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I’ve written on here before about how film adaptations of books are usually (though not always) unsuccessful, because the stories told in books are usually optimized for book form, and so don’t work as well on screen.  But what about books adapted from movies? Do they have the same problem?

Again; yes, usually.  But sometimes they can complement the movie well. I think it’s actually easier for a novelization to enhance a movie than for a movie to enhance a book.  You can probe the motivations and details of the characters more thoroughly on the page. But with movie adaptations, it’s more likely you’ll lose content rather than gain it.

An example of a bad novelization is the Star Wars: Attack of the Clones book by R.A. Salvatore. The whole thing feels off. It lacks much of the quick pacing of the movie, and when we get to “hear their thoughts”, as it were, the characters don’t really match up with how they seem to be acting in the film.

You don’t have to look far for a much better novelization, though:  Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover is a great adaptation that does a very good job illuminating other aspects of the story and fleshing out the characters in a way not possible in the movie.  One thing that’s not communicated in the movie, but which Stover includes, is the point that Anakin is very sleep-deprived during the events of the story. This helps make his decisions much more understandable.

I read a novelization of the movie The Mummy Returns, and it was about what you’d expect for a novelization of a popcorn action-adventure flick.  It’s entertaining on the screen, but dire on the page.  I think many novelizations really are nothing more than cash-ins.

One question that occurred to me as I was thinking about this issue: between books and movies, which medium do you think is more conducive to nuance and subtlety in storytelling? My first inclination was to say “books”, but then it is true that you have to spend a lot more time describing something in a book than in a film. “A picture is worth a thousand words”, as they say. What do you think?

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Spoilers ahead!

As you probably know, the film is a prequel of sorts to Scott’s Alien, which I have never seen.  Nor have I seen any of the sequels.  So, I can’t comment on what the events depicted in this film mean for the rest of the series.

The film begins with some archaeologists finding cave paintings of giants pointing at a constellation of stars.  These paintings match up with similar ancient artworks from other, distant civilizations. Based on this, a wealthy old man finances an expedition on the spaceship Prometheus to this constellation to meet the alien creatures presumed to be there. The man explains in a video to the crew—after they have woken up from years in suspended animation—that he will be dead by now, but his dream is that they meet the aliens. This is also where the film’s best line occurs–“By the time you see this, I will be dead.  May I rest in peace.”

The main characters are the two archaeologists, Drs. Elizabeth Shaw and Charles Holloway, a robot named David, and the cold, corporate-type heading the mission.  The supporting crew of the good ship Prometheus are all a bunch of outrageously clichéd and stereotyped characters, most of whom are so undisciplined and incompetent that it’s easy to see why they need David to run the entire ship.

Naturally, they go exploring caverns within the alien planet and soon enough some of the obnoxious secondary characters get attacked by aliens. Gradually, as crew members become infected, they ultimately conclude that the humanoid aliens–the giants in the paintings–were wiped out by a sort of bio-weapon they were creating—to wit, snake-like aliens found roaming around the tunnels. Despite this, the wealthy old man, who is not dead after all but had been secretly in suspended animation, has gone to talk to the last surviving alien.

Unfortunately, said alien reacts about like you would expect, killing the old man and ripping apart the android.  Then he blasts off in his spaceship and Dr. Shaw somehow intuits that he’s going to destroy the Earth.  Luckily, the crew of the Prometheus makes a suicide attack on his vessel, and bring it to the ground.  He survives, and pursues Dr. Shaw into a wrecked escape pod, but she is saved at the last minute when one of the snake-like aliens attacks the humanoid alien.  The film ends with Dr. Shaw stealing an alien ship and flying off to find the real alien home world.

If that summary seemed rushed, I apologize—but so did the movie.  It always seemed to be building to some big payoff, only to have the big payoff happen in a rush and then hurry on to the next thing.  There was a rather  disturbing scene which I shall not describe, but which is moved on from so quickly it feels unbelievable, given the circumstances.

The acting in the film is very good. It’s too good actually, because the acting outpaces the quality of the characters.  The biggest exception to this is Charlize Theron, who plays the corporate commander of the mission—her acting is mediocre, but then so is her character, so it’s hard to blame her.

