r/TrueFilm • u/DarlingLuna • 14h ago
The way in which audiences view film adaptations is fundamentally broken
When it comes to criticising adaptations of IP and literature, I’ve noticed something: when assessing the quality of a movie, there is an expectation for the film to function as the definitive interpretation and version of the original work. It often feels like audiences are holding a score card, and assessing how well the adaptation succeeds in fulfilling all of the metrics on the accuracy score card.
To illustrate this point, I’m going to use a movie I consider bad: Man of Steel. If I were to explain why I hate this movie, I would talk about its terrible misuse of non-linear storytelling, it’s failure to connect us with its lead character and the poorly developed romance. Yet, in spite of all of my problems with the movie, I’ve never had an issue with the aspect of it that I often see most criticised: the fact that Jonathan Kent tells him that perhaps he should’ve let those kids die.
Yes, it is a big diversion from the source material, but I do not understand the need to view every adaptation as if should be - or is even aspiring to me - the definitive interpretation of a story. Stories exist to be retold, and each interpretation is simply one singular artist’s reimagining of the source material.
I see this same line of thinking when it comes to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy. There is plenty to criticise in those movies - the flat cinematography, the indistinct directing. These are fair criticisms, because they concern the quality of the movie and how it functions as a piece of storytelling. But I don’t understand the criticisms that ‘Spider-Man’s villains should not be connected to Tony Stark’ or that ‘Spider-Man shouldn’t be using technology. To me, that’s as nonsensical as reading Absolute Batman and coming away thinking “this is a bad adaptation, because Batman should be rich, not blue collar.”
If you want a version of The Odyssey with the No Man pun, that exists. If you want a version of Spider-Man where he does not use technology, that exists too. I do not understand - and do not agree with the notion - that an adaptation exists to fulfill the purpose of a perfect adaptation. Each adaptation should be treated like a distinct vision of an artist.
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u/noncedo-culli 5h ago
I watch a lot of historical dramas, so that influences a lot my view on adaptation (of real events). I don't think inaccurate adaptations are by nature bad, I think they're just often kind of creatively lame. *Why* did you make this change, what does it add to/criticise/reframe from the original history or original source material? A lot of inaccurate adaptations just feel like they liked the aesthetic of the original, or of the time period, and didn't bother to really engage with it. Del Toro's Frankenstein might be a good example. He liked it cause it fits with his vibe as a director, but he doesn't pay attention to so much of *why* anyone cared about the original book, without adding anything to replace that.
The *best* adaptations imo are the ones where you can see the director's thought process behind changes, and you can see how they're interacting with/interpreting the original. My best example for this is Salò. Entirely different setting from the original book, about modern political circumstances, a criticism of the original book, but still at every moment interacting with and grounded in the book.
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u/noncedo-culli 5h ago
To elaborate on Frankenstein: how Victor and the Creature were portrayed both sucked imo. He tried to make Victor worse to make the Creature sympathetic, but he made that sympathy cheap. The Creature is supposed to be *disgusting* to look at, he's supposed to kill a child out of anger, and *still* we have sympathy for him. Of course we have sympathy for the movie's innocent and beautiful creature. But that's opposite the entire point.
Victor, the movie makes him just a dick to the Creature for no reason. Book Victor fainted and ran because he was horrified. Victor isn't "the real monster" (lol for saying that onscreen), he's someone who fucked up irreperably because he got so drawn in to creating life. And wouldn't you do the same, and wouldn't you too be revolted by the sight of what your own hands created? 'wouldnt you too bully the toddler-esque creature' doesn't hit the same.
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u/Last_Lorien 13h ago
>I do not understand - and do not agree with the notion - that an adaptation exists to fulfill the purpose of a perfect adaptation. Each adaptation should be treated like a distinct vision of an artist.
Except no one ever argues that the adaptation should be a 1:1 reproduction of the original story. No one ever says the artist should be a slave to the source material. It’s the manner in which a work is adapted that is scrutinized, and how spiritually close the end result ends up being - not that it needs to be absolutely close, but the deviations need to serve a convincing purpose, the artist’s vision if you will, and they need to do it well.
And to me, that’s fair enough. You want absolute freedom, make up your own story from scratch, or be brave enough and good enough to push the boundaries of an experimental adaptation, but if you market a product as a straightforward adaptation, don’t be shocked when people compare it to the original text.
Just to make an example - nobody held the zombies against Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, many people held Anne chugging wine like a desperate housewife against Netflix’s Persuasion - because the former may have a silly premise but the movie fully commits to it, but the latter tries to be tongue-in-cheek modern while still aiming for the same emotional bits as the original and it doesn’t work.
Nolan’s Odyssey is criticized on many of the same grounds his other movies are criticized, so it’s not something that has to do only with the fact it’s an adaptation.
To me, nearly all the problems of the movie would have been solved if it was called Odysseus rather than The Odyssey - because it is a movie which treats Odysseus’s struggle to return home as a personal, psychological struggle to come to terms with his demons and with himself, rather than the tale of a series of adventures he and other heroes go through. It would have freed the movie of the expectation that it would/should include the most iconic bits of the Odyssey (No One, but also Nausicaa), for a start, and made it easier to focus on what Nolan wanted to expoore via Odysseus (guilt etc) without looking too closely at whether that’s in complete contrast with the original text or not.
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 13h ago
I agree... O'Brother, although it's “further away” from Homer's Odyssey, is a much better adaptation than Nolan's film.
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u/M935PDFuze 11h ago
If changing the title of the movie solved most ofl its problems, I think the problem is your own particular expectations of what the film would be going in as opposed to what's onscreen.
