Agents of Shield - Season 4

[Christopher]

This may just be me, but I rather think a good movie adaptation has to first be a good movie in it's own right ahead of being accurate to whatever it may be based on. Calling Halle Berry's character in 'Catwoman' "Selina Kyle" would not have magically made that movie not god awful just as being true to the Johnny Blaze origin story did not automatically make 'Ghost Rider' objectively better.

They couldn't have done that anyway, since Berry's Catwoman implicitly coexisted with Selina Kyle in the same reality. What a lot of people don't realize about that movie is that it was a stealth spinoff of Batman Returns, taking the origin of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman -- murdered, surrounded by cats, revived with catlike persona and abilities to take revenge on her murderer -- and retconning it into a mystical legacy that had been endowed on many women over the ages, the implication being that Selina had been just one of them.


But you're right, of course -- fidelity and quality are two different things. I've just been binge-rewatching the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series, which is beloved by Hulk fans even though it was about as far from the source as it's possible to get. Its showrunner found the comics ridiculous and tried to change everything about them, instead doing a show that owed more to Jekyll & Hyde, The Fugitive, and Universal's Frankenstein than to anything from Marvel. Yet it was the first really smart, sophisticated TV superhero adaptation, rising above the cheesiness of contemporaries like The Amazing Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, so it's well-regarded despite being almost completely detached from the source.

 

[Greg Cox]

I
There's a strange trend I've noticed among critics and fans of comic book movies (and adaptations of anything really) where accuracy is equated to quality and deviation form the source material is cited as a flaw.
.

As I like it to put it, fidelity to the source material is a virtue, but it's not the only virtue nor even the most important one.

And fidelity may not even be a virtue in its own right, but more like a means to an end. The danger in deviating too much from the source material is that you run the risk of losing what made the property work in the first place, so you need to take that into consideration (without, hopefully, getting too fundamentalist about it).

But, to my mind, that's different from fidelity for fidelity's sake. Or from judging an adaptation primarily on faithful it is to the source material, regardless of the merits of the acting, writing, directing, production values, etc.

 

[Reverend]

They couldn't have done that anyway, since Berry's Catwoman implicitly coexisted with Selina Kyle in the same reality. What a lot of people don't realize about that movie is that it was a stealth spinoff of Batman Returns, taking the origin of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman -- murdered, surrounded by cats, revived with catlike persona and abilities to take revenge on her murderer -- and retconning it into a mystical legacy that had been endowed on many women over the ages, the implication being that Selina had been just one of them.

I think people were too distracted by how terrible that movie was for that to even register. Even if true, it's just lip service to tell their own terrible story while keeping up the bare minimum of pretence to justify using the license.

But you're right, of course -- fidelity and quality are two different things. I've just been binge-rewatching the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series, which is beloved by Hulk fans even though it was about as far from the source as it's possible to get. Its showrunner found the comics ridiculous and tried to change everything about them, instead doing a show that owed more to Jekyll & Hyde, The Fugitive, and Universal's Frankenstein than to anything from Marvel. Yet it was the first really smart, sophisticated TV superhero adaptation, rising above the cheesiness of contemporaries like The Amazing Spider-Man and Wonder Woman, so it's well-regarded despite being almost completely detached from the source.

The Bixby Hulk series is one of those instances I mention below where they stayed true more to the spirit of the material than the letter. Right from the get-go the Hulk comic was always heavily influenced by the likes of 'Jekyll & Hyde' and 'Frankenstein'. Borrowing the format of 'The Fugitive' was more a concession to the practicality of making a weekly TV show than anything else. There's just no way, even today that you could do a Hulk TV show that was entirely faithful to the comics. It's just not feasible.
What's important is they get the essence of the core character right and I think they did as well as one could expect of the time.

As I like it to put, fidelity to the source material is a virtue, but it's not the only virtue nor even the most important one.

