Bro. Did you even read the book?

Forget the wars and politics and AI that will kill us all.  It's time to talk about something actually important.  As you know unless you've been living under a rock, Hollywood has been having a moment "discovering" much beloved fan classics the last few years--Game of Thrones, Dune, Wheel of Time, the thousand Lord of the Rings projects...every other show seems to be a remake or adaptation of some beloved movie or book.  You'd think this would be an exciting time to be a nerd.  

You'd be wrong.

Now, I can't speak for all my fellow nerds, but I've been incredibly disappointed in just about all of them.  Expressing this has gotten me a lot of flack and accusations of being an unrealistic purist (among other things). That's not fair.  I'm not a purist; I understand how difficult it is to turn a book into a scene-by-scene remake, and why it just can't work a lot of the time. Some extraneous plot lines have to be eliminated, sometimes characters have to be condensed. Some devices that work well in writing are clumsy or even ridiculous in film.  I also understand that everyone wants to put their spin on things, to make their own addition to some already beloved and iconic pieces.  We all want to be immortal, and we don't want to just copy and paste someone else's work to a new medium.

While I acknowledge these challenges and limitations, the simple fact is that sooooo many of these adaptations have completely dropped the ball.  This happens in three main ways:

1. Poor writing. This comes in many ways--too much exposition, clunky dialogue, bad pacing, unrealistic or unexplained situations, over-simplified and cliche characters or tropes, and incomplete world-building.

2. Poor character development or casting. The characters drive the story.  If the characters are unlikeable or don't capture the feel of the original characters, it changes the dynamic and no amount of meticulously detailed set design or massive budget is going to save it.

3. Lack of fidelity (or even outright contempt) for the source material.  This is the most unforgiveable sin of the three.  If you, as a screenwriter, find yourself trying to "fix" material to make it align more with contemporary attitudes and mores, you shouldn't be adapting it to begin with.

With these things in mind, we'll go over a couple of my greatest disappointments.  If you're not an aggrieved fan or pedantic writer, I suggest you just skip this particular blog.  If you haven't seen the shows, I'm not sure why you're still reading, but consider yourself warned: here there be spoilers.

Willow

All of us 80s kids remember watching the movie that spawned this sequel series.  The movie was a wild, mildly irreverent romp.  The series was a spectacular example of poor writing and a Mary Sue.

The show starts off promisingly enough; as a sequel set 20 years or so after the movie, it can build on the established world without having to have continuity in characters or setting.  Unfortunately, the script and plot feel like a bad group project--a couple of ideas cobbled together by several people who didn't want to talk to each other.

Elora Dannan, the foretold empress and great magician is raised as a servant for...reasons, I guess.  Apparently keeping her safe required her to be completely ignorant of everything about herself pretty much since infancy.  Queen Sorcha is also totally cool with her charming and useless son boffing this girl (his supposed future empress) because...reasons.  

Despite having the personality and charisma of a feisty sock, Elora Dannan is our heroic Mary Sue.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a character who is inexplicably good at everything, unexpectedly powerful, and has no believable character growth.  This girl goes from a naive, slightly stupid maid who is heavy-handedly more than she seems to an opinionated, wand-wielding girl-boss who can face an evil that makes Bavmorda from the original film look like a party clown...all in about six episodes and a training montage. "But it's fantasy," you protest.  No.  Laws are even more important in fantasy because they make the world have consequences and weight.

Then there's Luke--I mean, Willow. Our pint-sized magician (who actually earned his powers and courage during his hero's journey in the film) turns out to be a demanding old charlatan who isn't actually a wizard because...reasons.  It doesn't make sense unless you are one of those people who feel that heroes need to be diminished, especially if they're a dude.  Just as Luke Skywalker's degeneration into a grumpy, alien-milk-swilling space hobo had only the thinnest and least feasible of explanations, Willow Ufgood's entire character arc being an incompetent scam also doesn't make sense.

I also couldn't shake the feeling that the writers couldn't quite decide kind of story they wanted to tell or who they were telling it for. The ghastly dialogue was mostly explication liberally salted with contemporary slang that the target nostalgia audience is too old to know.  The anachronistic clothes, music, and social attitudes are jarring in the setting.