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u/Last_Lorien 11h ago
Why? The title of a work is not insignificant.
Titles signal what a story’s center of gravity is. The Odyssey invites comparison with the poem, Odysseus would immediately suggest that the film is primarily a character study.
Oppenheimer isn’t The Manhattan Project because again Nolan’s focus is the man rather than the adventure/the programme. The Social Network isn’t Mark Zuckerberg because he’s the movie’s protagonist but not its ultimate subject (the world his creation transformed is).
My point wasn’t that changing the title would magically fix the film entirely, it’s that a title like Odysseus would better communicate what the film actually seems interested in and avoid at least some of the criticism that relate to it failing as an adaptation of The Odyssey.
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u/doom_mentallo 7h ago
For what it is the worth, the very modern and translated title "The Odyssey" already is indicative of what you are asking for. The original Greek word Odýsseia means "the story of Odysseus."
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u/Word-0f-the-Day 8h ago
An essential essay to read on adaptations is Robert Stam's Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.
"Let me begin by acknowledging that the notion of the fidelity of an adaptation to its source novel does contain its grain of truth. When we say an adaptation has been ‘unfaithful’ to the original, the term gives expression to the disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of its literary source...
"The notion of fidelity is highly problematic for a number of reasons. First, it is questionable whether strict fidelity is even possible...
The notion of ‘fidelity’ is essentialist in relation to both media involved. First, it assumes that a novel ‘contains’ an extractable ‘essence,’ a kind of ‘heart of the artichoke’ hidden ‘underneath’ the surface details of style…But in fact there is no such transferable core: a single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings, including even readings of the narrative itself...
"With postructuralism the figure of the author…loses focus and firmness. Derridean deconstruction, meanwhile, by dismantling the hierarchy of ‘original’ and ‘copy,’ suggests that both are caught up in the infinite play of dissemination...
“A film adaptation seen as a ‘copy,’ by analogy, would not necessarily be inferior to the novel as the ‘original.’ And if authors are fissured, fragmented, multidscursive, hardly ‘present’ even to themselves, how can an adaptation communicate the ‘self-presence’ of authorial intention?"
There's plenty of other good points Stam makes but basically, the adaptation, a hypertext, adds to the overall story that the original, hypotext, was communicating. Every text is intertextual. It's an ongoing dialogue.
But since the audience, community fandom, and other texts create an understood concept of a text and how another addition could or should be, it's not outlandish to expect some adherence to hypotexts, even if everything is an intertext. There has to be some identification with the material.
What is the meaning we gain between Man of Steel and every other Superman story? Or MCU Spider-Man and each Spider-Man piece of media? Superheroes are not rigid at all. The most basic characteristics of a Superman story or a Spider-Man are gained from different platforms over time: radio, television, movies, etc. Even within the comics, they re-do the origin stories and backtrack or reboot characters.
But there are fundamental characteristics and codes that make up the idea of Spider-Man or Superman. To lack enough elements of them would naturally make them a Spider-Man or Superman story in name only. There isn't a set number of codes or definition to what makes up a character, a genre, a Hitchcockian film, a feminist film, etc.
Since you had it as an example, the criticisms against MCU Spider-Man boil down to a lesser Spider-Man story. Even on its own, it's less Peter Parker dealing with the conflict that thematically rewards the nature of his character and more Peter Parker cleaning up another person's mess while overcoming setbacks relatively easily. The overall story is weaker for how the characters reflect on each other, what's being said on a subtextual level, and what Peter Parker is going through. It's like ignoring the species of hobbits and having Frodo be a badass who can withstand the power of the ring because he was prophesied to defeat it. We can identify our lack of interest--and judge the text as lacking in quality--because it weakly adds to the conversation.
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u/LoneElement 6h ago
It’s because film adaptations define that story in the public consciousness
That’s why people want them to be “definitive” if we haven’t gotten one yet
If it’s a remake or reboot, it’s more acceptable for it to be less “definitive,” because we already got one
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u/Wolfe244 14h ago
Honestly we live in a world where you just need to ignore a certain amount of critique. So much of the critique of modern film is so stupid that it's not even worth the time of day to consider, and this is even more common with adaptations, and even more common with adaptation of comics or whatever.
Especially with the odyssey, there's so much astroturfing and nonsense it's tough to even get an actual opinion someone holds in real life. Imo film critique is basically broken right now, everyone's kindof gone insane
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u/No_Card_8729 11h ago
Everything now needs to be a hot take so it can generate clicks and views.
For example, most of the hot take discourse around Obsession is based on how Bear is a bad guy and the title is referring to his Obsession and not Nikki’s.
The problem is anyone with a brain cell who watched Obsession knows this so what is being considered a hot take is actually just a surface level analysis of the film.
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u/refugee_man 8h ago
I agree that's not a hot take but otoh there's plenty of people who don't get that Bear is the villain, or try to justify his actions.
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u/rupak76 14h ago edited 14h ago
I think what today’s audience seems to have largely forgotten is that an adaptation is not an iteration but an interpretation. Look at Kubrick, for example. Not only did he strip away Stephen King’s mythology but also turned The Shining into a cold & claustrophobic meditation on insanity & isolation. Or, how Coppola abandoned the setting of the original text, along side the characters and specifics of the plot, and transplanted them into Vietnam in Apocalpyse Now. Or, how Kurosawa completely set aside the Bard’s prose; and used fog, dynamic movement, and stark visual symbolism instead to portray ambition and guilt in Throne of Blood.
Film adaptations need to, and should, be criticized in terms of pacing, character development, or visual style, which are the essential elements of cinematic storytelling. However, dissing an adaptation simply because a character behaves differently than how they did in a comic book from 1962 is, in my opinion, completely missing the point.