Michael Fassbender plays David, whose most notable character trait is that he is obsessed with the movie Lawrence of Arabia.  Fassbender does a good job channeling Peter O’Toole-as-Lawrence, but it’s not clear why David does this, except maybe that they thought by inserting references to a better movie, they could raise the quality of their own. The robot’s motivations are generally very hard to follow, and it was never completely clear to me who he was working for.  He seems to make decisions based solely on what needs to be done to advance the plot.

Noomi Rapace does a very good job imbuing Dr. Shaw with some charisma and likeability, which is vital because otherwise the movie would be unwatchable.  You can’t help but root for her character, despite the fact that a lot of what she and everyone else on the mission does is stupid.  Or if not stupid, utterly inexplicable.  (Actually, the assignments break down like this: utterly inexplicable plot-driving actions: David.  Obviously stupid actions: everyone else.)

It’s never clear why or how things occur: how does Shaw know the humanoid alien is going to destroy the Earth?  How does the pilot suddenly figure out that it’s an alien weapon-making plant?  How did they even manage to make the giant leap that there must be intelligent life on this one planet in this constellation based on some cave paintings?  It’s a weak basis for launching a trillion-dollar space mission.

I read on IMDb that Guillermo del Toro delayed his film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At The Mountains of Madness because Prometheus was so similar to his plans for the film.  I’m surprised I didn’t realize it until I read Del Toro’s quote, but yes, this is not surprising, since the plot of Prometheus is similar to Lovecraft’s book.  Both stories include explorers finding remnants of an alien civilization driven to the point of extinction by monsters of their own creation.  In both stories the aliens are suggested to have created humanity.  Prometheus even includes the same kind of chases through dark mountain tunnels described in Mountains of Madness.

The difference, as I might have predicted, is in certain subtle touches that make Mountains more interesting.  In Lovecraft’s novel, the “creator” aliens are treated as tragic figures, destroyed by their own scientific ingenuity.  (Like Frankenstein or, “the Modern Prometheus”) In Prometheus, it’s just one set of bad aliens vs. another set of bad aliens.  Even more significantly, at the end of Mountains, there is ambiguity as to what the final horror was. The reader never learns what Danforth saw behind the mountains.  There is some ambiguity in Prometheus‘s ending as to what the creator aliens were doing, but it feels more like ambiguity resulting from sloppy writing than a deliberate effect.

I realize after reading this, you must think I hated this movie.  I certainly  didn’t think it was great, but I didn’t hate it either.  Apart from the one disturbing scene, I found it a decent suspense flick while watching it, and most of the problems didn’t become apparent until I started to think about it afterwards.  It’s just that the film ultimately lacks anything really frightening or intellectually stimulating. It would have been better if it had ended with the alien setting off for Earth, his motivations open to interpretation, and Shaw and the rest were left to fend for themselves on the alien world.

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I’ve been wanting to do another one of these after I had so much fun with my political and football ones.

 

Mass Effect (series)

The Reapers are bad

Because they will kill us all–

So let’s kill ourselves.

Fallout: New Vegas

Why would you gamble

In a wrecked economy

Based on bottle caps?

Half-Life 2

1984

With gravity guns, crowbars–

And more depressing.

Metal Gear Solid

Two days to prevent

A nuclear disaster.

But let’s chat some first.

Halo (series)

Generic soldiers

Fighting generic monsters.

The Fans will love it!

Call of Duty (series)

Generic soldiers

Fighting with one another.

A Halo killer!

Deus Ex

A million choices;

Branching paths and decisions;

All destroy the world.

Doom 3

U.A.C. has guns,

Teleporters and ships, but

“No duct tape on Mars.”

Perfect Dark

A female James Bond

To be the next Goldeneye?

More like Moonraker.

Knights of the Old Republic II

Take away the Force

And Jedi are incomplete.

Much like the ending.

Feel free to add your own in the comments.

