than makes you think. In the end I Am Legend is not a bad movie. But it is a movie that bears so little resemblance to its namesake due to the big budget Hollywood treatment it got, that it makes you wonder why it kept that name in the first place. This is not even a little annoyance but is destructive to the legacy of the novel. Simply put I Am Legend should have just been called what it was, a remake of Omegaman.
It is obviously no easy task to hit the adaptation Goldilocks zone, you either misjudge where it is and go too far or stick too close. Though it isn't a black and white ordeal either, it is usually more of a grey zone. In terms of adapting the source material few films succeed as much as the 2010 comedy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Say what you will about the movie, it is a near perfect adaptation of the source material. The first half of the movie is almost page for page from the comic, but the latter half of the movie is completely different, changes were made that needed to be made so that it could translate to film. Comic books are different than movies and Edgar Wright certainly understood this fact. One would think this change at the halfway point would anger fans and send the internet into a rage induced flooding of the Universal message boards. However, the things changed in Scott Pilgrim keep the same tone and humor of the comics. The changes are consistent with the content that the fans went in to see, and in some cases actually works better than the comics did. Scott Pilgrim is a translation of the comic book to film rather than the comic book reproduced on film. The movie certainly has its flaws, the central love story takes a backseat to the humor and the movie flopped upon release (though it did have considerable DVD sales and has gone on to become a midnight movie in some cities). But in terms of adaptations few movies have hit that elusive Goldilocks zone as well as Scott Pilgrim did.
No movie has ever summed up the difficulty of conversions between the page and screen as well as Charlie Kaufman's 2002 movie Adaptation, a movie about Charlie making a movie about a book that is simply unfilmable. It is another case of a great adaptation and really puts the troubles that the creative team faces when they go to make these things into perspective. Do you want to honor the source material or make money? Keep die hard fans happy or attract a wider audience? Every production is asked these questions and there is simply no easy answer. Adaptation is a fine and tricky art repeated endlessly in the film world and few films get it right, but those that do are a rare gem that is a joy to watch for newcomers and fans alike.
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