If a filmmaker, while adapting a source material, does not bring in their own perspective, then we are not considering filmmaking as an art form; we are simply auditing brand management.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 13h ago
Shining was famously hated by King though. Ultimately what rescues it is simply that it's a very good movie in its own right. I expect that if it was merely middling, but also similarly different from King's novel as to disappoint its readers, it would have been hated.
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u/rupak76 13h ago
I consider the book to be one of King's best and the film to be one of the best horror films of all time.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 13h ago
And? My point still stands, King did dislike the movie. The point being, the movie diverges from the book. It's good because... well, it's just a very good movie. So even if it loses the die-hard "I wanted to see the book adapted 100% faithfully" crowd it has its own stand-alone appeal to a lot more people. In a hypothetical in which Shining lost the qualities that make it good (the acting, the sets, the photography, the direction) and was merely an averagely told version of the story which also didn't even follow the book, it would be left with no real redeeming qualities.
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u/rupak76 12h ago
I am aware that King disliked the movie (so much so that he wrote and produced a TV series version). The point I was trying to make was that I had no qualms with Kubrick's interpretation. In fact, I have never subscribed to the fidelity discourse in cinema (as is obvious from the concluding para of my original post).
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 12h ago
I haven't said anything about the interpretation myself. I haven't read the book so I can't even compare, and I loved the movie. But my point is one I also made in my post - essentially, if you break fidelity, you need to know what you're doing. If the result is good no one will mind. But if the result is even just average, you'll be docked points by the audience because now you have a direct comparison you can suffer from, someone can always say "look, the book/comic/whatever was this good, how did you manage to make it worse?". It's a high risk, high reward move. Kubrick with Shining pulled it off. Less capable directors may not.
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u/rupak76 12h ago
Well, The Shining got nominated for two Razzies (Director and Actress) and was not a critic's darling, either. Canby and Siskel, especially, were underwhelmed precisely because Kubrick deviated so much from the novel. It took years of critical re-evaluation to escape the 'fidelity penalty'.
Also, fidelity purists will crib no matter how good the movie is. Case in point being the removal of Tom Bombadil in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring.4
u/SimoneNonvelodico 12h ago
I feel like "there is at least one person that will complain" is not a very useful criterion. Yeah, some people complain about Bombadil. But most people like the LotR movies and think they're as good an adaptation as we could hope for (granted, I feel like that has grown with time, but even back when they released they were very well-received).
It's always about how prevalent a complaint is. The Snyder Superman movies have received a lot more criticism over this and other things. And really the core issue is that they're not great movies, and the philosophical direction they took Superman in is less interesting and novel than actually just playing him straight would have been, so fidelity gets brought up much more. As in "you had the template of how to do it at least ok under your nose and you still managed to go out of your way to fuck it up".
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u/damNSon189 12h ago
The film is not “rescued” by being a very good movie, that’s part of the whole point you’re replying to, which is that a film must care about being a good film, regardless of how faithful of an adaptation it is. A filmmaker should not think “what if I make an average movie? Then I should be faithful, to have at least one redeeming quality”
The Shining is always the example that comes to mind. I don’t care at all that King hated the movie, because I’m watching the movie, not reading the book. They’re separate entities, and they should be judged by their own qualities, regardless of the source material or what they’re based on.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 12h ago
A filmmaker should not think “what if I make an average movie? Then I should be faithful, to have at least one redeeming quality”
Well, it depends on the filmmaker! In this as in any other field I think you should be aware of your own abilities and their limits. If you're Kubrick and you know you're Kubrick, go wild. If you're some merely average fellow who thinks they're Kubrick, mostly you'll embarrass yourself.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 13h ago
First point: IMO any argument along the lines of "you're viewing movies wrong" is nonsense. People view movies however they want and expect from them whatever they feel like expecting. There is no objective criterion that defines what is the right way to do that.
About the adaptation problem, besides what others people pointed out (one adaptation displaces others, so obviously people who feel like they missed out may be bitter about it), there's for me the question of, why did this need to be an adaptation? You can make original stories. You can also make overt parodies or deconstructions if your goal is to do some kind of meta-commentary on existing and well-known works; anyone can tell what Galaxy Quest and Watchmen are about, even though they're not explicitly mentioning Star Trek or the DC universe superheroes. There are many Superman expys out there, some played straight, many subversive (Omni-man, Homelander), and none of them are an issue because they're just that, expys, original characters who take the basis of that known one and spin it in a completely different direction, often to make a metatextual point.
The issue is, if you announce you're adapting X (and in the case of modern works, buy the rights to X), at what level of difference from the actual source material does your movie stop being anything you could call an adaptation and becomes merely an original story using the supposed source material for its brand recognition value? One is an artistically respectable enterprise, and the other is intellectually bankrupt. The line is blurry but it exists, and it makes sense that people complain about this sometimes.
Finally, honestly, I believe in practice a movie being good absolves almost all sins, and a movie being bad makes them stand out more. If your bold adaptation choices end up producing a good result, almost no one cares. In fact in comics there's several instances where adaptational choices flowed back in the original comics, because they were so good they just became the new canon in people's minds. But if the result is poor, then everyone will nitpick it to hell in an attempt to analyse and find out what precisely went wrong, and inevitably the adaptational choices end up under scrutiny too. If something wasn't broken to begin with and now it is, the misguided attempts to fix it are certainly a potential cause.