And fidelity may not even be a virtue in its own right, but more like a means to an end. The danger in deviating too much from the source material is that you run the risk of losing what made the property work in the first place, so you need to take that into consideration (without, hopefully, getting too fundamentalist about it).

But, to my mind, that's different from fidelity for fidelity's sake. Or from judging an adaptation primarily on faithful it is to the source material, regardless of the merits of the acting, writing, directing, production values, etc.

The way I generally look at it is that it's more important to be faithful to the spirit of the material than to the letter. Few things annoy me more than an adaptation where the changes aren't done to properly adapt the story and/or concept into a new medium but because the filmakers fundamentally don't understand the point of the source material or don't care and are just using the veneer of a known brand to sell their almost entirely unrelated movie.
Jodorowsky's 'Dune' movie that never was leaps to mind. I don't know why so many people lament it not materialising (OK, I do really: Giger + Foss & Moebius = WIN!) but it's clear listening to the guy talk about it that he barely paid attention to what the book was saying. His ideas found a much better home in his own comic.

I do make exceptions to this such as the 'Starship Troopers' movie since it was very deliberately a parody masquerading as an adaptation. It also helps that the source material doesn't deserve a faithful adaptation and IMO the ridicule was well earned.

 

[Christopher]

I think people were too distracted by how terrible that movie was for that to even register. Even if true, it's just lip service to tell their own terrible story while keeping up the bare minimum of pretence to justify using the license.

Well, of course it was. But I think it was an interesting bit of retconning, a way to subtly establish a connection even though they couldn't make it overt.

The Bixby Hulk series is one of those instances I mention below where they stayed true more to the spirit of the material than the letter. Right from the get-go the Hulk comic was always heavily influenced by the likes of 'Jekyll & Hyde' and 'Frankenstein'.

Well, I think that's stretching the point. While those were definitely influences on the first couple of issues of The Incredible Hulk, the character quickly evolved away from that into something rather different. And Kenneth Johnson was absolutely not trying to be faithful to either the letter or the spirit of the comics. He wanted nothing to do with superhero comics. The only reason he accepted the gig at all was because he wanted to do a riff on Les Miserables, which is where the Fugitive angle came in. But he tried to get as far away from anything comics-like as possible. He refused to give the lead character an alliterative name, hence "David Banner." He wanted the Hulk to be red instead of green (Stan Lee refused), and he made the Hulk nonverbal and much less powerful (not bulletproof, no mighty leaps, no Hulk clap, etc.). The show had no other characters in common with the source, the origin was completely different, there was no military pursuit, and there were no supervillains (except the other Hulk-like creature in "The First") and almost never any fantastic elements beyond the Hulk himself. It was one of the least comic-booky adaptations of a superhero comic there's ever been.

There's just no way, even today that you could do a Hulk TV show that was entirely faithful to the comics. It's just not feasible.

Obviously, but it wouldn't be hard to get much closer than the show did -- to include Rick and Betty and Thunderbolt, to have the Hulk capable of speech, to include sci-fi plots and supervillains. The Bixby Hulk was exceptional even among superhero shows of its day in its avoidance of fanciful plots. Wonder Woman and the bionic heroes dealt with aliens and androids. Nicholas Hammond's Spider-Man dealt with a telekinetic and faced a clone just a few years after the comics' Spidey met his first clone. But TIH's most fanciful plots were a couple of episodes involving psychic precognition, which was seen at the time as a plausible phenomenon. The closest they came to a comics-like storyline was in the "Prometheus" 2-parter, a riff on The Andromeda Strain's secret government program to deal with alien life, but it had the suspicious extraterrestrial object turn out to be just a meteorite while the secret scientists mistook the Hulk for an ET. (That's also the closest we got to the comics' Hulk personality, since Banner was stuck half-transformed, verbal but less intelligent than usual.)

 

[RJDiogenes]

And fidelity may not even be a virtue in its own right, but more like a means to an end. The danger in deviating too much from the source material is that you run the risk of losing what made the property work in the first place, so you need to take that into consideration (without, hopefully, getting too fundamentalist about it).