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“The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this? They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it.”–George Lucas

I was thinking a bit more about the Mass Effect 3 ending.  I may do a post later on with my thoughts on it specifically, but while I was thinking about it, the idea occurred to me that it was so disappointing because it was so anticipated.  Fans had years to think about how the Mass Effect series would end; and so whatever happened would likely disappoint them.  It is an intrinsically bad ending, don’t get me wrong, but its badness was amplified by how much everyone had been thinking about it.

The same thing happened, for me anyway, with the Harry Potter series.  A big plot point, discussed by fans and even used in the advance marketing of the last book was “is Snape good or evil”?  Everybody had two years to think about this question, and we all knew what was going to happen.  Even if you bet on the wrong outcome, chances were you’d heard alternate theories that turned out to be correct. It may have made it sell better to promote the debate, but it weakened the book’s dramatic power.

It’s hard to surprise your audience with twists when you are telling a story with long intervals between each installment.  The only way out is to not leave clues to what’s coming, but then the endings or plot twists will feel unsatisfying; like they just came out of nowhere.  The best plot resolutions have to have been logically set up beforehand.

Sometimes a writer can stumble on some good twist in the middle of a series.  For instance, few people see the famous twist in The Empire Strikes Back coming, unless someone has spoiled them on it.  I’ve heard that this is because George Lucas only decided to do it after A New Hope was released, so he hadn’t left enough clues to give it away before hand, but was able to satisfactorily retrofit his twist on to the second film with the vague setup given in the first. But he was very lucky.

Lucas also didn’t have the internet to contend with.  If he had, some random fan probably would have accurately guessed the ending by pure chance while speculating on some forum.  I see this as the inevitable fate of the Half-Life video game series: if they ever do release Half-Life 3, there is no way someone won’t have already guessed what the deal is with the G-Man and posted a huge essay about their theories to be discussed on some forum.

There’s no question that internet fandom has intensified this problem; for it enables like-minded people to interact and ponder their favorite series.  I don’t think this was as much of a problem before the internet, even though there were stories that appeared in installments in magazines and the like.

This problem is lessened a bit if you are not doing a sequel that directly continues a particular story.  J.J. Abrams was very smart to come up with the alternate timeline business for his new Star Trek movies, because it pretty much allowed him to do whatever he wanted.   And although it still does not really live up to its title, I think a lot of criticism from Fallout fans of Fallout 3 was blunted because it was set far away from the other games.  In other words, it’s easier to do a series that is a loosely-related group of stories in a certain setting or around a set of themes than it is to tell one coherent story over installments. And it’s easiest of all to just tell your story in one shot.  To bring us back to Mass Effect 3, I’m convinced that had they condensed the story of the whole series into one game–with the same endings–they would have gotten way fewer complaints.  On the other hand, they also would have made less money.

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I saw most of the classic movie The Invisible Man on TV last night.  I was surprised by how good it was, almost entirely due to the performance of Claude Rains.  I’ve mentioned before that he was a great actor, and this movie really shows it.  It’s a tough role, since a lot of it is just voice over work for his invisible scenes, and during his actual screen time he’s covered by this weird bandage-and-sunglasses outfit.

The plot is that a scientist discovers a chemical mixture that makes him invisible, and then gradually goes mad with a desire for power as a result of it.  The scene where he is outlining his plan for world domination to his terrified friend is especially chilling.

 

Now, as I think I have mentioned on here before, I don’t like horror stories that explain everything bizarre that happens in them with rational, scientific explanations.  That kills the mystery, and mystery is important in horror.  I also don’t like horror stories where the horror is nothing really weird or alien, but just a lot of wanton criminal brutality. Both of these thing are true of The Invisible Man however, and yet I’d have to say that from what I saw, it’s the best of the  “Universal monsters” series.  How can this be?

Well, in my opinion, because it’s not really a horror story.  I don’t know why it was billed as such. It’s really more of a psychological thriller that tries to show what happens to the man’s mind once he gets power combined with a sense of having been persecuted in his past.  It’s a morality tale on the old “power corrupts” model, as far as I can see.  The invisibility thing is just a plot device to explore this.  Maybe it’s more clear in the book, which I have not read.