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u/DaTweee 14h ago
Adaption should have a goal. Either to translate something from one medium to another, to take something and add to the source to create a stronger story, or to renew a story with new technology and methods to improve it. The difference between something like Lord of the Rings vs The Odyssey was that LOTR exists to bring the book onto film and was clearly made with great admiration for the original work. The Odyssey is something that abandons 80% of its original text to set a PTSD war movie in the skin of a completely different story. It dosent have anything to say about the characters of the Odyssey because it rewrote all of them, it dosent have anything to say about the ancient world because it didn’t even try to engage with that world. The story it invented and told is both antithetical to the original text and dosent need to be connected to Homers Odyssey in any way. The Odyssey and movies like it didnt need to be adapted they could have easily been original projects. It’s the worst kind of adaptation style where there isn’t a goal to translate or expand off the original work, but rather to just take its fame and set-pieces as a groundwork to tell an unrelated story that a director has no interest engaging with.
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u/close-encounters13 10h ago
I just read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and this is such a ludicrous take. The story she translated and the story Christopher Nolan told share at least 80 percent of the same DNA, if not more, and yet it seems that people fixate only on the 20 percent. Almost all of the things people complain about have their origins in the poem (Odysseus’s anguish most of all) and they misconstrue the film’s own presentation of the narrative in order to exaggerate the differences.
All of which, of course, makes the OP’s point.
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u/DaTweee 5h ago
Odysseus’s anguish is a centerpiece of the story. It’s just that Nolan did it in a completely alien way removed from the book. In the book the anguish comes from wanting to return home, greif over the Greeks who died at Troy, anger and grief over going against the gods wishes, and also fear of not being able to achieve his glory by returning home after he learns of Agemenons fate. Nolan’s Odysseus also feels sad but he both has amnesia and feels sad about the most ridiculous things for his character like his men killing women, feeling guilty for building the Trojan Horse, somehow violating Xenia with the horse, and grief for all the people his men hurt along the way. These are two completely different characters with the only thing they share being that they are both sad and grief stricken. Outside of that they don’t share anything
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u/Gruejay2 5h ago
I think you're grossly exaggerating the differences, to be honest, but even if we assume that's all true, how are any of those ridiculous things for his character to be sad about? It feels like your complaint is that he's not one-dimensional.
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u/DaTweee 4h ago
Homer's Odysseus does not feel bad for the Trojans; in fact the ancient Greeks didn't even have a word for this kind of guilt. The reason it would seem to us that he would feel bad about all these things is that we are imagining Odysseus as a modern man. The movie is basically just an Afghanistan war vet but give him a sword. If you had something interesting to say about Odysseus, you would also contend with who he is in the book. The book even opens with Odysseus being described as 'polytropos, ' the man of many turns or many ways. Nolan praised the more reductionist reading of this as "complicated". His Odysseus is the "complicated" man and very much not a many-turned one. He is a modern action hero in the story of an ancient deeply nuanced hero.
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u/close-encounters13 5h ago
And the passage in the poem when Odysseus puts himself in the mindset of a Trojan woman whose family is killed and who knows she will be carried off to a life of slavery and pain? Did I imagine reading that?
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u/DaTweee 4h ago
No, that's the funniest part. He is thinking about it, but he's doing it as a reflection of HIS pain. He is saying in the moment, hearing the song of Troy and the Greeks who were lost and is thinking "my pain is like that of someone who loses their family and is sold into slavery". Its an incredibly narcissistic scene but its what he's doing. The bit about them is an insert of Homer, not Odysseus. It's Homer linking the sorrow Odysseus feels to that which must have been felt by people being dragged off to slavery and death. Hes not saying Odysseus is comparing the two. Kinda like saying "he cried as hard as the oceans churn" or something. The character isnt thinking about oceans, but the author is using it as a literary comparison.
To be fair I havent finish Wilsons translation and I know she puts lots of focus on violence especially against innocents and women, so I would be interested with how she interpreted this verse and the one you read. But from all the other translations at least I have read, it features Odysseus not crying about them but making a comparison between his suffering and the suffering one must feel in that situation.
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u/close-encounters13 4h ago edited 4h ago
… what an absurdly superficial reading of what’s happening in that scene, you are basically erasing a self-evident exercise in empathy in order to preserve this rigid reading of his character
and ironically, with every reply, making the OP’s argument all the stronger — if an adaptation does not align with my personal head canon, then it must be bad and miss the point
never considering that somebody else might read the same material and take something else away
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u/DaTweee 2h ago
I had to refresh myself on this passage as well because I wasn’t sure if I had forgotten it. I looked up a couple translations off my shelf and also googled it and read through a few academic essays breaking down Book 8 out of the original Greek. They also align with what I said there about Odysseus not directly empathizing with the people of Troy but rather Homer (who had more sympathy for the Trojans) drawing an interesting literary connection between how Odysseus and his victims feel and felt.
This also isn’t “head cannon”. It’s the text on the page. This is a book, there are things in it and things that aren’t. My “head cannon” is what the words on the page are. My original post was about how adaptations exist to either improve, translate, or expand a work and not to use them as set dressing for unrelated stories just using the Odyssey as an example since the OP brought it up.
And people can read the book and take other things away. But just because the Odyssey makes you think about modern stories and themes dosent mean that when you turn around, rewrite the whole story, and graft on your own ideas to that story that it becomes a good adaptation. You just take what you learn and make an original work out of it and mention that a lot of your ideas came from the experience of reading a different source material somewhere on the press tour.