In all, the series also failed the major rule of storytelling: show, don't tell.  In a book this rule can be challenging to follow, but in a visual medium it is much simpler.  What does this mean? It means you don't tell me a character is mean or funny or stupid, you show me through the things they say and do, the way they react to other people and situations.  A certain amount of explaining has to be done just because of time issues (8 hours of film vs hundreds of pages), but "show don't tell" is crucial to believable character establishment, growth, and narrative.  Conflicts rooted in this idea are more organic and believable, as are the solutions.  A great example of this from the film is the scene where Mad Martigan is feeding the baby Elora blackroot, and Willow objects.  Willow doesn't say he's a good parent, he shows it.  We aren't told Mad Martigan is coming to like the baby or feel protective of her, we see it.  And it makes all the difference.

Before you write me off as a pedantic old grump, there were several things the show did well.  There were several nods to the original movie in the design of monsters and sets, as well as having a number of the original cast return. While the series failed to capture some of the irreverent charm and coherency of the original, I did enjoy some of the characters such as Kit's would-be fiance, Graydon, and Boorman, the Mad Martigan-esque replacement.  The queer romance between Kit and Jade was actually well set-up for once instead of being shoe-horned in for representation points and was simply a facet of their characters instead of the focal point.  That being said, I was not surprised when Disney canceled season 2 and has been pretending the series never existed.

Rings of Power

This isn't technically a remake or a sequel, but it is part of the Tolkien 'verse--at least in theory, since apparently the showrunners don't actually own the rights to much of the source material they're drawing from.  I suppose that justifies their wild making shit up, but it doesn't excuse making their main character an insufferable Mary Sue.

From the first second Galadriel kick-flips off a sword to singlehandedly dominate the troll that's kicking the crap out of her supposedly elite commando squad, Galadriel is just another Mary Sue.  She's just so damned good at everything, so righteously furious at every one who just doesn't understand (and they all happen to be men, coincidentally I'm sure).  Other than wrath and superiority, she's got the emotional range of a rock.  Now, in fairness, Galadriel does improve toward the end of the season, but it feels too little, too late.  There were lots of opportunities they could have explored her pride, her conflict, and instead they focused on how misunderstood but awesome she was.  Unfortunate.

Some of the plots weren't followed through--things just happened without much explanation, and we had to just accept it because there was little to no explanation coming. An entire contingent of elves turn up captives of the orcs without any questions or explanation as to how they got captured.  Despite the near-constant refrain of "No one walks alone," the Harfoot proto-hobbit leaders deliberately put the crippled father and his family at the back of the train as a punishment for their misunderstood daughter, and only keep from abandoning the family by the merest shred of technicality.  Every major female character is a badass with the same fierce personality, whether she's an immortal high elf, a human queen, or a village medicine woman in the middle of nowhere, and cue the predictable girl-boss speeches to the men who have to be chivvied along to get anything done.

Unexpectedly, especially given the massive budget for this series, many of the costumes were crap.  They looked like cheap Halloween pieces, and the wigs were painfully obvious especially on the elvish king.  The elves just didn't feel very elvish, which I am willing to accept because there are thousands of years between this and the more familiar Hobbit and LOTR films, but there is still a strange lack of continuity that makes the RoP feel more like its own thing and not part of a well-known universe.

There were some gorgeous moments.  I did enjoy Nori and her friend Poppy, and I found The Stranger (obviously Gandalf) endearing in his subtle performance.  I did like Elrond, and for him I don't mind that he felt a little different because he would have been very recently Elf'd at this point, and he was charming.  I liked the dwarves, and found Disa and Durin delightful.  The twist at the end was interesting if a little predictable.

Wheel of Time

I was excited for this one--I have some complaints about Robert Jordan's style and heavy reliance on a couple of stock phrases and tropes, but he has a massive, beautifully thorough world with various diverse and intricate cultures, strong female characters, clearly defined laws of magic, and an absolutely solid, tight plot throughout thousands of pages of narrative.

What we got was a nonsensical world that completely scrapped a lot of the characters' individuality and personality and gave us several lead actors with the charisma of a damp paper bag.  The unforgiveable sin that makes this series the worst offender of the several I'm discussing is that the writers clearly disregarded the source material almost to the point of contempt.

