I'm lukewarm on the Divergent books to begin with, so I was never rushing out to the movies. I've seen them both now.
Or, well, I've seen the first one all the way through and enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed the book, which is to say... I have a hard time remembering it when it's over, but don't regret the time.
The second one, I just stopped.
The book is not great literature, but it makes some kind of disjointed sense. The movie just doesn't. Full stop. Yes, there's a battle for information. But it isn't a search for SUPER-SPESHUL divergents who have the power to open a magical box. It's computer information, stolen from Abnegation during the last story. The Factionless want to destroy it. Tris teams up with Marcus (despite hating him for how he treated Tobias) to get the information before either of the other sides can. In this, she works with several good Erudite members. She also willingly goes to her execution at one point, though Tobias rescues her in the end.
In the movie, there's a weird wire situation happening, and she has to get through simulations (one of which is ???kind of??? like the security on Jeanine's office?), and they magically unlock a box that only the absolute most specialest of special people can open. People come and go with very little reason. The characters are changed, again for very little reason (and what are they going to do in Allegiant, since they took out the plot about Tori's brother and her desire for revenge, since he turns out to be a key figure in the next book?). Marcus is sidelined, and Evelyn is mischaracterized.
Okay, elements:
Setting
The setting on these movies is easily their strongest point. The set designers created a gorgeously decayed, apocalyptic Chicago, and realized their creation beautifully. I have no qualms about it. The first movie gave us the Dauntless. Now, we see the Amity greenhouse with the central tree, the tall Candor building (though I'm not sure why they didn't use the canonical Merchandise Mart, which is also pretty imposing), the broken down buildings, the crumbling infrastructure. It's all quite good. It's the only thing I have no problems with. Roth worked her settings well, and the filmmakers did an excellent job at bringing them to life. It's like a weird cyber-punk John Hughes joint.
Character
Shailene Woodley carries the franchise as well as she can. She's a good actress, and her Tris overcomes the poor scripting in several scenes. (She also looks a good deal like the character in the book is described -- one of the most accurate bits of casting I've seen, with the only disparity being that she's taller than Zoe Kravitz's Christina.) But a good performance doesn't, ultimately, save the character, who's just all over the place in her motivations. Kravitz's Christina whipsaws around as well, and Theo James's Tobias has the personality of a wet cardboard box. I suppose it's possible that a sixteen year old could look older than his young-ish mother (played by Naomi Watts, 16 years James's senior, but looking about five years his junior), but she's supposed to have been living hard fo a while. Watts's Evelyn was portrayed as soft-ish, which is contrary to her nasty book characterization, and is just not believable as the long-time leader of the city's de facto homeless population. Caleb's characterization is senseless in the book and continues to be senseless in the movie.
Theme
The first movie is about discovering selflessness, to some extent. Tris has left Abnegation because she's bored, and by engaging in Dauntless recklessness, she ultimately comes to value the simpler, service-oriented world that she left. It's not quite as clear in the movie as it was in the book. There's also the general series theme of not limiting yourself to a single way of being.
In losing the sympathetic Erudite, the second movie's theme becomes, "Smart people are bad." Seriously, it's not much more complex than that. The books aren't exactly subtle in thinking that academics are arrogant and power-hungry, but the movie makes them look like they're using obscure symbolic language. There's some mileage left in the book's "look yourself in the eye and learn self-forgiveness" theme, but not a whole lot.
Style
Aside from the setting, the style is general apocalyptic dystopia. A lot of shots of people running, some mirroring themes, with the black and white of Candor used to contrast views of self from time to time in the second. Nothing to write home about.
Plot
See the intro. The books were at best okay on plot. The first movie is relatively close. The second one pulls out the supports and lets the whole structure fall in under its own weight. Irritating.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Saturday, September 5, 2015
My love/hate relationship with movie adaptations
It may be obvious, but when it comes to movie adaptations of books that I love, my relationship status is "complicated."
On the one hand, I love movies. Big, splashy blockbusters, especially. Things that hit cultural nerves. I love the theme songs, I love the effects, I love the actors running around publicizing things. I love costumes and sets and big action scenes. I love sitting in a crowd and munching popcorn and cheering and...
Well, you get the picture. I love movies.