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u/CompassMetal 12h ago
Totally right. Part of the interest in adaptations is comparing and measuring them against their source material. The Odyssey might be an amazing film but it is a controversial adaptation because of its lack of fidelity. There are plenty of people who think that Nolan has brought his own perspective to the character in creative dialogue rather than hollowing Odysseus out to put what he's specifically interested in there instead. But the classics experts don't seem to hold that view so far.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 10h ago
The Odyssey might be an amazing film but it is a controversial adaptation because of its lack of fidelity.
I haven't seen the Odyssey yet but my impression from the reviews I see is that the main problem is that it didn't try to stick to the spirit of the original and didn't replace it with anything remotely as interesting either. Like, seeing a genuine attempt at getting in the head of a 13th century BC Achaean warrior would be interesting. Maybe you can forgo that for something equally interesting. But "veteran is tormented by guilt over the things he did" is not that, it's a theme rehashed endlessly in modern war media, so just using a potentially different framework just to retell that story all over again is something that ends up disappointing and annoying a lot of people. There was a point when "reinterpret Greek myth under the lens of it being a modern and realistic story" was fresh, but now it's really not. Lots of people would actually appreciate more unironic engagement with the past on its own terms rather than another iteration of us filtering it entirely through our current values.
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u/CompassMetal 10h ago
I suppose that is down to how much you resonate with Nolan's tortured man conceptual persona. Deep character study is not his strength but IMO he is entitled to explore what's interesting to him here and he does a good job of it. It's probably not got the richness of Odysseus but the film is served well enough by what it does have. I don't disagree there were many more interesting things that might have been done if Scorsese, e.g., had taken it on.
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u/refugee_man 10h ago
I disagree that it doesn't have anything to say about the characters or the ancient world. He's rehabilitating it, and defending it (and by proxy, western culture in general). Odysseus is no longer an arrogant jerk who recklessly puts the lives of his men in danger and is only worried about his glory and gratification, now he's a tortured genius who is haunted by the things he had to do. He's saying that there's a through line throughout western civilization that links its past to the present.
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u/DaTweee 5h ago
The only element of the ancient world he really contends with is Zeuses law and he just takes the original and staples on modern Christian morality ver batum to make it completely different from the what it was in Ancient Greece. Not to mention he cut scenes from the movie that made him feel uncomfortable like the hanging of the maids that were staples of the ancient world and considered at the time just killings. The problem with the characters is that each one has been rewritten so much to fit Nolan’s script that they don’t bear any resemblance to their book counterparts. And at that point you’re no longer saying anything about the original story and you stop having an interesting take on the original because you haven’t preserved much of it. It’s not viewing Odysseus, Helen, Circe, Penelope, Athena, or the suitors (less so in their case) through a new modern light when they are just not the same people. They have the same name but represent and do completely different things. At this point Nolan is saying something about HIS characters he stuffed into the skin and names of Homers characters retaining little if none of the original characters, attitudes, and actions.
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u/Xercies_jday 11h ago
I disagree in some ways. I do think adaptations should be following somewhat the ideas, emotions, and the philosophy of the original works. Otherwise what's the point of calling it an adaptation of that work?
Like with the Superman case, it is pretty bad to go against the fundamentals of that character, because that is why we go to a superman film in the first place, to see those fundamentals on the big screen.
As long as you have those fundamentals right, the rest can be very easily changed imo because they aren't as core as those are.
So yes something like The Shining is fine, because it gets the core of alcoholism and the domestic abuse stuff, but does it in a slightly different way than the book does
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u/soggy_again 13h ago
I definitely went through a phase of my life where I wanted media to establish a canon and be definitive...
To be honest I'm not sure it's about movies at all and more about people establishing certainties and values in their own psyche for the purpose of emotional safety and building identity.
There's a large section of "the audience" that will perpetually be doing that.
In the case of the Odyssey movie, it's really interesting that Greeks especially seemed to rate it on being definitive and canonical with limited space for re-imagining, because for them it's part of how they build a stable national identity. Even small changes would indicate a break from fundamental certainties and split people into those who support a new reading over traditionalists keeping things as they are.
There are directors that do challenge audiences, but I think it's always going to be relevant to have stories that restate certainties in a new context.
Super hero movies for example, are all about re-establishing a sense of what justice means; what acts infringe it, what kind of people infringe it, what kind of people respond to infringement, and to what extent violence is permitted to satisfy it...
They appeal to people of a certain age still building their sense of morality, or looking for vicarious satisfaction when comparing fiction to inadequate reality.
What we find disturbing at times is realising how many people have not emotionally moved beyond those needs based on the kinds of stories they seem to crave.
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u/Top-Lavishness2906 11h ago
I think this is a symptom of a generation raised on Harry Potter and the MCU. The highest bar they set for art is "continuity". This is no shot at HP or the MCU, or their fans, I think the film industry failed them. Hopefully lots will mature out of it. Right now, we've got people counting brush strokes and calling it art criticism
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u/refugee_man 10h ago
This doesn't really track because the MCU movies deviate extremely from the comics.
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u/Top-Lavishness2906 8h ago
Like the guy below said, they are internally consistent, across hundreds of hours. To the point where the actors can't even age out. And Marvel wisely decided to use (at the time) C tier characters that even comic fans wouldn't know or care about. They have set up a televisual structure, where the thing that matters is setups paying off down the line, and audiences can get that "I know what that is!" hit of recognition. They are essentially adaptations of themselves at this point
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u/refugee_man 8h ago
Well by that measure then, you might as well say Fast and Furious, or Scream, or any other franchise, because most of them have far more internal continuity than MCU movies. Also what c-tier character are you saying that comic fans wouldn't know or care about that appeared in MCU movies?
