Only if one defines comic book films very narrowly.
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I'm curious how Suicide Squad was "off" because I just checked out the 2011 Suicide Squad comic and granted only read the first few issues but it seems that the movie was a pretty reasonable take on that.
The original Suicide Squad run in the '80s and '90s is the most acclaimed version, I gather, and it was totally unlike the movie. SS is basically The Dirty Dozen with supervillains. It's black ops, the government using expendable, deniable criminals on secret missions that are morally gray at best. The movie ignored all this and sent them on the same kind of highly public mission against flamboyant supervillains and swirly sky vortices that you'd see in any cookie-cutter superhero movie, even though almost none of them had any actual superpowers. It made no damn sense. I mean, it sent in this super-secret, deniable black-ops team of assassins with full military support, which makes no damn sense. The Squad are the ones you send in when you don't want anybody to know you're doing it, for missions too dark and ugly for the military or for superheroes.
Not to mention that it's called the Suicide Squad for a reason. They don't all come back alive. The movie killed off one token character who'd been there for like fifteen seconds, and everyone else came through fine.
Not to mention that it's one of the most ineptly structured movies I've ever seen. It spends forever walking to the plot, giving us a lengthy series of disconnected origin stories that we have no reason to invest in because there's no actual plot or stakes to make any of it matter yet. And when this interminable exercise in exposition finally ends, we jump right to a third-act-style cataclysm with virtually no buildup.
No.
Yep
They fell apart by Superman 3 and totally imploded by Superman 4. Thankfully Batman 1989 came out and saved things...until that series imploded by 1997.
If we're going with individual movies, then it's a different story because the very first Superman movie was excellent...if you ignore the Luthor parts.
But in your previous post, you just said that the MCU was the only way to do superhero movies and every other attempt has been wrong. So is that statement only true until someone brings up an exception?
True., and its produced many great results.
As always with that one.
No.
This.
I just thought it was a really well done mashup of the two genres. Giant monster movies really a perfect genre for found footage movies.
Every other attempt to do a series/Universe ended up imploding, yes. Individual movies in them are better than others but they always fall apart in the end.
Nah, just Prima Donnas who hijack names to tell their own stories with little respect for the source.
It was very much in line with the original Gojira movie.
The source doesn't require respecting. That is the nature of adaptation. It doesn't have to be 100% faithful to create a successful or compelling story. Sorry, but that's not how adaptions have to work, and it doesn't make them disrespectful of the source; it makes it an adaptation-a word that means change.
Right. The whole point is to take the concept in a new direction. Mere copying is redundant; adaptations are meant to be transformative, to create something new using something existing as the starting point. Some successful movies have been only very loosely based on their sources, sometimes nothing more than the broad concept. Adam-Troy Castro just talked about this on Facebook earlier today.
Indeed. My go to example is "Starship Troopers" and Verhoven's own take on the material that he was only passingly familiar with.
Regardless, reading so many comic threads leads me to the distinct impression that adaptation has somehow shifted to mean "strict adherence to personal definition." Which also strikes me as completely worthless as an adaption.
I actually like the movie better than the book, because Verhoeven had the good sense to satirize the fascist system that Heinlein unconvincingly presented in earnest.
I tend to cite Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which just takes the general idea of toons and humans coexisting and the names of the main characters but otherwise crafts a story completely different from and far superior to the rather mediocre novel. There's also the How to Train Your Dragon film trilogy (and TV series set between the first two films), which also just uses the basic idea and character names and does something almost totally different from the books, but excellent in its own right (though I haven't read the books so I have no opinion on their worth).
As someone who's read lots of the modern SS and none of the old stuff, I really can't agree. Everything Christopher says about the squad being black ops and plausibly deniable, etc, is still a fundamental part of the series. Also, something he didn't mention is the interpersonal dynamics: the SS actually hates each other more often than not. They don't 'learn to get along' and 'bond over their shared circumstances' and 'become like family', as the hollywood cliche (and the SS movie) goes. They stab each other in the back all the time. Sometimes because Waller or someone else paid/told them to. Sometimes just because. Deadshot in particular is an utterly amoral character who doesn't give a damn about anyone's life but his own and his daughter's so to turn him into a standard Will Smith lovable action hero was a pretty huge change.
Actually the movie does kill Diablo off at the very end (and Flagg's army buddy). But, yeah, the death rate is not only comically low for a SS movie, but the whole part where they went out of their way to casually resurrect June Moon just to have a happy ending is pretty much the antithesis of SS comics.
True, but not really relevant to the discussion...
I'm not a fan of what we have seen so far. The grounded and "realistic" Batman has already been done by Nolan and it's not gonna get any better than that. I'd have preferred to see something closer to Arkham, I mean Batfleck could have been good if he was given a decent script and didn't murder people.
