Words and Pictures: Adapting Stories to the Screen

I’ve written before about my opinion of several then-recent movies adapted from favorite novels. Though some were better than others, I felt that each movie—even those I pronounced “great”—was not nearly as good as it could easily have been, because the books were far better and the movies had made so many unnecessary changes (several of which were simply bad decisions even ignoring the books entirely).

But then there are the few gems that are both quite faithful adaptations and brilliant productions per se. The ones I’ve seen, where I knew and loved both books and adaptations, were the first two in the Harry Potter series and the BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptations.Potter series and the BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptations. What made these succeed when others failed?

I think each one’s success came largely from a different facet of the same reason: each took the time and effort necessary to fully portray the essentials of the book. In the case of Pride and Prejudice, this meant five or six hour-long episodes, and in the 1995 version the addition of a few scenes shedding light on the characters. Some truly extraneous action may have been cut from the book; I don’t entirely recall. The other two visual adaptations, into feature films, had to condense the plot considerably, and the story suffered significantly. (I intend to write a comparative review of the four adaptations on this blog … sometime, eventually.)

By contrast, the Harry Potter films (I restrict myself to the first two—I’ve only seen the first three, Prisoner of Azkaban in my opinion isn’t a very good adaptation primarily because it broke visual continuity with the first two so severely, and in any case I like the books after the fourth less and less) work well as both adaptations and films because so much of Rowling’s text is either description that translated well into comparatively brief “visual storytelling” or entirely extraneous: in other words, because there is simply so much to cut without harming the story in the slightest. (Note that I think Rowling’s true and lasting literary success should be measured more by the sheer number of better writers she drives to write fan-fiction fixing the problems with her books or otherwise set in her world than by the seven books themselves.)

In general, it is a rare novel (that is itself any good, anyway) that can be faithfully translated into a ninety-minute film that is both a good film and a good adaptation. A film is the visual equivalent of a short story, or at most a novelette or short novella. Examples of short stories that have been successfully adapted into movies abound; I’m told that Blade Runner (based on the story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”—I’ve neither read the story nor seen the film) was one, as was Minority Report (which I have seen, but I haven’t read the story it was based on). The visual equivalent of the novel is the mini-series; you simply need several hours to do a 80,000-100,000-word story justice.

Dawn Treader: Unworthy of the name

Back in October I saw the trailers for the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie and expressed dismay at the direction the film seemed to be going. When I saw the film earlier this year, I discovered it was worse than I feared.

In that response to the trailers, I summarized the recent history of Inklings-novel dramatizations: great films, but far inferior to the books. The filmmakers clearly loved and generally understood the books, but didn’t “get” them deeply enough to do them justice. For true fans of the books, the Lord of the Rings and earlier Narnia movies were at worst disappointments. Dawn Treader, by contrast, is a slap in the face—a deliberate insult.

Each of the previous films (as usual, I’m including the Lord of the Rings here too) was basically faithful in its portrayal of what the book was about on the most superficial level: Lord of the Rings is about defeating Sauron forever by taking the Ring to Mount Doom and dropping it in. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is about Edmund’s treason and Aslan’s sacrifice. Prince Caspian is about restoring Old Narnia under its rightful King, Caspian X. And we get that from the movies nearly as well as from the books.

But Dawn Treader is about a quest for honor (in seeking the seven lost lords, as Caspian swore to do when he was crowned), adventure, and the world’s end, undergone for no advantage or “useful” thing whatsoever. Not so in the movie; while the scene in which this first comes up is done nearly faithfully (omitting only Reepicheep’s “greater hope” for Aslan’s country at the world’s end), once they reach the Lone Islands they see the “evil green mist,” are given the first of the seven swords, and the search for the seven lords and for adventure in general is never mentioned again. Similarly, there’s a short scene that shows that Reepicheep would like to visit Aslan’s country some day (contrast this with his all-consuming longing that permeates the book!) … and then this, too, is never mentioned again until the end of the movie.