What's interesting is that fidelity to the source material is even controversial. If you're not faithful to the source material, you're not really doing an adaptation-- you're just recycling names.

Or from judging an adaptation primarily on faithful it is to the source material, regardless of the merits of the acting, writing, directing, production values, etc.

Does anybody actually do that?

 

[Myko]

Adaptation means change, so it definitely does not require you to be faithful.

I think the obsession with fidelity in the movie adaptations probably stems from the many years of super hero movies that where completely unfaithful (and terrible movies) leaving a bitter taste for wild changes. I think now that we've had high fidelity for a while things will be able to get looser again.

Edit: To clarify, I didn't want to imply they were terrible movies because of low fidelity, but the combination of low fidelity and terrible movie has been conflated in the minds of the viewer.

 

[Christopher]

I think the obsession with fidelity in the movie adaptations probably stems from the many years of super hero movies that where completely unfaithful (and terrible movies) leaving a bitter taste for wild changes. I think now that we've had high fidelity for a while things will be able to get looser again.

I think that correlation has always been overstated. I mean, Bryan Singer's X-Men films pretty much began the modern wave of quality superhero movies, and they took enormous liberties with the source -- changing the characters' relative ages and the team composition, making Xavier English, reducing Rogue to her baseline powers without the flight and invulnerability, giving Rogue the name "Marie," avoiding the costumes, etc. All the subsequent X-Men films have played similarly fast and loose with chronology and continuity -- with respect to each other as much as to the comics.

By the same token, Arrow is a massive departure from its source material in many ways. It changed character names (Laurel, Thea), created new characters (Diggle, Quentin, Tommy, Sara), repurposed and reinvented characters associated with other heroes (Felicity), and made all sorts of other radical changes to the source, but it laid the groundwork for a continuity that became successful enough to expand to encompass more comics-faithful elements. Although even as it's incorporated a ton of stuff from the comics, the Arrowverse has also continued to reinvent and transform it -- new characters like Wells and Joe West and Amaya, heavily altered characters like Caitlin and Jax, the name Waverider assigned to a ship instead of a superhero, etc.

It's just that fans are more willing to forgive changes if the adaptation is good. When we like something, we focus more on the parts we like and gloss over the parts we don't.

 

[bbjeg]

Just watched the Slingshot mini series (and I mean mini). It was alright though they mostly showed what I expected what happened in the past. I did however like May's aggressive favor. I also liked that they featured my hometown of Baltimore. I think this is the first time they did that in the MCU (Winter Soldier was close with DC).

I do hope that they continue with this. Maybe a Deathlok series or even Talbot dealing with the ever changing world.

I think that correlation has always been overstated. I mean, Bryan Singer's X-Men films pretty much began the modern wave of quality superhero movies...

I don't care what anyone says, it was Howard the Duck!

 

[Greg Cox]

Does anybody actually do that?

I think so. Even on this board, you can sometimes see people getting worked up (albeit usually in advance of the actual release) if it looks like an upcoming adaptation isn't sticking exactly to the source material. ("Stupid Hollywood! Did they even read the comic book?")

Granted, if the adaptation turns out well, such liberties are eventually overlooked by most. But if the adaptation fails, those same liberties will be blamed for its failure. ("Well of course it bombed--because it didn't stick to the comics!")

And some hardcore purists will still complain that Hollywood screwed things up again.

Recent examples? I recall plenty of folks who couldn't get past the fact that NBC's short-lived DRACULA tv series was NOT a faithful adaption of the original novel, even though it was obvious from the first episode that that was hardly the intent. And I recall folks who never forgave SMALLVILLE or MERLIN for not being 100% faithful to previous versions of Clark Kent and King Arthur . .. even though there were already multiple versions of both stories.