And I love books. I love curling up with my nose in one. I love listening to audiobooks. If I'm not driving, I close my eyes and let the story play out on the back of my eyelids. I love stories. I love writing. I love TALKING about stories and writing. I love reading out loud. I love analyzing stories on as many levels as I can. I love theme and meaning and extrapolation. I love doing insane things like trying to figure out the geography and history of Panem from the scant clues in the books.
All of which often leads to great anticipation of movies made from books. How will this look? Will they have noticed that little thing? How will they get across the motivation for character Y to do action X, which is entirely internal in the book?
I'm not a complete novice. I've taken screenwriting. I've produced and directed a college show. I was in drama club for years. I get most of it in principle.
There are obviously places where a script needs to be different from a novel. You can't skim time in a movie the way you can in a book. You can't just have an actor frown a little bit and convey the entire mental process of a character. You can't always find an actor who looks exactly like the character who can also, you know... act. I'll take the ability to act over the ability to look like someone who only lived in an author's head.
That said, why on earth they don't even try sometimes is a mystery. I mean, really... you already put a wig on Woody Harrelson. Why not put a wig on him that's the same color as his character's hair, which, in Hunger Games terms, is actually a back story point? (Blond is coded as the merchant class, while Haymitch, like Katniss, is from the miner class. In District Twelve it's a HUGE deal, and the fact that Katniss's mother is a blonde -- like her sister -- is serious business.)
Okay, I digress. But for a good reason, and I'll digress here again.
I've been accused of being a horrible "purist," by disparaging film fans who think I somehow don't "understand" the differences that need to be addressed between the two media. I do understand it. I just don't, nine times out of ten, agree with the particular choices. Other times, I really do agree strongly.
There are two Stephen King movies in particular that surpassed the source material, in cases where the source material is actually very good. Shawshank Redemption took the novella it was based on and took the time-passing moments of the book into much more meaningful territory by the choices it made of which glossed over events to make scenes of and which to ignore. It took the freedom of leaving Red's head sometimes to expand the world very nicely, and it developed several secondary characters. In the case of Stand By Me, I think the screenwriter understood the story King had told better than King did. King genuinely thought it was a story about Chris, told from the side perspective of Gordie, sort of like Watson telling the story of Holmes, but in more tragic circumstances. It's very clear on reading it though, that it really is the story of Gordie, and the screenplay hones that and focuses on it. It happens. Sometimes, what you're really writing isn't the same story you think you're writing. Other movies, like the Hunger Games movies, are pretty all right, though rushed, and I question a few decisions -- I won't know until November whether my fears are justified on those, and if they are, I will spew much venom.
But a lot of the time -- most of the time -- the choices are awful. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I AM TALKING TO YOU, OH YOU PARAGON OF TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO-GOOD PRODUCTION DECISIONS.) There is nothing in the transition from page to screen that requires changing the entire tone of a story. There is nothing that requires one to make Mina Harker into Van Helsing's daughter. There is nothing that requires changing a small town setting to a suburb ('Salem's Lot, most recent Carrie), nothing that makes you turn a frightening battle sequence into a random misty maze (Goblet of Fire), nothing that forces you to turn a twelve year old into a twenty-year-old (Lightning Thief), nothing that absolutely compels you to ignore the theme of the book and have a character publish the wrong novel in the end (Misery -- and even someone who hadn't read the book recognizes that one in an otherwise good adaptation; it's a noticeably wrong tonal note), or have the character who stepped out and challenged a mountain troll and a black rider reduced to hiding behind the rocks in one scene and sleeping on Liv Tyler's horse in another (I stopped watching those movies at that point). If you want to do any of those things, by all means, do it -- as a new story. If those things are important, nothing is stopping you from writing an original script that has those things in it.
So, yes, I get ranty about totally unnecessary and detrimental changes, and I get back, "But that's the director's INTERPRETATION!"
And that's the thing, as far as my love/hate relationship goes. While I enjoy visual interpretation of the elements, the truth is, I don't enjoy having someone force his own textual interpretation on the material. If everyone who felt like making a movie of a book could just make one and pop it up on YouTube, then this wouldn't be a very big deal, but as it is, there don't tend to be a lot of movies out of the same book at a given time, and often, only one is ever made. Because of that, movies get a lot of privilege about the interpretation, so if a big movie of a book says, "This is what's important; the rest is irrelevant," then that tends to stand. It spoils a lot of the fun.