And it’s not only the plot, but also the central themes that the filmmakers did violence to. First, the subtle point from Caspian that victory need not involve bloody battles (which that film missed—but that’s understandable and excusable there) becomes a central theme in Dawn Treader, which features Reepicheep, of all people, shouting, “Don’t fight!” in the middle of the battle with the sea serpent, and the possibility that fighting might break out at any moment providing a tension to the Lone Islands sequence that the film tries and fails to duplicate. Instead, the film adds battles at every point it can.

Second, one of the points the book emphasizes over and over is that evil comes from within us; it is Caspian’s own greed at Deathwater, Eustace’s own “dragonish” thoughts, Lucy’s own vanity, and so on, from which their danger principally comes. And in each case it is Aslan’s intervention—an outside, and divine, force—that saves them from their trouble, even when (on Dark Island) the danger is external. The movie completely reverses this, turning toward the Pelagian heresy that evil comes from outside temptation (here ham-handedly symbolized by the green mist), and is defeated by the goodness inside the characters. This was precisely the point that Lewis refuted in the book.

And for all this, it isn’t even a good movie. The pacing is very rushed, and the film relies heavily on characters telling rather than showing their feelings and explaining the obvious. The end credits, based on the Pauline Baynes illustrations that have enchanted readers of the books for decades, were by far the best part of the movie—but they belong with a true Narnia movie. Not with a movie sharing only the title and the slightest resemblance with what Lewis wrote.

Trailers indicate Dawn Treader off course

Two and a half years ago, I wrote:

The Lord of the Rings. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And now Prince Caspian. Each of these may be a great movie. But each was allegedly adapted from a truly extraordinary novel.

In each of those movies, where the filmmakers’ choices differed from the originals they varied from hack-work to “very good but not as good as the original.” (Plus a few necessary cuts.) Fortunately, their additions and substitutions tended to be closer to the “inferior only to the original” side of the spectrum than to hack work; unfortunately, based on the latest trailers for the upcoming film adaptation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (I tip my hat to E. Stephen Burnett and GlumPuddle), it looks to have reversed that trend.

From the trailers, the two high points of the Narnia films so far—stunning visuals and inspired casting—seem to have continued. But the third mainstay of the series so far, spotty plotting, has worsened. Peter Jackson and Andrew Adamson (or their screenwriters) fabricated plot threads and entire subplots, but in The Lord of the Rings and the first two Narnia films, neither created the main plot out of whole cloth and made the original plot a subplot. And, from what we see in those films, neither Jackson nor Adamson would have let the “seven swords” plot get off the ground.

Both Jackson and Adamson made some major unusual, disastrous, and idiotic changes to some characters. To recapitulate some highlights: in Lord of the Rings the conflation of Arwen and Glorfindel is actually quite reasonable, but replacing Faramir with Boromir Mark II should have been unthinkable. In Narnia, beyond the hinted romance between Susan and Caspian that the filmmakers fabricated out of whole cloth, Prince Caspian nearly consistently misportrays most of the main characters. In the book, the fact that the Second Battle of Beruna was basically bloodless, as was the transition afterward, is a deliberate stroke of characterization of Aslan; the movie made the opposite characterization. Similarly, in the books the Pevensies—and earlier Diggory Kirke and Polly Plummer, and later Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole—come back from their encounters with Aslan permanently (except perhaps in the case of Susan) and markedly changed for the better. Sure, the Pevensies’ bodies lost fourteen years of age in a few moments, but would High King Peter the Magnificent really stoop to brawling in a train station, no matter how old his body was? Caspian, on the other hand, is thirteen in the book of which he is the title character and tries to decline the crown of Narnia on the grounds that he is “just a boy”—diametrically opposed to the way he was played in the film.