It’s still not a great movie–some of the supporting cast seemed to think they were in a comedy, and while the special effects must have been stunning at the time, they look fairly lame now. But it is rather interesting all the same, and much more compelling than, for example, any of the old “Mummy” movies.

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I see  that Electronic Arts has gotten the exclusive rights to Star Wars video games.  I remember another thing EA got exclusive rights to, and that didn’t work out so great…  but we’ll see.

I’m not saying this is necessarily bad news–for one thing, if I understand correctly, EA can still publish games that other developers make. To my mind, it could be good or bad.

I’ve been thinking about the Mass Effect series again, and how weirdly uneven it was for a trilogy that was supposedly mapped out in advance.  The first Mass Effect had a very interesting story, but the gameplay was a little wonky, at least to people like me who aren’t really familiar with RPG mechanics.  Combat in ME1 feels very awkward.

Then Mass Effect 2 streamlined the combat, making it much more like the popular Gears of War series.  The hardcore RPG people may disagree, but I think this made for a superior game, even if they had to mess with some established background information of the setting to make it work.  ME 2 is still my favorite in the series, even though parts of the story don’t make sense.  And I think it’s interesting that EA acquired BioWare between ME1 and 2, and in the latter, the game suddenly became much more  accessible to the average gamer.

But then you have Mass Effect 3, which had many well-known problems with its infamously unsatisfying ending.  BioWare insists that they had total creative control, so you can’t blame EA for the ending.  (Then again, the Illusive Man insisted he had control of the Reapers, too…) But in addition to all the in-game problems, it was criticized for forcing players to buy a bunch of additional stuff in order to get the “full” ending.  Again, it’s just interesting to me that there was no comparable marketing scheme for, say, BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic (2003) or Jade Empire (2005) or even the first Mass Effect (2007).

So, I think we have a pretty good roadmap already for what is going to happen to a beloved science-fiction franchise whose video games department is now being run by EA.  But wait!  There’s more!

Everyone thinks that this means Star Wars game will become increasingly Call of Duty-like, and you will see a lot of polished but simplistic games.  Pretty much everyone feels that the  Battlefront series or something like it will be making a comeback. And why not?  If EA can make something Star Wars themed that can compete with the highest-grossing game series in history, why wouldn’t they?

This isn’t so bad, really.  Battlefront was a fun game.  It’s just that I think everyone feels EA is just too big, and when a company gets that big, it’s hard for them to function the right way.  They can keep making money off of AAA blockbuster games for a while yet, but they can’t really innovate, because that involves risk. Which means we probably won’t be seeing any deep, philosophical,  Star Wars RPGs like the great Knights of the Old Republic II anytime soon.

But more than that, there are indications that EA is just generally mismanaged.  As Shamus Young says in that article, they are not running their company as well as they might, just from a pure business point of view.  However, I think their model is sustainable for the near-term future.  Star Wars has been popular since the 1970s–people will continue to buy any heavily-hyped game that ties with that franchise for a few more years.  This is where we see the similarity to EA’s NFL license monopoly–the NFL has been popular since the 1960s, and for those who play sports games, it’s the only show in town.

The difference, of course, is that the NFL, while not technically a monopoly is the only widely-watched pro football league in America. Star Wars is not the only major science-fiction franchise. There are still more of those to compete with Star Wars games.

That’s why I think the monopoly on Star Wars has a greater chance of blowing up in EA’s face than their NFL  monopoly–the latter is essentially a monopoly on a near-monopoly, because the NFL controls a huge amount of market share in the market for football.  EA is building off of that. But it’s different with the market for sci-fi games–it’s more of an oligopoly, with just a few competitors: Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on.

If we assume that consumers are indifferent as to which science-fiction franchise’s video games they choose to spend money on, this means there is still an element of competition in the market.  But, of course, not all consumers are not indifferent–they have preferences for franchises.  So, I want Star Wars to have the better video games, among other reasons, to show up the Trekkies. (Not that I dislike Star Trek, but still.) Branding is always very important in oligopolies.