You would think the resident MCU cheerleader would appreciate that, since the majority of the MCU is far removed from the source in terms of tone, capturing the heart of classic stories, etc.
It was definitely iconoclastic and belligerent (against militancy) but I didn't see how it was much of satire aside from in the sense that excess necessarily invokes some humor. I also don't think the system was outright fascist even though it was non- and anti-democratic; it did also glorify the military but, huge difference, it discouraged rather than compelled military service.
Maybe then closeness makes sense and makes for a good work when the original work is really good ...
Being something like just 10-20% similar, like Batman Forever or Batman & Robin, though, will probably be necessarily be regarded as a big disappointment and probably yes even hostile to the source.
It makes sense to me that people would still want to avoid something like Batman & Robin and want something much more like Batman Begins which while not 100% replica was pretty drawn from and otherwise true to "Year One" and other popular comics.
I think it's relevant in the sense that the poster was asking why we thought the movie was "off," why it wasn't an authentic adaptation. I haven't actually read any of the comics, but one of the defining things about the classic Ostrander run, from all I hear, is that it was good, that it was smart and sophisticated with strong character work and storytelling, and the movie was definitely not that.
Satire isn't necessarily comedic. It's about holding something up to ridicule to expose its failings, and while that can be mocking and humorous, it can also be scathing and contemptuous. Some satires are very dark, like Fahrenheit 451 or A Clockwork Orange. Wikipedia differentiates between Horatian satire, which is playful and spoofish, and Juvenalian satire, which is scornful and "abrasive."
But in this case, I disagree with your "aside from." The nature of Verhoeven's satire is to take things to excess in order to exaggerate their folly to a grotesque degree, as with the ultraviolence and corporate venality in RoboCop. In the case of Troopers, it was about taking the pro-war propaganda-film aspects of the movie to such an extreme that it became ridiculous; the movie was making fun of its own superficial earnestness, or rather, making fun of other Hollywood films' excesses by taking them even further. The thing about satire is that you have to look beneath the surface to see that the work is mocking its own presentation, and many people don't do that and fail to understand that it isn't in earnest (like the way many conservatives really believed Stephen Colbert's right-wing pundit persona was for real and that he agreed with them rather than mocking them).
When I finally did read the novel of Starship Troopers years after seeing the movie, I initially believed Heinlein's intent was satirical as well, because his characters made all these earnest arguments in favor of the military state that I could tell were hollow and invalid -- they were based on the presumption that the system actually did work as advertised, but there was no evidence presented to prove that presumption, so it was ultimately circular argument. I was surprised when no less a luminary than the legendary author/editor Gardner Dozois, who'd known Heinlein personally, assured me he'd written the book in earnest -- maybe not that he fully believed the arguments his characters made, but that he wrote the book to explore the possibility that such a system might work.
No, you can't make blanket generalizations like that, because the world is not that simplistic. It's different in every case. What matters to the quality of an adaptation is the same thing that matters to the quality of an original work -- how good it is on its own terms, as what it is in and of itself. Worrying about how close it is to its source is a distraction from that. The adaptation is its own entity. It draws ideas from the original, yes, but it's not the ideas that make something good or bad, it's how they're executed. Just look at the two film versions of Psycho, Hitchcock's original and the shot-for-shot Gus Van Sant remake. The first is brilliant and the second is lame, despite telling exactly the same story. Because it's the execution that matters, not the ideas. Fidelity to the source is irrelevant to the quality of a new version, one way or the other.
You didn't hear a word I said. There are some great movies that use almost nothing from the source material but are still excellent near-original stories. The purpose of adaptation is NOT, NOT, NOT merely to duplicate the original. That is not what creativity is. Creativity is taking something that exists and using it as raw material to create something new, to transform it into something it wasn't before.
Think of the source like an artist's model and the adaptation as their painting. Some artists paint their subjects in a realistic style, while others paint them in a way that transforms them totally, like Picasso's works. Neither way is more right than the other. They're both about using something that exists as the basis for creating something new. And what makes the creation good is not merely how similar it is to the source, but how well-done it is in its own right. The source is just the material on which the creative process is practiced.
But that completely misses the point of adaptation. As @Christopher describes much better than I.
As much as I would prefer more faithful adaptations of different works that is not the point of such work. The point is for an artist to take their own vision, their own interpretation of the material, and put it on the screen.
Expecting it to be like comics is setting oneself up for disappointment because that is not the point of adaptation.
Yes, definitely. The first two films were slavish to the letter of the books but failed to capture their spirit. They took magical things and made them feel prosaic. It's more important to capture the spirit and tone of a work, its meaning and sensibilities rather than just its surface content.
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