However, the Dawn Treader trailers seem to suggest it contains far worse changes. King Edmund the Just and King Caspian may be only teenagers, but each has been King over Narnia and met Aslan, and in any case neither of them is from the post-sixties America where their behavior in the scene in the trailer where they meet Ramandu’s daughter would be likely or acceptable. (Ramandu’s daughter supposedly being able to change her form at will is equally unlikely, but that’s mere silliness, while this is far more serious.) And then there’s Edmund’s unexplainable reaction to the White Witch: In Prince Caspian it is Peter who is tempted and Edmund who resists, apparently effortlessly. Edmund of all people should be the least likely to even listen to the White Witch, so why does the trailer depict him almost giving in to her?

So, basically, again, the directors are usurping the authors’ prerogative “to have a Better Idea.” The story would be far better served by producing it straight.

You may or may not be aware that in the late ’80s the BBC produced adaptations of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair for television. Except for a very few things, those adaptations were far superior to the last few years’ feature film adaptations: first, their special effects are typical of the era, usually obvious cell animation added to live-action scenes but also costumed actors for the animals. Second, the productions were obviously low budget, settling for third-rate settings, forgoing any elaborate props or sets, and avoiding scene changes when possible. Third, the more recent productions’ casting was arguably (arguably, mind, not certainly) better. And fourth, the television adaptation made even more cuts than the films. Now, most of the BBC’s cuts were logical and reasonable ones given their constraints (Caspian in only two episodes, and Dawn Treader in only four, with the other two novels in six each) but it’s hard to decide whether we prefer a tattered but well-done version or a more complete but badly adapted version.

What I really want is the BBC serials redone with the material they cut put back in, the special effects updated, the secondary cast and perhaps some of the principals replaced by better actors, and the cinematography done more professionally. That’s it. We don’t want Harry Potter’s younger step-sibling. We want Narnia. And from the trailers I’ve seen, Dawn Treader may not deliver.

Mythprint’s second review of Caspian on target

[Adiministrivia: This was originally posted on Facebook as a Note on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 12:26 AM. I apologize to my readers on Facebook for the duplication.]

A few months ago Mythprint (the quasi-monthly publication of the Mythopoeic Society) printed a favorable review (which I do not have to hand, alas) of the film Prince Caspian that left me wondering if they’d seen the same film I had. It has now made at least some amends by printing a review that addresses other specifics of the problems I have discussed in general at length in previous Notes. A nearly-identical version (probably a previous draft, since something from a comment made it into the print version) may be found here. The title given to the printed review is “The Peter Jacksonification of Narnia.”

Some points from the review that I want to emphasize: Peter Jackson is a horror film diredctor who turned a “character-driven epic of high fantasy” into “an action-driven horror-fest.” Similarly, Adamson turned two children’s stories with serious spiritual content into action movies that trivialize the spiritual stuff–or just plain get it wrong. This isn’t to say that the stories these two men seem to be trying to tell couldn’t be interesting films; it’s just that they aren’t what we were promised. Jackson, Adamson, and Walden Media are participants in a bait-and-switch. But I do have high hopes for Dawn Treader, which has a new director whose last film was Amazing Grace (which I still haven’t seen).

Prince Caspian: A (tragically) merely great movie [SPOILERS]

[Administrivia: This was originally posted on Facebook as a Note on June 1, 2008, at 7:28 PM. I apologize to my readers on Facebook for the duplication.]

The Lord of the Rings. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.. And now Prince Caspian. Each of these may be a great movie. But each was allegedly adapted from a truly extraordinary novel. And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy. The most obvious failing of the filmmakers is that The Lord of the Rings truncated the story, removing what is in my opinion the most important sequence of the whole three volumes, the Scouring of the Shire, while adding minutes upon minutes of unnecessary battle action sequences. And all of them made changes to the temporal sequence that would work . . . if there were not the highly superior originals to compare them to.

