How Purist are you?

[Dînadan]

Watching pt1 of the Going Postal video and got this idea for an interesting discussion; when judging an adaption, how much of a purist are you? Are you a stickler for word-for-word adaptions or do you prefer broad strokes?



For myself, I'd say I have purist leanings, but nowhere near the extent of only word-for-word being good enough. For me it's less a case of being in favour of no changes and more a case of being against inexplicable or pointless changes. I think that when changing mediums it's unavoidable that changes will have to be made, but that doesn't mean it's okay to make changes willy-nilly.

For example, Peter Jackson's adaption of The Hobbit runs the gamut from good changes to down-right stupid ones. On the good end is the part where the Trolls capture Thorin's Company; in the book each dwarf is captured one by one whereas the film has them charge in enmass and get captured as a group. This is a good change as while having them captured onebyone works on the page, it doesn't on screen and the change makes things flow better (plus it makes the Dwarves look less stupid). A tolerable change (although not particularly necessary) is the inclusion of an Orc antagonist while an unnecessary/inexplicable change is making it Azog (who in book canon was dead at the time) instead of choosing his son Bolg (presumably Azog was chosen because it gave him a revenge motive to explain his antagonising Thorin, but Bolg would also have that motive considering Thorin slew his father, plus it'd give the Orcs more dimension by showing that they're not pure evil). And on the down right stupid end of the scale is Radagast's bunny sled.

[GandALF]

I don't know if it counts as purist-ism, but I've always found the "psychedlic" aspects of Dune adaptions, particularly Jodorowsky's unmade one, to be a bit out of place. Sure there's the space cocaine and the visions but the novel always seemed grittier and more down-to-earth(Arrakis?) to me.

[Madner Kami]

Books and movies are two quite different media. What takes pages in books to describe, can be shown within a second, what gives insight in a character's mind in books, ends up being a wierd, forced voice talking out of the air. An adaption should stay close to the source, but you simply have to make adjustments, simply due to how different the media are, there's no way around it.

The question is always, whether the changes add to the work or subtract from it. It's somewhat hard to say what will work out in the end and what not.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'm sure I used to be more of a purist, and I still am to some degree depending on the work. If I really want to see a certain scene or idea transposed to film, then it is annoying if that scene/idea is ignored or worse.

My real priority is that the spirit and central theme of the book/comic/whatever is captured in the adaptation. Certain scenes or story elements not working on film, that's understandable. Every once in a while a director or screenwriter even comes up with a better way to communicate the themes than the original writer. There are also times when a not-very-good book happens to have a really good premise, in which case a loose adaptation doesn't bother me at all.

The Tolkien adaptations are a good example. The Lord of the Rings films capture the "northerness" of the novel amazingly well. In my opinion, a big part of the reason for this is the quality and quantity of Tolkien's descriptions, and especially the fact that Tolkien was drawing upon both real cultures and established mythologies. How do you do Rohan on film? Well, Tolkien drew heavily on Anglo-Saxons, so you can draw from the same sources that Tolkien did. The sophistication of the music is a huge part of it. Get Tolkien artists who know their stuff as conceptual designers and consult Tolkien experts on stuff, and you're well on your way to a "faithful" adaptation.

The Hobbit, on the other hand, was a failure. It wasn't a failure because of lack of talent involved in the production, but really because the tone, theme, and spirit of those films are very, very wrong. Jackson and co. tried to make another LotR, but The Hobbit doesn't have that kind of depth. It should have been an easier movie to make (no, it shouldn't have been three movies). Heck, I can think of half a dozen adventure movies that are closer in spirit to the book than the actual adaptation.

[Dînadan]

. It should have been an easier movie to make (no, it shouldn't have been three movies)

Agreed. At most it should have been two films, 'The Hobbit' adapting the book, and, I dunno, 'The Wizard' focused on Gandalf and adapting the Appenicies/Unfinished Tales material they tried to cram in (and even then, it probably would have been better not as a companion film/pt2 to the Hobbit, but rather as the first in an anthology series that dipped into the supplementary material).

I suppose it's kinda ironic how, back when Jackson was trying to get LotR backed, he tried to trim it down to two films to make backing it more attractive to studios and when he got to New Line they said "What are you doing? This needs to be three films!", and now after that when he came to make what should have been one film he bloated it out to three.

