I love the movie Starship Troopers, which was directed by someone who disliked the novel and never bothered to finish it.
I saw the movie before I read the novel, and when I read the novel, I assumed it was as much of a satire as the movie -- since the characters' arguments about why their authoritarian system worked were all predicated on the unproven assumption that it did work, so it was circular reasoning, and I assumed we were supposed to recognize that and see how invalid it was. I was surprised when I mentioned this on the old Analog Magazine discussion board and was informed by legendary Asimov's editor Gardner Dozois, who'd known Heinlein personally, that Heinlein had intended it in earnest. Learning that lowered my opinion of the novel.
Although I've subsequently heard it said that it wasn't so much that Heinlein truly believed in the system the novel presented as that he was exploring it open-mindedly as a thought experiment. Even so, I don't think the characters' arguments held up, for the aforementioned reason.
Like the War of the Worlds movie that started with a topless scene? (I suspect that was the Asylum version.)
Even refuting, in toto, the whole premise of the original work counts as respect. Certainly more respect than ignoring the premise of the original work.
I actually had to look it up, having neither read the short story nor seen the film (and quite frankly, the more I read about it, the less I want to read it), but yes, that sounds like a several-orders-of-magnitude-worse case of "ignoring the original premise" than even the worst revisionist Oz, and Mr. King deserved every cent he got out of the lawsuits. (And seeing that Pierce Brosnan was an above-the-title star doesn't exactly raise my opinion of him, which was never all that high in the first place.)
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I'm not even sure what you mean by that. But I stand by my position that it's facile and wrong to make blanket generalizations about any category of creative endeavor. Anything can be done well by the right creator.
For that matter, it isn't the job of an adaptation to serve the original. The original is what it is, and it isn't affected one way or another by what an adaptation does. The job of an adaptation is to create something new using the original as its starting material -- to tell a story that will stand on its own and satisfy an audience whether they have any knowledge of the original or not (as indeed most of them probably won't, as the entire point of an adaptation is to introduce the work to a new audience). The source material serves that goal, not the other way around, and sometimes what serves that goal best is to diverge from the source material. Sometimes the source is just the barest inspiration for creating something almost entirely different. That doesn't matter, as long as the adaptation is effective on its own terms.
I do find that folks sometimes confuse "best" adaptation with "most faithful."
Fidelity to the source material is a virtue, and if you deviate too far from the source, you run the risk of losing what appealed to people in the first place, but it's not the only virtue or even the most important one.
The 1939 movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton, is arguably the best one to date, even though it takes liberties with the novel and (spoiler alert) gives the movie a much happier ending for Esmerelda than the one found in Hugo's novel. A great movie, regardless.
On the other hand, I confess I have never forgiven 1962 movie version of The Phantom of the Opera for prettty much omitting the two best scenes from the story. I mean, seriously, how do you do The Phantom of the Opera without the unmasking at the piano and the chandelier drop?
(That being said, the latter does have its admirers on-line, so maybe I should revisit it with a more open mind?)
Fidelity to the source material is a virtue, and if you deviate too far from the source, you run the risk of losing what appealed to people in the first place, but it's not the only virtue or even the most important one.
The 1939 movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton, is arguably the best one to date, even though it takes liberties with the novel and (spoiler alert) gives the movie a much happier ending for Esmerelda than the one found in Hugo's novel. A great movie, regardless.
On the other hand, I confess I have never forgiven 1962 movie version of The Phantom of the Opera for prettty much omitting the two best scenes from the story. I mean, seriously, how do you do The Phantom of the Opera without the unmasking at the piano and the chandelier drop?
(That being said, the latter does have its admirers on-line, so maybe I should revisit it with a more open mind?)
The only movie version I've seen of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a silent (screened with live organ accompaniment at First Congregational Church of Long Beach, CA). Which is to say, I haven't even seen the Disney animated version).
The only adaptations I've seen of The Phantom of the Opera have been the Lloyd Webber versions. Of which I found the stage version to be the most successful. And from what I read about the sequel that Lloyd Webber did, I saw no reason to see it.
As to refuting a premise vs. ignoring it, @Christopher, I'll leave my bee-in-the-bonnet about revisionist Oz off the table, and just say that you and @Tosk cited examples of the former, with Starship Troopers, and Tosk then cited the latter, with The Lawnmower Man.
The only adaptations I've seen of The Phantom of the Opera have been the Lloyd Webber versions. Of which I found the stage version to be the most successful. And from what I read about the sequel that Lloyd Webber did, I saw no reason to see it.
As to refuting a premise vs. ignoring it, @Christopher, I'll leave my bee-in-the-bonnet about revisionist Oz off the table, and just say that you and @Tosk cited examples of the former, with Starship Troopers, and Tosk then cited the latter, with The Lawnmower Man.
To my mind, the best adaption is still the classic silent film with Lon Chaney. And if you ever have a chance to see it on the big screen, with a live pipe-organ accompaniment (as I did in Seattle decades ago), do it!
And in a tortured attempt to bring this back on OT, I'm kinda amazed that Trek has never done a riff on The Phantom of the Opera that I can think of. "The Phantom of the Space Station." "The Phantom of Holodeck." "The Phantom of the Asteroid."