I saw Prince Caspian this afternoon. I have two primary objections to the movie’s treatment of the story, and a host of minor (nearly cosmetic) objections. The first major objection is one that I wrote about in an earlier Note after watching the trailers: The scale of the movie is all wrong. As I wrote in a reply to another review (but paraphrasing it a bit), you can’t have it both ways. If the three children and the Beavers can make it from what became Lantern Waste to Beaversdam in a matter of hours, and from Beaversdam to Aslan’s camp (which was at the Stone Table in the book) in no more than a couple of days, then the Telmarine army — and the Narnian army, for that matter — is actually a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than it was pictured. Not to mention that it’s not possible to get that kind of an army assembled in a matter of days or even weeks anyway, unless it was a standing army, which would make its possible size smaller yet. And then there’s the fact that much of Narnia — Ettinsmoor was specifically mentioned in the film as supplying troops — is left “uninhabited.” The whole coast. The North (Caspian defeated the Northern Giants the year after he won his throne). The forests anywhere.

The second major problem is the pacing. Caspian blows the Horn early, which throws the whole sequence off and ruins major scenes. But that’s not all. It permits this crazy scheme of raiding Miraz’s castle (not that the Narnians had enough troops to even think about it), which then, combined with the decision to postpone Aslan’s intervention until after the single combat had begun, causes the nearly bloodless (because of the intervention of Aslan and the Trees) Battle of Beruna to transmute into the bloodbath outside the How. While moving Caspian’s story from flashback to simple action before the sounding of the Horn was arguably a good idea, a reordering of only a few major events should only be considered in the rarest of circumstances, let alone the near-complete transposition in this alleged adaptation. And the filmmakers took advantage of it to make major changes to several characters, including Aslan.

Minor issues: All the children (and I include Caspian) are too old. (This was the case in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, too, but I didn’t know about the timeline then.) Caspian is thirteen in the events of the book that bears his name, and Peter was the same age, and Susan twelve, in the previous novel. While on the whole the casting for the Pevensies was simply inspired, they should have shot these films two years earlier. (I hope they keep the same Royal Four if and when they do Horse and His Boy in a few years.) That would also have had the effect of neatly nipping the “romance” between Susan and Caspian, which the scriptwriters fabricated out of whole cloth — this is a series of children’s books, in which the oldest person allowed alive into Narnia after the very beginning is fourteen (in Earth years, but the Caspian movie showed entirely too little of the growing-up-again-in-mere-days that was a major thing in the book) — in the twig. Second, the first page of the novel (which was as far as I got today, after the show) identifies the train station from which they are pulled by Susan’s Horn as a deserted junction out in the country, rather like the one in the beginning of the first movie. (And I think that simply omitting the darker-side-of-humanity-here bits at the beginning of each of them would have been a better choice.) Third, the voice actor for Aslan sounds constantly patronizing — the sort of actor a movie studio would cast as a Christian in an atheist propaganda movie.

Here’s hoping for a “Purist Edit” of the Narnia series like there is for the Lord of the Rings …

Caspian trailers excite, disappoint

[Administrivia: This was originally posted on Facebook as a Note on May 2, 2008 at 5:25 PM. I apologize to my readers on Facebook for the duplication. If you have a Facebook account and can read my Notes there, I'd suggest following the comments posted there, whch I will not be transferring.]

I wrote yesterday (this morning?) about the review of the upcoming Prince Caspian in The Banner. At that point all I had to go on was the book (worse: merely my memory of it), the review, and the inset of a poster of the movie. After sending the note to News Feeds across the state, I went looking for trailers, and found trailers and more, including TV ads and behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries. While all this visual stimulation stirred up what Lewis called Joy, the longing for the real country of which even Narnia is only a shadow, it also left me shaking my head.

I now know of exactly one filmmaker in the world today who, adapting a literary classic into a movie, does a straight adaptation and makes a film classic. That man is Kenneth Branagh, who adapts Shakespeare (though he had a cameo as Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). And even he makes the occasional weird choice, though I have yet to see one that broke the original, like setting As You Like It in feudal Japan. (Which, after seeing it once, actually works–unlike the production I saw in Stratford which set it in Vietnam-era America, Calvin’s fall 2005 production setting it in “the forest frontier” of America rather than “the forest of Arden,” or the movie coming out this summer whose trailers come up on YouTube above even the 2006 Branagh film’s.)