Also, an interpretation needs, at some point, to refer to what it's interpreting. Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, because you can't actually make the argument for or against it. How can you argue with, "Yes, but the way I saw the twelve year old, he was twenty, and I envisioned an entirely different plot"? I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, "In my view, District Thirteen was as evil as the Capitol" (me) or "In my view, District Thirteen was doing what it had to" (the movies, as far as I can tell). If you can bring in the textual support, then you can have a reasonable argument about the subject. The two might produce entirely different performances and different foci in the scripts. But if, in your interpretation, you decide to, I don't know, change the actual actions, then you're cheating in the argument.
Another thing is, it tends to abruptly fossilize every other visual interpretation. Fan art of The Hunger Games has gone almost exclusively to the movies, with Haymitch almost universally blond, even when it's not a literalistic drawing of Harrelson. It's eaten up the actual text, which describes him briefly but very clearly -- the movie is overriding the real visual. Now, I love Harrelson's performance, and wouldn't change a thing about that, but that doesn't mean he looks like the character. And Jack Torrance sure-God doesn't look like Jack Nicholson (nor does Wendy look like Shelly Duvall). But these images have absolutely frozen so much of the visual imagination! (Again, this could be solved by having as many people making movies as feel like it, but I guess they'd cut into each other's box office and cause fan wars about whose was the best, etc. But at least no one would be left with the idea that such and such is the definitive interpretation which must now be followed.)
So that's the /hate part.
On the other hand, I still love hearing the dialogue I've only heard in my head. I love seeing the characters and settings take life and begin to breathe. I love the anticipation as they build up the hype every time, and I love the cultural moments that the movies create. I still read books and think, "Wow, I can't wait to see how this scene plays out on the screen!" Heck, I'd love to write something that would look awesome on a screen. I love the whole concept of the movies, and every single time, I go in thinking, "I can't wait to see this!"
So I find myself constantly whipsawed on the subject. It's annoying.
On the one hand, I love movies. Big, splashy blockbusters, especially. Things that hit cultural nerves. I love the theme songs, I love the effects, I love the actors running around publicizing things. I love costumes and sets and big action scenes. I love sitting in a crowd and munching popcorn and cheering and...
Well, you get the picture. I love movies.
And I love books. I love curling up with my nose in one. I love listening to audiobooks. If I'm not driving, I close my eyes and let the story play out on the back of my eyelids. I love stories. I love writing. I love TALKING about stories and writing. I love reading out loud. I love analyzing stories on as many levels as I can. I love theme and meaning and extrapolation. I love doing insane things like trying to figure out the geography and history of Panem from the scant clues in the books.
All of which often leads to great anticipation of movies made from books. How will this look? Will they have noticed that little thing? How will they get across the motivation for character Y to do action X, which is entirely internal in the book?
I'm not a complete novice. I've taken screenwriting. I've produced and directed a college show. I was in drama club for years. I get most of it in principle.
There are obviously places where a script needs to be different from a novel. You can't skim time in a movie the way you can in a book. You can't just have an actor frown a little bit and convey the entire mental process of a character. You can't always find an actor who looks exactly like the character who can also, you know... act. I'll take the ability to act over the ability to look like someone who only lived in an author's head.
That said, why on earth they don't even try sometimes is a mystery. I mean, really... you already put a wig on Woody Harrelson. Why not put a wig on him that's the same color as his character's hair, which, in Hunger Games terms, is actually a back story point? (Blond is coded as the merchant class, while Haymitch, like Katniss, is from the miner class. In District Twelve it's a HUGE deal, and the fact that Katniss's mother is a blonde -- like her sister -- is serious business.)
Okay, I digress. But for a good reason, and I'll digress here again.
I've been accused of being a horrible "purist," by disparaging film fans who think I somehow don't "understand" the differences that need to be addressed between the two media. I do understand it. I just don't, nine times out of ten, agree with the particular choices. Other times, I really do agree strongly.
