Adapting complex, “talky” books is seldom a grateful job. Movie scripts are much shorter than many books in length, and adapting complex, non-visual themes is problematic at best.
I have chosen Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune as a textbook-case (pardon the pun) explanation. The book is six hundred pages; the film is two and a half hours in length.
Just a few examples in where the movie fails:
The Bene Gesserit becomes bald-shaved and telepathic, instead of the hyper-awareness possessing “witches” in the books. However, we get to see the Spacing Guild’s navigators, resembling giant floating and talking vaginas.
LANDSRAAD is pretty much eliminated, and the “instable tripod of power” goes with it. The whole delicate balance of power found in the first book is all emitted, the emperor is little more than a puppet of the Spacing Guild, who fear Paul, the main character.
The Harkonnen-Atreides blood feud is never the least bit explained.
The “weirding way”, instead of a mental discipline, becomes a kinky new weapon amplifying its user’s voice.
Paul, the main character, defies every single law of probability and common sense in the very last scene in the movie, instead of the much memorable final spoken line, which was something I always remembered ever since I read the book in 8th grade.
Granted, such things would have been hard to translate for the screen in a reasonably lengthy movie.
Creating a trilogy would have been a much better choice, in all due probability. No rush to tell the story.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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It is a really interesting entry! Enjoyed reading it! :)
ReplyDeleteYou can always find differences between books and movie adaptations. Depending on the technology used, and the amount os dramatic effects in the original work, you can get a totally different movie in the end.
ReplyDeleteJust some examples from the recent past:
I, Robot (starring Will Smith) The original book by Asimov consits of different short stories. They took some of the characters and background, and constructed their own story.
THHGTTG (if you don't know what this means, I slapped you in the face right now) The beginning is similar, the middle is different, the ending somewhat resembles to the book.
Though, in both cases the original author died before the film was made. Asimov in 1992, Douglas Adams in 2005 but he was there when the work started.
Ps. Disable word verification pls.
kthxbye
DNA wrote almost the whole script before his death for THHGttG.
ReplyDeleteI find word verification to be a good tool to prvent Hell's minions (AKA "spambots") from flooding the temple of my page.