You'll note that I said criticism of the changes in adaptations was 'interesting', not that it was wrong, or silly. I'm genuinely curious about fans views, not dismissive.
Fair enough.
Yeah, Charlie might have been a more likely or high-profile target than the minor Royal in PG (though IIRC the character was supposed to be a diplomat or something too, and thus more of a political target for the movie's splinter group).
The Heir to the Throne of England would also be a political target. The only reason England still has a royal family is because of politics.
I also take your point about the Islamic Fundamentalists - it was more the novels with the USSR as the foes I was referring to. Would fans prefer period pieces set during the 1980s or modern day adaptations taking the basic ideas and premises?
I can't speak for other fans. I, personally, think that if its the only way they'll do movies that are faithful to the books, then break out the A-team vids and pass out the jellybeans and
absolutely set the movies in the eighties! I would love to see
The Cardinal of the Kremlin - one of my favorites and the
real sequel to
Red October - made into a movie, eighties setting and all!
And anyway, wasn't the novel of SOAF set in the 1980s?
No, the early nineties.
Clancy tends to set the stories of his books a few years ahead of when they'd actually come out, mainly so he can use weapon systems that may still be in the development stages at the time he's writing. The previous book,
Clear and Present Danger, was published in 1991, but depicted a Bush 41-like president facing a tough election year (1992), the main reason for the military excursion against drug lords. Also, the Russian carrier
Kusnetzov was depicted in SOAF as being active in the Russian fleet, something that didn't happen in real life until well into the 90's.
Rainbow Six was published in '97 or '98, but the target of the bad guys in that was the 2000 Olympics, and Rainbow didn't have to wait two years for it to happen.
Would you have wanted the movie version set in that era?
My point is you can modernize the setting all you like and still be faithful to the book because all the elements are still around. There are cordial but strained relations between the US and Russia right now, as there were in the book. The Russians were not the enemy in the book. They were scapegoats for the real bad guys, whose goal was to force the US and Russia into a nuclear exchange and thus eliminate their two greatest obstacles to their own power. This scenario would be a real life Jihadist's wet dream. You have a Democrat administration that would be utterly lost if the Super Bowl was nuked (and yes, I did vote for McCain. Deal with it.). So keep the jihadists as the bad guys, keep the potential US-Russia conflict, and keep Jack Ryan as the DDCI (which makes the movie the same sequel to CAPD that the book was) and it doesn't matter if it's set in 1994 or 2010. It still works!
To give an example, I'm a big fan of the novels of Stephen Hunter, which have been set from around the 1940s to recent years, following the saga of father and son Earl and Bob Lee Swagger. Earl was a WWII vet and later a sherriff in the 1950s, while Bob Lee was in Vietnam. Only one of the novels was filmed, Point of Impact (filmed as the Mark Wahlberg movie Shooter), with the action being updated to post-Nam to modern day. I'd like to see faithful adaptations of the Hunter novels in chronological order, but its not going to happen. I'd settle for modern set versions - as long as they're better than the disappointing Shooter!
Some things I don't mind being adapted (BSG). Others I want done faithfully (Tom Cruise should be whipped for what he did to Mission:Impossible).
The Hunter novels would be easier to do faithfully than the Clancy ones, as they don't change history the same way - we know that there were never the sort of high-profile clashes or wars between East and West that there have been in the Clancy novels. That's part of the problem with writing topical novels like he does - within months, events will render your topical novel outdated. I can see why movie-makers don't want to take that risk. Remember when the Russians left Afghanistan during the making of Rambo III?!
This is nonsense. By that logic, a show like
The West Wing, a series that depicts an eight-year presidential term in a time frame where it couldn't
possibly have happened, would never have gotten renewed the first year, but it lasted about as long as the presidency it supposedly documented. It managed to be topical too, but it bent history way more than Clancy's novels ever did. This series is proof that if you make the stories compelling enough, nobody's really going to turn off the TV (or walk out of the theater) saying, "Obviously I can't watch this because nothing like this ever happened or can ever happen."
Movies are movies. Not history lessons. Tom Clancy spent most of his writing career on the best-sellers list. I'm pretty sure if you made movies that accurately depicted the stories that put him there, finding an audience for them wouldn't be a problem, even if that audience went to theaters listening to Cyndi Lauper tapes on their walkmans.
Will this ever end?
