The past three weeks, Lost in Translation has looked at the Good, the Bad, and the Weird. There are some works that deserve some spotlight, despite not falling into the above three categories. The honourable mentions are, again, in no particular order.
Robocop
The original Robocop was an over-the-top satire of the Reagan Eighties. Everything was exaggerated that it couldn’t possibly happen. A city going bankrupt? Privatized police forces? Couldn’t happen. The remake, though, was made after Detroit declared bankruptcy. The satire wasn’t over the top; it was biting, closer to home. Samuel L. Jackson’s parody of a Fox News pundit was too on the nose. The violence got toned down, at least against humans, and ED-209 gained competency, but after a decade of drone warfare, the new Robocop wasn’t the exaggeration the original was.
Stargate SG-1
A TV series that can last ten seasons deserves mention. The series used the original Stargate movie as a launching point then built the universe implied in the film. Stargate SG-1 shows what a TV series can do as an adaptation, allowing the work to delve deeper into the setting with the time available.
Thunderbirds Are Go!
The remake of the classic Gerry Anderson work replaced Supermarionation with CGI but kept the model work. The update used several episodes of the original series, in some cases recreating scenes shot for shot and kept the tension while expanding the role of several characters, including Kayo. Of course, bringing back the original voice of Parker, David Graham, didn’t hurt.
Dilbert
Dilbert slipped off the top five list for the Good in a close heat. The quintessential office comedy comic strip made the transition to animated series almost seamlessly, and included casting choices that worked for the characters.
The Four Players
Where Super Mario Bros. tried for a gritty world and failed, the web original work, The Four Players injected a note of hope despite the grim duty the characters faced. Each part focused on one character, keeping the iconic appearances while giving a new twist. With technology allowing fans to produce work that can surpass what professionals did twenty years earlier, the onus is now on Hollywood studios to up their game.
Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton’s novel about the hubris of man and the dangers of unchecked genetic engineering was hefty. Not everything in the novel made it into the movie of the same name, though some elements would make it into one of the sequels. Lex’s role in the story got expanded; in the novel, she was there to scream whenever a dinosaur showed up. In the movie, some of her brother’s abilities, such as knowledge of Unix, transferred to her, giving Lex more substance.
And this is still just scratching the surface. I could have added A Charlie Brown Christmas, Harry Potter, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Watership Down, and Evil Dead to the list above and still not scratch the surface. There are good adaptations out there; but it takes effort. There will be even more coming, Good, Bad, and Weird.
The reviews return next week.
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)
Wait, so where have I been?
Sorry to vanish for, well, nearly two weeks, but it got crazy.
Short form is I had a crazy 4 weeks with work, book publishing, class, and a bit of illness. This then compounded with two more weeks of crazy brought about by exhaustion, more work, family and friend issues, and more. The smoke is finally clearing, but my major reaction is roughly A) WTF happened, and B) Thank goodness for No Man’s Sky and Gravity Falls as a break.
So six weeks so nutty it could be a candy bar. So what’s up?
- Way With Worlds Book 2 is now slated for “Q1 2017.” Getting the editing done has been a challenge – my editor herself got mobbed at work, had technical issues that mangled one of the documents, and more. After talking, she’s going to take it easy to focus and I’m moving the editing to someone else. On top of that the holidays are still approaching so I figured best to keep this scheduled within a given quarter – not a month.
- The Sailor Moon Book, Her Eternal Moonlight, drops in a little over a month!
- Though I’m insanely busy, I have made some plans for my next writing in the coming 18-24 months. This is not to overload myself so much as focus it and avoid overloading myself.
- The Pizza generator has data ready to go (try 100 different ingredients) so now I just need to set something up. I may not get it done this month but hope to soon. Not sure what food to do after that – I was considering coffee or pastry, but I also have some notes on a candy bar generator that would be descriptive enough to nearly be used as a recipe . . .
- I’m waiting to hear what I do at Con-Volution and Kraken-Con.
- I got accepted to speak at the PMI Silicon Valley symposium. I’ll be speaking on how to ruin a project. Yes, you heard that right.
That’s currently it for now. I’ll be back on top of this, return to Civic Diary, and more in the next few weeks.