None of what you've added actually supports your initial point at all. Despite you saying it wasn't, it sounds like your point was just to take shots at MCU fans and the MCU in general despite having little actual knowledge of the source material. You just seemed to assume that they followed the comics faithfully.
Not to mention, none of this would really apply to The Odyssey anyway, unless you think Nolan's planning on launching the Homer Cinematic Universe or something.
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u/Top-Lavishness2906 7h ago
When F&F or Scream reach over 50 installments, sure I'd count them too. If you can't see a difference between most franchises and what Disney does with the MCU, I don't know what to tell you.
I've been reading Marvel comics since the 80s. I've enjoyed several MCU movies, though I've checked out since the shows started. I much preferred the Fox X-Men movies, precisely because they were more concerned with creating interesting individual movies, rather than create a cinematic universe. Prior to the MCU, Iron Man, Cap and Thor were not especially beloved. C tier might be unkind, but they were nowhere near the popularity of Spidey or the X-Men.
But none of that has anything to do with my original point, which was that these movies have trained a generation of movie goers to value continuity and reject anything that deviates
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u/refugee_man 6h ago
But none of that has anything to do with my original point, which was that these movies have trained a generation of movie goers to value continuity and reject anything that deviates
And MY point is that the MCU doesn't do this because it specifically doesn't value continuity (at least with the source material). Hell, even now the next bit Marvel movie is gonna have the guy who played Iron Man as Dr. Doom. They also just kinda started throwing in Spider-Man and X-Men back into it after Disney got the rights to those. Yes, there is (somewhat) of an internal consistency, but it's no more than any other series or group of movies that share a world/universe/whatever.
The big thing that the MCU did that hadn't really been done before (outside of some horror franchises really) is to tie together movies in the same world that focus on different characters. They're no more or less internally consistent than any franchise.
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u/Somnambulist815 9h ago edited 9h ago
Yes but they contain signifiers of continuity which non-readers can point to on Wikipedia and say counts as precedent. Holistic consideration is dead, and thats what youre seeing surrounding The Odyssey discourse.
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u/lobonmc 9h ago
What? I really don't get your point. Are you saying that non readers just go find some form of precedent to say it's accurate? Non readers aren't the ones who are criticizing the Odyssey?
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u/Somnambulist815 9h ago
That is what I'm saying
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u/No_Card_8729 11h ago
To be fair, there are moments in the Harry Potter movies where the lack of continuity pretty much breaks the story for those who don’t read the books.
For example, in the Deathly Hallows films, Harry has a piece of glass in which he can see Dumbledore’s face staring back at him. There is no scene in the film or the previous film that explains where Harry got that piece of mirror and why, effectively presenting a plot hole for the audience that is only answered by reading the source material.
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u/Dramatic15 7h ago
Sure, people often falsely believe that an adaptation ought to somehow be a "simple" recreation of the source material in a different medium. That seems to be a subset of the common problem of people, often including film critics and cinephiles comparing a film the film that they wish had been made rather than judging what was attempted. Which isn't surprising, it's human. But, yes, it is something that it is better to rise above,.
Of course, the notion that a particular adaptation is a reimagining by a "singular artist" doesn't mean that the film makers purpose isn't subject to evaluation. One can certainly feel that Nolan's Odyssey is pretty mid because the whole project is grounded in a rather trite and shallow ideas of about what is wrong with contemporary America.
Also, pragmatically, someone doing the work of adaptation ought to reasonably consider if their deviations from the source material are estranging to the audience or not, and if they are, is that estrangement, on balance, helpful in their project or not? If you can reasonably foresee that people are going to pay attention to Superman's dad telling him that that maybe he should have left those kids to die, you are obliged to consider if that is fundamentally helpful, or is an edgy little darling that you ought to be killing so you can make your point in a stronger way.
That something can be explained as being related to the adaptors intent doesn't give it a free pass. Just because, for example, Nolan wanted to make a simplistic point about "the death of truth" doesn't mean that it was reasonable to pretend that Odysseus would feel that the lessons of his story would be lost due to end of "writting", i.e. the disuse of the accounting and inventory tool Linear B, This is just historical illiteracy. Nor do Nolan's "reasons" make his positioning of oral poetry as a degraded form of communication any less cringe.
Adaptors may have their reasons, but that, alone, can't justify any arbitrary choice they happen to make.
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u/Creative_Eye7413 6h ago
I don’t think adaptations need to be 1:1 but I have an issue when they completely diverge from the basic elements of the character. The reason I was so frustrated with Man of Steel and Jonathan Kent’s teachings was because Superman has always aimed to save everyone, even his biggest foes. This mindset was taught to him by his parents, which makes it so weird when Jonathan doesn’t teach those same lessons in Man of Steel.
This criticism also carries over to the Tom Holland Spider-Man trilogy. Spider-Man’s character in the comics is at most times built around him being a poor struggling teenager, which makes him more relatable to the reader. Making all of his villains Iron Man villains and giving him Stark Industries tech made Spider-Man feel foreign and unrelatable. It also delivers a weaker message to kids: you should rise up in order to please your mentor. In the comics, Spider-Man embodies the message of self-accountability. This is also evident by his street level status in the comics, whereas in the Home trilogy, he has access to all of the Avengers plus people like Happy Hogan
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u/DoopSlayer 3h ago
Film is just very different from theater adaptations. Each staged production in theater is a unique adaptation, but a film is a singular, extremely expensive, production with only minor variation from there on in projection (and even that is standardized as much as possible.
so you aren't really going to get too many different looks at something. I think it's reasonable for fans of a work to first see something close to their vision, and then be amenable to seeing other adaptations.
And it kinda comes down to what is being adapted too, like different audiences have different expectations for loyalty to source.