[Dînadan]

For balance, a case where not sticking ardently to the source material is probably best found in the superhero genre. There have been bad adaptations and missteps of course, but on the whole superhero adaptions tend to come off well in this regard I think. Possibly because they tend not to be adaptions of an existing work to a new medium persay. Possibly also helps that by now most seperheroes are established as living in a multiverse so each new 'adaption' can comfortly slot into one of the parallel universes that exist within that multiverse, whereas for something like Tolkien's work there is no established alternate realities to place the adaption in.

Although, saying that, that doesn't account for things like King Arthur or Robin Hood where on the whole adaptions/retellings/etc are more forgiving. Then again, those were never a cohesive body of works and what we have today are a (sometimes even contradictory) mishmash of stories that have been passed down over time. Thinking about it, tying it back to the Tolkien musings, I think book purists would possibly be more forgiving of an adaption of 'The Children of Hurin' because multiple versions have been published over the years, so unlike TH and LotR there's no one, 'true' version to compare against.

[Rocketboy1313]

There are several instances in which a radical departure from the source material resulted in the movie being better than the book (for example, "Starship Troopers") and there are plenty of instances in which a direct adaptation is impossible because the material is so expansive and varied that to attempt a "definitive" take on it would be impossible (most things related to Batman for instance).

There are also issues of, "If you are just going to do the book then what is the point?" Which is my rebuttal to people who complain about the Harry Potter movies not being enough like the books or the Lord of the Ring movies not being faithful enough. But then, I don't give a shit about the books in those instances and what they bring up, like more bullshit with the House Elves (who I hate) or Tom Bombadil (who I hate) make me think what they like about the books and what I like in general at just at odds, so it has less to do with Adaptation and more to do with them liking garbage.

Overall, I prefer when creatives leave their own authorial stamp on a production even if it recontextualizes the material so much as to be a rebuttal of the original work... See again "Starship Troopers". At the very least I want them to pull out or change things that made no sense in the original, if anyone has read "No Country for Old Men" I consider them ovie better for the simple reason that when Lou Ellen Moss encounters Anton in the motel he fights to win instead of leaving him alive and getting shot in the back for his trouble (after already admitting that anyone searching for the money would not stop and that a deadly confrontation was inevitable, so the idea of not killing Anton when he had the ability to is just stupid).

[LittleRaven]

I am the anti-purist. I firmly believe that to make a successful adaptation, you have to be prepared to change stuff. Quite possibly a lot of stuff. The most important thing is to preserve the spirit of the work, and every successful adaptation that I've seen is very broad strokes indeed.

A few adaptations that I consider very successful:

• Coraline: The movie makes a LOT of changes - it adds new characters, shifts orders of events, changes the appearance of the Mother, etc...but it perfectly captures the theme of the book, and transforms baby's first horror book to baby's first horror movie beautifully.
• The Hunt For Red October: Both the movie and the book are excellent. They both have a submarine named The Red October. That's the bulk of the similarities between the two. But both tell a compelling cold war story within the confines of their mediums.
• Lord of the Rings: Jackson's work isn't perfect, but it's a damn fine stab at putting Tolkien on the big screen, and it succeeded in bringing his world to a whole new generation. (It also inspired the far less fine stab that was the Hobbit, but no good deed goes unpunished.) And Tom Bombadil had to go. I understand perfectly.

Dune is...as close to unfilmable as any book that someone would conceivably WANT to put on film could be, so I'm not surprised that every adaptation of it had failed to really hit the mark. (For the record, while I loved the sci-fi miniseries....I actually think that Lynch's terribly flawed but utterly epic attempt came closest to the mark. But that's just me.)

[Dînadan]

Wasn't 'Starship Troopers' originally it's own movie and then during production they realised the similarities to the book so bought the film rights to avoid getting sued, or is that an urban myth?

[Rocketboy1313]

I wrote a thing about adaptation years ago on my own blog (back before I really figured out how to format things for easier digestion by the eye) and it was all about how I think that adapting elements into a work that would not otherwise include them is smart and interesting.

"Incongruous Soundtrack"
http://rocketboy1313.blogspot.com/2013/ ... track.html

Wasn't 'Starship Troopers' originally it's own movie and then during production they realised the similarities to the book so bought the film rights to avoid getting sued, or is that an urban myth?

I have read conflicting reports on this. But, since Director Paul V has gone on record calling the book junk it is likely that even if it was its own thing, he knew enough of the book to smear it directly and deliberately while making the movie.