– Steve
Continuing the retrospective, this week, Lost in Translation looks at the oddities. These are movies that defied expectations and became a challenge to analyze and review. Unlike the Good and the Bad, the Weird show how adaptations can misfire and still cleave close to the original work. Once again, the list is presented in no particular order.
Gnomeo & Juliet
For a movie aimed at children and promising to tell Shakespeare’s tale in a different way, Gnomeo & Juliet remained faithful despite the use of garden gnomes. Even the opening monologue came from the original play. The story only really devaites after William Shakespeare himself appears. The result was surprisingly entertaining and accessable, with background gags reflective of other Shakespearean plays.
Speed Racer
The biggest failing Speed Racer had was trying to hard to recreate the original. The movie is live action anime, with the Wachowskis putting in an effort to not just recreate the characters but also the appearance and animation style of the TV series. The casting was note perfect, and the soundtrack used the original Speed Racer theme. The movie turned out to be far more animated than the original, and managed to make Spirtle and Chim-Chim key characters without making them annoying. The Wachowskis could have dialled things down a notch and not have lost details.
Phantom of the Paradise
Two adaptations in one, Phantom of the Paradise worked from both The Phantom of the Opera and Faust. A tale of obsession and desire, Phantom moves both original works from their eras to the then-modern 70s, keeping the core of both while changing the trappings.
Battle Beyond the Stars
By all rights, a low-budget B-movie trying to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars should have been a disaster. Battle Beyond the Stars punched above its weight class, though, in an adaptation of The Seven Samurai by way of The Magnificent Seven. Creative use of the budget and budding young filmmakers, including James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, lifted the movie up to the point where it kept the core of the original work even while placing the story in space.
Howard the Duck
Howard the Duck wasn’t a good movie. Technical limitations meant animatronics and people in duck suits that barely looked like the comic book Howard if the audience squinted. Character backgrounds changed; Beveraly became an up-and-coming rock star instead of a nude model, and the being responsible changed from Thog the Nether-Spawn to mad scientist Dr. Jennings. There was no PG-13 rating yet when the movie was first released; it earned a PG rating with Howard smoking cigars and implied duck/human sex. However, the movie kept the relationship between Howard and Beverly and kept to the idea of a duck alone in a strange world. Howard the Duck wasn’t a good adaptation, but it wasn’t a complete write-off unlike last week’s list.
Last week, Lost in Translation listed the best adaptations analyzed so far. This week, time to scrape the bottom of the barrel with the worst adaptations. These are films that managed to miss the point so much, they made audiences wonder what was being adapted. The adaptations are presented in no particular order.
The reputation video game movies have can be traced to two movies, one of which is Super Mario Bros. The film managed to avoid everything that made the video game iconic, from Mario’s red overalls to the look of the world. While the intent was an origins movie, the result was a muddled, brown mess that only shared a name, with even some game elements misnamed.
With all the published settings available, the Dungeons & Dragons movie had choices of where to start. Instead, it went from scratch, its own world, as many players do.. There were even elements from the game from spells to iconic monsters. The problem was in the execution. The movie had the elements but had poor presentation and ignored the game the closer to the climax it got. The end result was a movie that had the trappings but none of the substance.
No movie on this list shows the moment where it fell apart better than the 1998 American Godzilla. The beginning of the movie does well, despite moving the action over to the Atlantic. Once Godzilla takes Manhattan, though, the movie changes focus to Matthew Broderick’s field research and Jean Reno’s French secret agent. Godzilla has always been portrayed as a force of nature; the 1998 Zilla was just a giant monster in the vein of Jurassic Park‘s
The go-to for blockbuster disappointments here at Lost in Translation, Battleship‘s main problem may have been the choice of game to adapt. A two-player head-to-head competition works better as a thriller, not as an action movie. Like the D&D movie above, game elements appeared but, for the grid-calling and the shape of the alien shells, they didn’t help. Battleship could have been called Space Invaders for all the accuracy it had. Worse, the titular battleship, played by the USS Missouri, became a Chekhov’s 16-inch gun, becoming a factor in the story only at the end.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
The problem that The Legend of Chun-Li had was it felt like a different script was then melded with Street Fighter elements. If the characters weren’t called Chun-Li, Balrog, and Bison, it would be hard to tell who they were meant to be. Only Chun-Li gets her iconic costume and appearance, and that for one scene. Without the Street Fighter elements, the movie becomes a decent police procedural. But an investigation doesn’t necessarily work as the basis for an action movie, and a fighting game works best as an action movie. The Legend of Chun-Li forgot that key aspect of the video game.