The director of the Narnia films–whose name I have not bothered to note–appears to be making the same error as Peter Jackson, who directed the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. And it comes from a virtue in filmmakers. The error is to suppose that a his judgement of what would be a stunning visual effect, plot twist, etc., is to be preferred to that of the author whose work he is adapting. This comes from two sources: first, the virtue of a keen eye for drama, stunning visual effects, etc., and second from our culture’s adrenaline and general thrill addiction.

The consequence and symptom of this disorder in the Narnia films, and in Jackson’s take on Tolkien, is an increasing divergence from the text of the novels. Caspian is described everywhere–in the trailers, by the actor playing the title role, by the director–as an “epic.” (It’s worth noting that a fan trailer produced soon after the first movie came out, probably as soon as Caspian was announced, called it Lewis’s “beloved masterpiece” while the official trailer calls it his “epic masterpiece.”) While it is probably more epic than the first, if you go by the text it is most certainly not. (Unless you mean “in the tradition of the epics,” which would tend to exclude “epic battles”–while I haven’t read it, I am given to understand that even the Iliad contains more sitting, talking, arguing, etc., than fighting.) Tolkien’s work may approach “epic,” but Jackson (or the team under his direction) broadened the scope of the story by at least an order of magnitude, falsified characters (Faramir, Arwen out of Glorfindel, Aragorn’s horse, etc.), deleted what is in my opinion the most important sequence of the entire three volumes, the Scouring of the Shire (this article has a fair treatment of the subject), added elements contradicting major themes (elves at Helm’s Deep, for one), and so on, and so on. It’s almost as if Jackson thought that Tolkien’s text was a starting point that could be made into a good story, rather than the masterpiece of literature that it is.

In the first Narnia film, though this disorder is present, it is much subtler–as indeed it was in the first installment of Lord of the Rings. The primary symptoms are the emphasis on both the vast size of Narnia (which contradicts the impression I got from the book, of Narnia being, like Israel, a tiny country given disproportionate importance to the history of the world) and on combat. There are perhaps four battles in the entire novel, depending on whether you count Peter’s encounter with the wolf where he “earns his spurs,” and all are treated rather briefly–the final battle mostly in a post-operation debrief. But you’d never know it from the film. And, as I remarked in my last Note, everything is rushed. The trailers and other related footage show that, while something of the nostalgia of the first few chapters comes through better than I had hoped, again the director had a “Better Idea.” (Which is, as Bujold has remarked, the author’s prerogative. My corollary: The author’s alone. Perhaps shared with the reader, cf. her essay “The Unsung Collaborator” in Dreamweaver’s Dilemma and the tremendous community that writes “fan fiction” to ease the pain of Better Ideas that turned out to be worse.) The trailers show Caspian coming to the island ruins of Cair Paravel (though that may be a conflation of two scenes from different parts of the movie, as is common in trailers), two catapults firing into either a field of trees or a castle (sorry, didn’t happen — and the armies around the catapults were entirely too large for either side to have supported given how small Narnia is, even after ten generations of Telmarine rule. Calormen, maybe; Narnia, no, not even with Archenland’s help), and the actor playing Caspian describing his part the first day of shooting as riding in to “save the day” which left him feeling “like a prince.” Again, that’s not in the book I read; while Caspian was properly trained for the job until his cousin was born, he was “just a kid.”

I hope and pray that a majority with sense and the ethics not to be in the Disney lobby’s pocket reforms the copyright law SOON, so that someone like Kenneth Branagh can make proper adaptations of the monumental classics of our age.

Banner reviews, misunderstands Prince Caspian

[Administrivia: This was originally posted on Facebook as a Note on May 1, 2008 at 11:41 PM. I apologize to my readers on Facebook for the duplication. Several other posts about Caspian followed this one.]

I read a review of Prince Caspian in the Banner. (For non-Calvin readers, the Banner is the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, which can be found in stacks across campus.) I (obviously) haven’t seen the film, and this review is making me (slightly) uneasy about the prospect, because the reviewer shows a near-total misunderstanding of what the book was about.