There are two Stephen King movies in particular that surpassed the source material, in cases where the source material is actually very good. Shawshank Redemption took the novella it was based on and took the time-passing moments of the book into much more meaningful territory by the choices it made of which glossed over events to make scenes of and which to ignore. It took the freedom of leaving Red's head sometimes to expand the world very nicely, and it developed several secondary characters. In the case of Stand By Me, I think the screenwriter understood the story King had told better than King did. King genuinely thought it was a story about Chris, told from the side perspective of Gordie, sort of like Watson telling the story of Holmes, but in more tragic circumstances. It's very clear on reading it though, that it really is the story of Gordie, and the screenplay hones that and focuses on it. It happens. Sometimes, what you're really writing isn't the same story you think you're writing. Other movies, like the Hunger Games movies, are pretty all right, though rushed, and I question a few decisions -- I won't know until November whether my fears are justified on those, and if they are, I will spew much venom.
But a lot of the time -- most of the time -- the choices are awful. (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I AM TALKING TO YOU, OH YOU PARAGON OF TERRIBLE, AWFUL, NO-GOOD PRODUCTION DECISIONS.) There is nothing in the transition from page to screen that requires changing the entire tone of a story. There is nothing that requires one to make Mina Harker into Van Helsing's daughter. There is nothing that requires changing a small town setting to a suburb ('Salem's Lot, most recent Carrie), nothing that makes you turn a frightening battle sequence into a random misty maze (Goblet of Fire), nothing that forces you to turn a twelve year old into a twenty-year-old (Lightning Thief), nothing that absolutely compels you to ignore the theme of the book and have a character publish the wrong novel in the end (Misery -- and even someone who hadn't read the book recognizes that one in an otherwise good adaptation; it's a noticeably wrong tonal note), or have the character who stepped out and challenged a mountain troll and a black rider reduced to hiding behind the rocks in one scene and sleeping on Liv Tyler's horse in another (I stopped watching those movies at that point). If you want to do any of those things, by all means, do it -- as a new story. If those things are important, nothing is stopping you from writing an original script that has those things in it.
So, yes, I get ranty about totally unnecessary and detrimental changes, and I get back, "But that's the director's INTERPRETATION!"
And that's the thing, as far as my love/hate relationship goes. While I enjoy visual interpretation of the elements, the truth is, I don't enjoy having someone force his own textual interpretation on the material. If everyone who felt like making a movie of a book could just make one and pop it up on YouTube, then this wouldn't be a very big deal, but as it is, there don't tend to be a lot of movies out of the same book at a given time, and often, only one is ever made. Because of that, movies get a lot of privilege about the interpretation, so if a big movie of a book says, "This is what's important; the rest is irrelevant," then that tends to stand. It spoils a lot of the fun.
Also, an interpretation needs, at some point, to refer to what it's interpreting. Otherwise, it's kind of pointless, because you can't actually make the argument for or against it. How can you argue with, "Yes, but the way I saw the twelve year old, he was twenty, and I envisioned an entirely different plot"? I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, "In my view, District Thirteen was as evil as the Capitol" (me) or "In my view, District Thirteen was doing what it had to" (the movies, as far as I can tell). If you can bring in the textual support, then you can have a reasonable argument about the subject. The two might produce entirely different performances and different foci in the scripts. But if, in your interpretation, you decide to, I don't know, change the actual actions, then you're cheating in the argument.
Another thing is, it tends to abruptly fossilize every other visual interpretation. Fan art of The Hunger Games has gone almost exclusively to the movies, with Haymitch almost universally blond, even when it's not a literalistic drawing of Harrelson. It's eaten up the actual text, which describes him briefly but very clearly -- the movie is overriding the real visual. Now, I love Harrelson's performance, and wouldn't change a thing about that, but that doesn't mean he looks like the character. And Jack Torrance sure-God doesn't look like Jack Nicholson (nor does Wendy look like Shelly Duvall). But these images have absolutely frozen so much of the visual imagination! (Again, this could be solved by having as many people making movies as feel like it, but I guess they'd cut into each other's box office and cause fan wars about whose was the best, etc. But at least no one would be left with the idea that such and such is the definitive interpretation which must now be followed.)
So that's the /hate part.
On the other hand, I still love hearing the dialogue I've only heard in my head. I love seeing the characters and settings take life and begin to breathe. I love the anticipation as they build up the hype every time, and I love the cultural moments that the movies create. I still read books and think, "Wow, I can't wait to see how this scene plays out on the screen!" Heck, I'd love to write something that would look awesome on a screen. I love the whole concept of the movies, and every single time, I go in thinking, "I can't wait to see this!"
So I find myself constantly whipsawed on the subject. It's annoying.
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