 

[Christopher]

Recent examples? I recall plenty of folks who couldn't get past the fact that NBC's short-lived DRACULA tv series was NOT a faithful adaption of the original novel, even though it was obvious from the first episode that that was hardly the intent.

When has there ever been a faithful screen adaptation of the novel? You couldn't really do one, because it's an epistolary novel presented as a compilation of journals, letters, and news reports, and the process by which the book was compiled is itself a key plot point within the book -- essentially the literary equivalent of a found-footage movie. Its story is too closely bound to its prose format, so there's no way to adapt it to a new medium without changing it significantly.

I will never for the life of me understand people who think that adaptations should be exact copies of the source. If you want something exactly like the original, that's what the original is for! If you're not gonna do something different, why bother doing another version at all?

And I recall folks who never forgave SMALLVILLE or MERLIN for not being 100% faithful to previous versions of Clark Kent and King Arthur . .. even though there were already multiple versions of both stories.

Well, let's face it -- Merlin was pretty much trying to be a version of Smallville. Except with a better lead actor.

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

I will never for the life of me understand people who think that adaptations should be exact copies of the source.

I guess a counter to that is, if you want to make something different, why bother with the source and just do something original? In some cases, it seems like it's only to cash in on the name as opposed to being excited to bring a favourite book to life.

Like anything, it's about where that balance is.

 

[Christopher]

I guess a counter to that is, if you want to make something different, why bother with the source and just do something original?

Which is a silly question. Exploring variations on an idea is a vital part of creativity. Ideas aren't static, unchanging things that only exist in one form. They're fluid things that are meant to be passed on from one mind to another, played with, added to, changed, expanded, evolved. There are always new possibilities that you can find in a story that weren't developed in the original form. It's the same reason musicians do new arrangements and covers of old songs, or that chefs try to find new variations of popular recipes. Creating new works and creating variations on old works are both valid ways of telling stories. Insisting that it has to be a choice between one or the other is like saying that a carpenter has to choose between using a hammer and a saw and can't keep both tools in the kit. Both are useful depending on the particular job you have to do.

There's also the fact that a lot of stories have elements that date them, that make them alienating or offensive to later generations. Things like antiquated prose or unconscious (or conscious) racism or sexism or scientific ignorance. A story can have a lot of worthwhile, timeless elements, yet also have aspects that make it unappealing to a modern audience. So retelling the core story with the details modernized can keep it alive and meaningful.

 

[Greg Cox]

Adaptation means change, so it definitely does not require you to be faithful.

I think the obsession with fidelity in the movie adaptations probably stems from the many years of super hero movies that where completely unfaithful (and terrible movies) leaving a bitter taste for wild changes. I think now that we've had high fidelity for a while things will be able to get looser again.

My pet theory: what we actually want and what we think we want are not always the same things.

What we want, quite reasonably, is for the property to be treated with respect by somebody who has done their home work and appreciates the source material. And who can blame us?

But sometimes "respect" is mistakenly equated with absolute fidelity to the source material, leading to a preoccupation with keeping every little detail consistent with the source--and treating every deviation as a "mistake" for which the adaption needs to be marked down.

That's mostly what I talking about before: the unfortunate tendency to "grade" adaptations on their fidelity and to automatically treat deviations as flaws.

 

[Christopher]

My pet theory: what we actually want and what we think we want are not always the same things.

What we want, quite reasonably, is for the property to be treated with respect by somebody who has done their home work and appreciates the source material. And who can blame us?

But sometimes "respect" is mistakenly equated with absolute fidelity to the source material, leading to a preoccupation with keeping every little detail consistent with source--and treating every deviation as a "mistake" for which the adaption needs to be marked down.

The problem is, fans only know what they like. They don't understand how to make things they like, because that's a matter of technique, and technique takes skill and study and experience to master. So when fans assume they know why one story is more enjoyable than another, or that they know how a good story can be made, they're usually wrong. They mistake what they do know, which is the surface content and factual details of the story, for what they don't know, which is the technique and craft of making a story engaging.