From the very beginning, this show flipped the bird to Jordan's carefully constructed world.  The Two Rivers is a relatively small area far from major sources of trade and travel; it would be very homogenous because there are few outside additions to the gene pool.  And before you start rolling your eyes because you think I'm upset that they showed them as non-white, listen--I think that having the Two Rivers as non-white actually fits quite well with the narrative as well as the original material.  Rand was a blue-eyed redhead and he stood out because of it. It's actually relevant to the story that he looks the way he does, like "an Aielman." What I take issue with is the very obvious ethnic diversity in this small, incredibly rural town (and literally every other town and culture in this show, no matter how remote). This is sloppiness, not diversity. It is poor world-building. It also undermines the characters' awe and discomfort when they enter into bigger, more cosmopolitan towns and are exposed to so many other cultures as their world literally gets larger and more colorful and more dangerous.

Major points of the plot were also waived in favor of contemporary perspectives. The Dragon Reborn was always going to be a man, and everyone knew it; that's rather important to the plot and socio-historical issues within the world. Moiraine never wondered whether it was one of the girls due to some misreading of prophecy.  Of course everyone is sleeping around and naturally are incredibly sex-positive and there are no strictures or societal disapproval.  It feels very inauthentic and frankly boring to have a world where every culture so clearly echoes ours.

The lack of familiarity with or care for the original work was clearest in the characters.  The names might be the same, but several of them are otherwise unrecognizable.  The writers took Mat--one of the most irreverent, mischievous, fun characters in the entire story--and turned him into an unlucky addict edgelord with an abusive, alcoholic daddy.  Perrin accidentally kills his invented wife for extra pathos because the destruction of his hometown and sense of safety just isn't gritty enough. The growth arcs for the girls become trite girl-boss cliches (yes, of course Nynaeve can single-handedly take down an eight-foot-tall orc with a hunting knife despite never having been trained). Siuan and Moraine obviously have to come into conflict over the very thing they've been working toward for twenty years, finding the Dragon and protecting him (them).  And then they just start making stuff up, adding in Moiraine's sister and whatever plot twists sounded cool in the moment.

Now, credit where it's due.  The visual world, from the architecture to the clothes and everything in between, was absolutely phenomenal--better and clearer than the books. The older members of the cast were perfectly cast and carried their roles well.  The graphics were amazing.  And the villains... *chef's kiss*  The villains are examples of additions to the original story that actually made it better.  The show's Eamon Valda was a monster, and I loved the fact that he collected the rings from Aes Sedai he killed.  Liandrin's son was a brilliant way to flesh out her character and make her a little more human--and a little freer to be evil once he's dead and no longer holds her back.  And Lanfear...she is a vast improvement from her literary incarnation, where she is supposedly so evil but mostly just petulant and impotent.  In the show, she is actually believably powerful and scary.  I just wish the writers had managed to find the same balance with other parts of the show.

The Last Airbender

Out of all of these shows, this one is the closest to a love-letter to its fans.  The showrunners learned from the mistakes of the terrible M. Night Shyamalan film and stayed mostly faithful to the source material.  Throughout the series they did a fabulous job hitting a lot of the right notes and took their time to recreate scenes in exacting detail--sometimes even down to jewelry placement and camera angles.  They streamlined the story pretty well and nodded to the plots they cut with well-placed references, inside jokes, and easter-eggs. The diversity was well done in that it wasn't highlighted, it was simply done appropriate to character and culture.  The costumes and design were thorough and detailed.  The casting was incredible, and if the acting wasn't universally great or the occasional actor was bland (*cough* Katara *cough*) well, they also cast age-appropriate actors and there aren't that many 12-15 year old actors who have mastered their craft.  The water bending was weak, but the CGI animals and other effects were astonishing.  If occasionally the explication was a little clunky, there was a lot of information that had to be established early for the sake of the setting and story.  All forgivable.

It fell apart in two ways.  First, they started adding stuff in. Some of it was great.  Adding more Ozai worked well.  Giving us a little bit of Sokka's emotional baggage made him even better.  Making Bumi a little harder wasn't necessary but was an acceptable and logically justifiable change.  Mixing in episodes and plot from season 2, not so much.  The whole episode in the spirit world was a muddy, hectic, unnecessary mess.  And Katara's arc...in the original show, it was an incredible moment where she has just had her fill of Paku's shit, loses her cool and puts up a good fight and helps to change his dismissive and traditional attitude toward female water benders. It was feminist in the best way. In the reboot, it becomes protracted virtue-signaling punctuated with pretentious speeches against The Patriarchy. It could have been done much better--for example, the men could have been up on the wall, looking at the vast Fire Nation fleet that they have no chance of defeating, and Katara could have just shown up beside him.  Paku says it's not her place, and she just ignores him and gets into stance.  He looks to his left and there's another woman, also in stance, her face determined.  He looks back at the fleet, despairing of the fight to come and resignation for the inevitable end, then sinks into a matching stance beside them.  Show, don't tell.  No one likes a damned lecture.