Next week, the Weird.
(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)
Hey everyone, had a busy time with the book launch and so on, so here’s the latest. I’ve had a crazy few weeks so it’s not much of an update:
- Way With Worlds Book 2 is now coming out in January. There’s two reasons: 1) Editing the last book was brutal and with the holidays I wanted more time, and 2) Deploying the book during the holidays is going to mean it’ll get lost among all the activities of the time.
- I plan to write more books on creativity, since after a few decades of writing, making generators, coaching people, playing RPGs, and more I’ve got a lot to share. In time of self-publishing, I figure more advice for creatives can’t hurt!
- The Pizza Generator is in progress. No delivery date in mind yet, mostly due to the recent craziness, but I think it’ll be worth it. Pizzas have an interesting philosophy behind them, and when you look them over, you can see patterns. For instance, there’s all sorts of ways to combine meats and toppings, but going outside the “normal” spices usually involves only one or two.
I hope to have more in the next week or two.
– Steve
After five years, Lost in Translation has seen a number of adaptations, the good, the bad, the mixed. The result is a body of work trying to understand what makes for a good adaptation and why. This week, a look at the best adaptations reviewed so far, presented in no particular order.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Scott Pilgrim is a film that shows that a good adaptation doesn’t necessarily mean a good return at the box office. The film failed to take hold at the box office, in part from a disjointed marketing effort that didn’t quite catch the movie properly. However, as an adaptation, the movie not only caught the feel of the original graphic novels, it used them as them as storyboards. Scenes appeared on screen as they did in the novel, and Edgar Wright filmed on location in Toronto, using the settings that appeared in the comic. The only deviation came at the end, where Bryan Lee O`Malley hadn`t finished the series yet, and he was on board the production as a story consultant. The result is a cult clasic for the video game age.
The Beverly Hillbillies
At first glance, the adaptation of The Beverly Hillbillies is an odd choice. Yet, the movie managed to capture the essence of the TV series while still acknowledging how Los Angeles had changed between the end of the TV series in 1961 and the movie’s release in 1993. While the choice of TV show may seem odd, The Beverly Hillbillies was a top rated series during its run and lasted beyond in syndication, making it a known factor. The movie managed to keep the feel while still updating some ideas, helped in no small part to its cast, including Jim Varney and Lily Tomlin.
The LEGO Movie
How can a movie be made based on a toy that relies on the imagination of the person playing with it? The LEGO Movie answered that question by remembering to be fun. The movie felt like someone was playing with their LEGO, letting imagination run wild. The big reveal hammers home that core idea. The LEGO Movie looks like a LEGO world, with the main characters being Minifigs, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more or less that that.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Popular novels tend to be made into movies. Studios want to maximize the audience, and using a popular work means there will be people coming in curious to see how the work turns out on the big screen. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took some liberties with the novel, but needed them due to the change of medium. The big changes came at the end, in part to curb ending fatigue. The movie tightened the narrative, but the key elements appeared just as in the book. Helping with the success of the adaptation is the director’s use of locations in Sweden, bypassing the trend to Americanize foreign works.
“Steel”
Richard Matheson’s short story, “Steel”, saw two adaptations reviewed over the past five years. Real Steel changed the story greatly, keeping just the idea of a robot fighting league. Matheson’s own adaptation of the story for The Twilight Zone, though, remained true to the work. Elements that helped with keeping to the original work include having the original author on board and being in an anthology series known for pushing the envelope with science fiction and fantasy. The Twilight Zone was groundbreaking when it aired, tackling issues that weren’t normally seen. “Steel” was a study of human perseverance, the lengths one man would go, even getting into a boxing ring against all odds of survival to fight an unfeeling machine.
Each of the above managed to take the original work and translate into a new medium without losing the key features that made the work popular. Next week, the bad.