Hmmm. . . ..
But different audiences have different preferences, and as I said, the primary audience for an adaptation is going to be people unfamiliar with the original, contrary to what fans tend to assume. (To this day, I've never read the novel of Jurassic Park, for instance, but it's one of my favorite Spielberg movies.) Sometimes an adaptation appeals more to people who liked the original, but sometimes, as with Starship Troopers, or in my case Minority Report, the adaptation appeals more to people who disliked the original -- which is fine, since the original is still there for those who enjoyed it, but there's also an alternate approach for those who didn't.
Of course, the ideal is to find a way to thread the needle and do something that appeals to both audiences. For instance, Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated was a deconstructive, satirical take that appealed to people who (like me) were not that fond of the original, but it also had a ton of affectionate allusions and easter eggs for people who were Scooby-Doo fans.
As it happens, the Long Beach Chapter of the American Guild of Organists does occasionally have silent movie nights as official Chapter events, and a number of churches whose organists are Chapter Members also have silent movie nights. I've seen Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, The General, a French silent of The Fall of the House of Usher, and Murnau's Nosferatu at such events. And I'm not entirely sure, but I may have invoked the "Yes, we have Nosferatu, we have Nosferatu today" gag at a screening of the latter long before I saw Mel Brooks use it in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and it might have even been before it came out.
So it's probably only a matter of time before I see the Lon Chaney silent Phantom in that context.
But almost certainly not with an actual theatre organ as we know them today (i.e., "pizza organs"): syrupy, tibia-dominated registrations give me the collywobbles just as severely as Laurens Hammond's Noisome Little Noisemaker (TM) does. Hmm. I wonder if they've ever done a silent movie night with the Harvard Flentrop . . . (I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they've done them with the St. Mark's Seattle Flentrop, or the "Little Church Around the Corner" [Transfiguration Episcopal Manhattan] Fisk, or the First Church Cambridge Frobenius.)
As it happens, one of the major beats in my novel involves very successfully accompanying silent movies on an organ that is about as far as one can get from the "Hope-Jones Unit Orchestra" concept, and still have real pipes. An important enough beat that I will not say any more about it.
True, but I was also referring to the qualities that made the source material popular enough to merit a movie adaptation in the first place.
"Gee, that book is a big bestseller. Maybe that will translate to a big hit movie as well!"
And name-recognition value figures in here as well:
"Hmm. Everyone loves that book, which I never got around to reading. Maybe I'll check out the new movie version instead."
But then, in the process of adaption, the movie loses whatever made the book a success. "Hey, let's do Jurassic Park but dial down the dinosaur stuff. And maybe make it a slapstick comedy? Or a spy thriller?"
Of course, the flip side of this is people who encounter the movie first, then are surprised or disappointed to discover that the original book is nothing like what they were expecting.
Was that how they would have brought back the Living Witness EMH?
I'd completely forgotten that episode. And if the MA article on it is any indication, I'd forgotten it unjustly.
Yeah, I get that, but sometimes an adaptation isn't based on something popular, just something that strikes someone as having a promising idea. I mean, I don't have to tell you that Kolchak's debut movie The Night Stalker was based on a novel that hadn't even been published yet, so popularity wouldn't have been a factor.
When I read Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report" for my Patreon review before rewatching the movie, I was struck by what a weak story it was, far from a classic. Even aside from its problematical ethics, it's weakly written, with a slow, boring, infodump-heavy opening and a protagonist so kneejerk paranoid for no reason that it feels like Dick was parodying himself, and with important worldbuilding not established until late in the story. I think it was more the idea that the filmmakers saw potential in than the execution.
For some people, sure, but there are also going to be a fair number of moviegoers who don't even know it was based on a novel, who just know that it stars an actor they like, or that it's in a genre that they think their date or their kids might like.
Of course, the flip side of this is people who encounter the movie first, then are surprised or disappointed to discover that the original book is nothing like what they were expecting.
Which is why it's better to think of different versions of a story as independent or complementary works, instead of thinking they need to be in competition for the same niche.
But god, when I was a teaching adjunct thirty years ago and sneakily turned a Literature and Composition class into also being a science fiction one, I wish I could’ve gotten some of the kids to realize that. Directly telling them so didn’t work, since I still got more than one essay on Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” that figured they could just watch the then-current adaptation, and so confidently explained how he saves her in the end…
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Some adaptations are different or change minor things.
No Country for Old Men is a good example. The film ending is different from the book, and a dog doesn't die in the book. No idea why they had to kill off a dog in the film. It's the one thing I don't like about an otherwise good film.
I wouldn't want to teach now in the age of AI. Blue books would be the norm for me.
I enjoyed it when it originally aired, but it's clearly Father Brown redone.
I haven't read the Father Dowling books. Are they still in print?
My big example of an "adaptation" that completely changes everything about the story is The Beastmaster. I didn't even realize until over a decade after I saw the movie that the book is sci-fi and focuses on a Native America dealing with aliens on another planet in the future. So it was about as far from the sword and sorcery fantasy movie as you can get.
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