 

[Greg Cox]

When has there ever been a faithful screen adaptation of the novel? You couldn't really do one, because it's an epistolary novel presented as a compilation of journals, letters, and news reports, and the process by which the book was compiled is itself a key plot point within the book -- essentially the literary equivalent of a found-footage movie. Its story is too closely bound to its prose format, so there's no way to adapt it to a new medium without changing it significantly.

True, but in the case of the NBC show, I think there was some confusion between Dracula (the character) and Dracula (the book) when it came to people's expectations for the TV show, which was never supposed to be a literal adaptation of the novel, but was instead a deliberately revisionist take on the concept, so judging it by its fidelity to the original novel seemed to be colossally Missing the Point.

"But that's not how it was in the book . . . !"
"Of course not, but they're not doing the book."

Mind you, this didn't stop some publisher from reprinting the original novel with the actor from TV show on the cover, even though this might have been a case where it would be have been more accurate to publish a novelization instead . ...

 

[Christopher]

True, but in the case of the NBC show, I think there was some confusion between Dracula (the character) and Dracula (the book) when it came to people's expectations for the TV show, which was never supposed to be a literal adaptation of the novel, but was instead a deliberately revisionist take on the concept, so judging it by its fidelity to the original novel seemed to be colossally Missing the Point.

And it's just so ridiculous and ignorant. The most famous version of Dracula is Bela Lugosi's, and that's profoundly different from the book. I bet the vast majority of the people whining that it wasn't enough like the book have never actually read the book.

 

[Greg Cox]

Just to belabor the point, you'd think the fact that Dracula (in the TV show) is posing as a brilliant American inventor who wants to bring free wireless electricity to the masses would indicate that this is not supposed to be the same old DRACULA story we're accustomed to.

But, to be fair, the title of show, Dracula, could lead people to mistakenly expect a straightforward adaption of the novel instead of a new steampunk series loosely based on Dracula. Perhaps they should have called it DRACULA: THE ELECTRIC AGE or something?

But, again, it should have been obvious after about ten minutes that this was never intended to be a reverent "Masterpiece Theater" adaptation of the novel, and yet people kept complaining that the TV show was getting everything "wrong"--as though sticking to the novel was the only valid approach to the material.

 

[Christopher]

But, to be fair, the title of show, Dracula, could lead people to mistakenly expect a straight adaption of the novel instead of a new show loosely based on Dracula.

I'd think it'd be more likely to lead people to expect a remake of the movie. After all, most Americans don't read prose fiction. I bet there are plenty of people out there who don't even know the Lugosi Dracula or the Karloff Frankenstein was based on a book, let alone how much both movies changed the books.

For that matter, there are already multiple different screen works titled simply Dracula -- the 1931 Lugosi film (based on the 1924 play of that name), the simultaneously produced Spanish-language version of same (shot at night on the same sets), the 1958 Hammer film (retitled Horror of Dracula in the US), a 1968 ITV television version starring Denholm Elliott, the 1979 Frank Langella film, a 2002 Italian miniseries, and a 2006 Granada Television version starring Marc Warren, plus several other stage plays. So it's not like there's anything remotely new about a production of that name telling its own different version of the story.

 

[Greg Cox]

^ By coincidence, I'm listening to the soundtrack to the Langella version at this very minute!

(By John Williams, no less!)

And let's not forget the Louis Jourdan version from the late seventies, which is probably the most faithful adaptation of the novel, and the Jack Palance version (scripted by Richard Matheson), which first introduced the idea that Dracula was searching for the reincarnation of his long-lost love (an idea found nowhere in Stoker, but used again in the Coppola version).

Etc.

 

[Ovation]

^ By coincidence, I'm listening to the soundtrack to the Langella version at this very minute!

(By John Williams, no less!)

Isn't he the guy who did the Lost in Space soundtrack and a couple of other vaguely remembered space operas?