The point is, this arrangement coupled with EA’s past problems with understanding different markets as mentioned in the Shamus Young article linked above and… well, the title of this post says it all.

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A few days ago, a friend of mine was recommending to me that I read some John Steinbeck books.  Then, a few days later, my blogger friend Thingy also mentioned him.  So, I guess I better get to it. I’ll try Grapes of Wrath, even though I admit the setting doesn’t appeal to me.

Another famous book I’ve never read is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I see they have just adapted into a movie.  I’ll have to read it too at some point.  It’s also considered a great book.  It should make for an interesting contrast: Grapes is about poor Westerners in the 1930s, and Gatsby is about rich Easterners in the 1920s.

There are surprisingly many famous books that I have never read…  Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, everything by Charles Dickens that isn’t A Christmas Carol. (Actually, I’m not even 100% sure I read that–I may have just absorbed by seeing the many thousands of adaptations.)

I did recently read Dracula, by Bram Stoker.  It wasn’t very good, to be honest.  It was very slow-moving and except for Dracula himself, most of the characters were thin as paper.  Add in that it was surprisingly violent for a Victorian novel, and I didn’t care for it at all.

UPDATE: Thank you for the award, Thingy.  (I still can’t comment on your blog, BTW, but I’m glad some comments are back.) Gone With The Wind is another one I want to read, even though I fully expect to hate it from what I know about it.  It’s what the critics like to call an “important” book, so I should probably  see what all the fuss is about.

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I recently read a book called The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.  It was a forerunner of what we would call  “Lovecraftian” weird tales, in that instead of relying the stereotypical monsters, it instead used a weird atmosphere and strange alien creatures to be frightening.

That part of it is pretty cool.  Unfortunately, it’s also a forerunner of Lovecraft in another respect:  the story goes on way too long.  I think it’s partly a dramatic device to have it drag on like it does, but it’s still too long.  The feeling of weirdness and dread can’t really be sustained over a story of that length.

Even with that serious flaw, though, it’s a very good story, especially the first half of it.  Some of the science of the science-fiction elements were surprisingly well done.  The author does as good a job as one could expect of describing what seems to be the end of the universe as many astronomers predict it.

I guess that’s kind of a spoiler—but actually, it’s also a good way of conveying how long the book is: the universe ends—and then the book continues after that!

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Weird article in The Daily Beast by a writer called Frank Bill.  Idea is that men are not manly enough these days, so there are fewer manly novels about manly things.

What I don’t know is what he means by “masculine writing”.  Does he mean subject matter–wars and hunting? There are books about those things. Or choice of words–short, blunt sentences?  Like Hemingway, who did both.

Tough to gut it out through lots of words.  Have to fight your way through dense jungles of adjectives and adverbs, hunt down the meaning.  Cut out useless bits.  More manly to use short sentences, or fragments.  But that has drawbacks, too. Can be hard to follow the logic.

Probably, fewer men read than women. So topics are chosen accordingly.  It’s tough, but you have to man up, grit your teeth, and realize that probably, they’ve already won the war for dominance of the bookshelves.

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You know, there was a time when I hated musicals.  That was before I discovered Gilbert and Sullivan’s work. Their plays technically aren’t musicals, but operettas.  But they are similar enough that after that, I came to like musicals.  Well, the good ones, anyway.

What bothered me for a long time about the genre was how strange it was that the characters sometimes speak like normal people for a time and then burst into song at key points.  This was actually kind of immersion-breaking for me.  I still wonder about how this genre was originally created: how did it ever even occur to a dramatist to try this?

Have you ever seen the Monty Python skit that is purportedly a trailer for an upcoming film entitled “The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights”?  It also includes “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Morse Code” and other things like this.   It’s very funny, but in a way, that’s how musicals can seem: like introducing a strange new form of communication into a story.

Musicals do have a major advantage over other genres in that they can be more memorable, because rhyme and music make it easier for people to commit lines to memory.  I still wonder at how it’s not an inherently audience-distancing device, though, because it’s very weird if you think about it.

*The title comes from a line in what is probably my very favorite Gilbert & Sullivan song, “About a Century Since”, from The Grand Duke.