The second failure was in the mischaracterization of certain characters, most notably Roku and Azula.  Roku was shown as a clown, probably in an attempt to make him distinct from other past avatars who are all very somber if not borderline wrathful; this was a mistake because Roku was a distinguished, noble man who was very aware of the cost of his mistakes just like the other avatars.  He was kind, but he was serious, and his jocularity felt out of place.  Azula, however, in what I assume was an attempt to show her inner turmoil and hint at her future instability, was inexcusably weakened.  They took a character who is supposed to be a firebending prodigy, a genius tactician, her father's undisputed favorite, an iron-willed, manipulative, and highly functional sociopath and said, "You know, she's still a fourteen-year-old girl.  She should be insecure."  It was a bad choice because instead of a truly terrifying villain, we got a petulant teenage girl with a cruel streak.  Her cohorts Mei and Ty Lee, while appropriately costumed, were as defined and interesting as room-temperature butter.  I hope that season 2 will rectify the mistake made with Azula.  Out of all of these shows, this is one I will definitely continue watching.

Honorable Mentions

Dune was absolutely phenomenal.  The book is a dense, intricate blend of politics, intrigue, mysticism, philosophy, adventure, and the crossroads of choice and destiny.  It is probably one of the most difficult stories to adapt because of its complexity.  Villaneuve's films managed to simplify the plot while capturing and presenting the essence of the characters through design, casting, and presentation.  It *felt* like the book in the most important ways.  It also had a believable diversity that didn't feel heavy-handed or forced.  Obviously there were changes, but they largely fit in with the world.  The Harkonnens, for example, had their personalities and worldview clarified by using the stark monochrome colors and parallel human design. Sex and race swapping Liet Kynes didn't affect the plot because it still felt organic to the world and character.  Chani being a little feistier worked well within the context of the film even if she did veer a little into woman-power territory.  She isn't just a meek appendage to Paul and provides a foil to his resignation to his terrible destiny.  Taking Alia out of the narrative is good; it shortens the timeline and also removes the challenges of trying to create a believable three-year-old child that is mentally an adult reverend mother, neatly avoiding the creepy Twilight-Renesmee issues.

Shadow and Bone --All in all, no complaints.  It's a little cheesy, but the action and characters were largely similar to the novels.  I enjoyed splicing in the Six of Crows series. The acting wasn't terrible and actually improved as the seasons progressed.  The magic, history, and hierarchy were interesting twists on old material. I particularly enjoyed the new setting--a Russian-influenced world from the language to the costuming to the creatures is something we haven't really seen before, and I hope that writers are encouraged to spread beyond the classic (but still good if done well) Western European setting.  I have no idea why Netflix dropped this one before releasing the final season.  It seems like a bad choice but there's little I can do about it.

Congratulations! You're still here, and I appreciate you coming along for the rant.  So what do we learn from all this?  If you ever plan on writing an adaptation, get out your pen and scribble this down, one nerd to another.

1. Stick to the source material.  You don't have to make it word for word, but it has to feel like the original.  The characters have to be recognizable, and not just have the same names.  The world has to reflect the world of the novel or film.

2. Show don't tell.

3. To quote The Birdcage, "Don't add.  Just subtract." Only add material if it makes the story better--if it fleshes out a character, if it fixes a plot hole or smooths out an edit.  If you don't like the story, then write your own.

4. Don't try to "fix" the story or the world.  Don't try to make it "less problematic." It is beloved for a reason.  Try to understand why.  Not every story needs to be a perfect idealized microcosm of your values and opinions.

5. Most importantly, understand this: If you are adapting a piece that already has a huge fandom, then don't change the material.  The people who already love it--your built-in audience--want to see the piece brought to life largely as it is.  You don't need to surprise them or add twists to keep their interest.  As for everyone who hasn't read it, they don't know what's coming anyway. So stick to the book.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.  Stay classy, San Diego.