Case in point: He says that “Although Lewis never liked to describe The Chronicles of Narnia as biblical allegory, but ‘only magic,’ the parallels are undeniable. Aslan represents Christ, the White Witch is Satan tempting Edmund, who is Judas, and so on and so on.” Several things are very wrong here. Even if we grant his premise that Narnia is allegory, these “parallels,” or at least the last one, leave much to be desired. Edmund is as much Simon Peter as he is Judas, and most of his character fits with neither. In fact, Aslan as Christ, White Witch as Satan, and Lucy and Susan as the women who were the first to see the empty tomb are pretty much as far as the alleged allegory can be taken.

However, Lewis didn’t only “not like to describe” Narnia as allegory, he flatly rejected that categorization in a (1958?) letter:

“If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality, however, he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all.”

Allegory is a genre where everything and everyone represents either an abstract concept or a real person or place. A Pilgrim’s Progress, Animal Farm, and Lewis’s own A Pilgrim’s Regress are all examples of allegory. (This article on the question, makes the same error in calling the Divine Comedy an allegory — in the Comedy the characters do not represent anything but themselves.) In Narnia Aslan is Christ — in a world of Talking Animals, God would take on animal flesh as he did human flesh here — the White Witch is that world’s Accuser, and so on.

But these novice misunderstandings aside, I’m not entirely sure I was reading the same novels as this reviewer, who wrote that he “found Lewis’s original novel a bit slow moving” but reassured us that “the movie will deliver some special effects thrills that rival Lord of the Rings.” As I’ve said before, that’s not a flattering comparison; the adaptation of Tolkien’s three volumes could have been drastically improved by shaving five percent or so of every battle scene (especially in the background stuff), maybe cut some of the superfluous additions, and instead included the Scouring of the Shire. Which is the most important part of the whole story (from a theoretical standpoint, anyway). Oh, and while we’re wishing for changes, turn Faramir from a Bormir clone back into the moral brother of the pair; omitting the trip to Osgiliath could have saved several minutes of screen time (though it would have eliminated the unintended funniest line of the whole trilogy: “We shouldn’t even be here!”). The same could have been done with the movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: the Inklings’ pacing, anecdote selection, characterization, and ellipsis choice are much better than modern filmmakers’ second-guessing.

“The screen-writers changed the structure of the story as well, allowing them to contrast the four children with Prince Caspian.” We’ll have to see how this turns out; like I said, in general second-guessing the author is a Bad Idea, but the “backstory dump as Trumpkin’s story” took a while to grow on me in the book and putting Caspian’s story up to the sounding of the Horn first (which is what I would do if I were rearranging the story) could work.

Then again, the reviewer says that “The battle scenes are action-packed” and that “Three years ago I wrote . . . that I thought the pacing in the first Narnia film was a bit slow . . . [but Prince Caspian] is darker, livelier, and much swifter in its storytelling.” His take on the first film was entirely wrong, then; if anything it was much too fast-paced. While the ride to the Witch’s castle on Aslan’s back was a whirlwind of words, and the flight from the Beavers’ dam, the chase through the house that got them in the wardrobe in the fist place, and a few other passages were somewhat fast, the movie made everything at breakneck speed. (This was undoubtably to make it all fit in a reasonable amount of time, but with the script’s additions–like the cricket game and, more to the point, that whole scene with the wolves on the ice–that added more time than the breathless pace of the movie shaved off, this is inexcusable.) And the removal of Lewis’s pacing of the flight from the dam was a major change outside the scope of a mere adaptation. More action is not what a movie needs; Narnia requires contemplation, solemnity, and some emotion other than mere thrills.

So, then, while I will eventually see Prince Caspian when it comes out, as well as any further installments–and, though my dad refused to see Return of the King because of how far the first two segments of Lord of the Rings had diverged from Tolkien, I watched it and will probably do the same with these–I have mixed feelings. While the visual picture of Narnia (though an order of magnitude too big) in the movies, and the particular actors playing the Pevensies, is compelling, I hope the production staff didn’t mess things up too much. At least I have the original to go back to if they do produce a flop.