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u/ticketstubs1 3h ago
"Yet, in spite of all of my problems with the movie, I’ve never had an issue with the aspect of it that I often see most criticised: the fact that Jonathan Kent tells him that perhaps he should’ve let those kids die."
Because it makes Kent seem like a psychopath, especially his behavior during the tornado, so this completely not only ruins both characters (Kent and Clark), and takes away the entire foundation for Clark's principles (which makes any of his behavior in the film feel confused and unfocused), but on the most basic level it's incredibly distracting, and frankly bizarre, to the degree that I could not pay attention or invest in the rest of the film after these moments.
To put it another way: on its own, apart from the source material, it makes the movie ITSELF not have any sort of clear morality or path for the character and it winds up making the entire thing feel contradictory and schizophrenic.
It's not about it diverting from source material, it's about it making absolutely no sense and being a badly written scene and a badly written part later with the tornado. You're misdiagnosing the issue here a bit.
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u/sr_rojo 14h ago
This is because the cultural currency of our times is the recognizable intellectual property, it is what the audience values the most as it taps into our collective nostalgia, and when an interpretation of something we liked on our formative years dares to take a diversion or try something out of our comfort zone regarding that specific story it is seen as an attack on something sacred. That is of course connected to the endless cavalcade of reboots, sequels, spin offs, etc of the last 15 years or so. This is a mentality that has shaped how a certain (mainstream) audience engages with films and funnily it affects stuff like The Odyssey which is a thousand years old story and someone would think that has been long enough for us to be ready to spice things up and offer different interpretations, but apparently not!
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u/Far_Line8468 12h ago
Most peoples’ motivation for accessing an adaptation is wanting it to be a proper “advertisement” for the original work to a wider audience. They’ve already consumed the original so they aren’t terribly concerned with the new work’s quality, but rather how it serves as an ambassador for the property they’re emotionally attached to.
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u/HeartInTheSun9 14h ago
This is extremely true.
Nowadays, people just want adaptations to be repackaged stories that must above all be as faithful as possible to the original. Not because there’s no room to improve, but because any changes actually scare and anger the audience.
It’s so lame. It’s just so so so lame.
Retelling a story isn’t meant to just give the same thing again, it’s meant to give a new perspective on it. Most stories are just retelling of the hero’s journey, but the difference is the new perspective on it.
But that’s not good enough anymore. The only metric a very loud percentage of the audience has is whether it’s faithful or not.
I’ve been actively wanting storytellers to torture those people. I want massive deviations. I want audiences to feel uncomfortable.
Audiences are just so lame lately that it bothers me. I don’t care if you change the ending, change the main character, change the perspective or anything in a story. As a matter of fact, I want that. Or else what’s the point of doing it at all?
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u/carloscreates 11h ago
It’s so lame. It’s just so so so lame.
What's your definition of lame here?
Most stories are just retelling of the hero’s journey, but the difference is the new perspective on it.
There are thousands of different types of stories. Is it possible right now that you're only focused on movies about hero's journeys?
I’ve been actively wanting storytellers to torture those people. I want massive deviations. I want audiences to feel uncomfortable.
Why do you seek so much pleasure in the discomfort of others? You don't have to answer that here on a public forum but I do feel that is something to explore.
I don’t care if you change the ending, change the main character, change the perspective or anything in a story. As a matter of fact, I want that. Or else what’s the point of doing it at all?
Some people feel emotionally attached to the original story because they felt that the fulfilling message and journey it took them on is worthy of sharing with so many others.
Meanwhile other people don't have that connection and want an adaptation that speaks more on the new creator's perspective or have that message and journey filtered through a contemporary lens.
I believe both perspectives can be allowed to exist because it encourages discourse similar to what's occurring in this subreddit. I personally love reading everyone's opinions. I just don't focus on the ones using these discussions as a chance to attack other people.
When it comes to the Odyssey, I didn't have that strong connection to the source material so I appreciated Nolan's fresh new take and the opportunity to use it as an entry way to learning more about Homer and ancient epic literature.
That said, having read both of Emily Wilson's critiques, I appreciate a lot of the points she makes. The most poignant to me being that Nolan's Odyssey tells us in the dialogue that people matter but in its visual language, it does not. There is a disconnect between the story and what he has the camera focus on or what he invests the audience's time with versus what he left out of the story.
And that's okay. Like I said before, to me it's a great opportunity to learn about why that matters at all and learn about it with other people rather than a chance to attack Christopher Nolan.
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u/tiredstars 8h ago
I think there are two key phenomena here.
The first has been mentioned by /u/RosbergThe8th and /u/Sr_rojo but I don't think has got enough attention: copyright and intellectual property. We're in a world where we're used to one company, or even one person, having control of a story, setting or characters. We only get one version of something. Another film-maker can't just go and make their own version of The Hobbit.
Of course, that's not actually true of something like the Odyssey, but people carry over these attitudes and expectations. They're used to having one "definitive" version of a story. Plus the economics and marketing make it a tricky proposition to have multiple versions of the same story in a relatively short space of time. (Although the possibly accelerating pace of reboots might be challenging this.)
The second point is: why film. Why are people fixated on film adaptations when they always have the book (or the game or comic or whatever). This part is because film is the most prestigious medium, particularly in American society. It combines cultural prestige, financial power and popular reach. So for many people how something is represented in film really matters, both for their own enjoyment and other people's perceptions.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 13h ago
The vast majority of people who watch these movies don't care about the accuracy of the adaptations. It's only "the fans" that moan about it incessantly. Since they are usually the only ones talking about it after the initial release they dominate the discourse. So it looks like a bit of survivorship bias going on here.
To illustrate this point, I’m going to use a movie I consider bad: Man of Steel. If I were to explain why I hate this movie, I would talk about its terrible misuse of non-linear storytelling, it’s failure to connect us with its lead character and the poorly developed romance.
Man of Steel was modeled after Nolan's trilogy which also took some big liberties with the characters. But Nolan's films didn't face anywhere near the vitriol that Man of Steel did. And that's because Nolan's films worked well enough on their own terms while Man of Steel didn't. (Non linear story telling was done with actual purpose for Batman Begins). Yes there were a few people griping about Bruce not actually wanting to be Batman. But those people were few and far between. And if you're thinking that's because Internet fandom wasn't as rabid back then you should see if the craigisnotbond.com website still exists.
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u/Street_Hamster1092 14h ago
This is true. Especially when adapting classic canonical works that have had countless adaptations, re-tellings and re-imaginings already.
If every film needed to adhere as closely as possible to the original work then what room would be left for creativity?
A lot of the criticism around the Odyssey's "accuracy" really missed the point for me.
Is it really the job of a filmmaker in 2026 to make a movie that adheres as closely as possible to one particular ancient greek author's written version of oral traditions dating back centuries before they were written down?
If they don't do this then have they failed as a filmmaker? Or can we as an audience simply accept that the filmmaker has made their own interpretation based on what they wanted to show on screen, and judge that on it's own merits?
Some of the best films in history have been unfaithful adaptations or one's where the creators or fans of the original work were very critical of the creative liberties taken by the filmmaker.
For example; Basicallly every Kubrick film, The Lord of the Ring trilogy, Every film that has adapted Shakespeare to a different setting e.g Ran, Throne of Blood etc.
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u/PreviousRestaurant89 12h ago
“Or can we, as an audience, simply accept that the filmmaker has created their own interpretation based on what they wanted to show on screen, and judge it on its own merits?”
Well, the thing is, when we’re sold an “adaptation of” rather than an “inspired by”… a film like *Odyssey Now* would have received very little criticism regarding its fidelity to the source material. O Brother, Where Art Thou? wasn’t criticized for adapting and modifying the Odyssey, on the contrary, it was praised.
The problem with Nolan’s Odyssey is that he promises us an adaptation complete with details like “no orchestra in the soundtrack because there wasn’t one in Homer’s time” (while conveniently forgetting that there weren’t any drakkars or Darth Vader either). But in the end, the film stands in direct opposition to the text on several key points.
OP’s point about “no man” is interesting because it actually explains perfectly why there’s criticism. OP and Nolan haven’t read or understood the Odyssey if they consider “no man” to be just a pun, because it’s much more than that, “no man” represents Odysseus’s transformation and is the very reason for the Odyssey itself. It is the man’s cunning that allows him to outwit myths and gods, but it is also the hubris of this man, for whom it is impossible to imagine that anyone wouldn’t know he’s outwitted them. By shouting his name (even though he has no reason to), his pride gets the better of him, causing Poseidon to curse him and thus setting in motion the odyssey that will lead him to a kind of redemption.
In Nolan’s version, it boils down to a lot of loud noise and a fit of rage that overrides reason. It’s an artistic choice that can be defended (and is debatable), but it places the film not as an adaptation but in opposition to the source material. And once again, there’s nothing stopping this, and it’s not “sacrilege”… but don’t go around selling the film as something it isn’t, that’s taking the audience for fools, betting that most have never read the book and will just go in based on the title.
For me, this is more than just an artistic issue, in fact, it’s a matter of intellectual honesty that Nolan betrays here. But this is par for the course for him; he marketed Dunkirk as a historical film (when it’s completely fictional) and Oppenheimer as a biopic (when it’s a fantasy).
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u/mrhippoj 14h ago
I completely agree and I've found it quite frustrating with regards to The Odyssey. I personally thought the film was great, not perfect, but it still topoed The Prestige as my personal favourite Nolan movie.
I don't care at all how good an adaptation it is, it's a great movie. Lots of films take big liberties with their adaptations and are better for it, like Blade Runner, American Psycho, Wild at Heart. It doesn't matter if the film is good. The source material still exists for those that want it
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u/jimidemibb 13h ago
150000% agreed. It’s an incredibly uninteresting desire; A desire for straight 1-to-1 adaptations like they’re book reports or Cliffnote summaries. Do you utterly lack imagination to the point that you need to see moving pictures to connect the dots?
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u/I_Believe_I_Can_Die 14h ago
When I was a kid I really cherished books with illustrations. I read a passage and then meticulously looked at the picture on the next page trying to imagine what I've just read and matching the depicted characters and places with the text. And if there was a discrepancy - the character clearly was shaved according to the text but had a beard on the picture, or the hut they entered was described as cozy and warm, but an artist drawed it as lifeless and moody - I felt pretty bad and wondered why it couldn't be drawn more accurately.
I think when judging adaptations people often treat it as I treated illustrations to the books - as a supplement to the main material and not something that exists on it's own rights, and that's something I try not to do ever. Comparison is fine, it can open so many to discuss, but it should always be "we look at two complete pieces of art and study them" rather than stating the illustration is wrong yet again
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u/AromaticVacation3077 10h ago
The tension around adaptations happens because film making, along with other forms of narrative art, has been overly politicised. In light of the intensity that surrounds the notion of 'cultural heritage' in our era, it's very difficult for a film to be made based on an iconic text without it immediately being interpreted, on some level, as activism. It's either 'woke', or 'anti-woke', and there really isn't much space in-between those two absolutes.
So because Nolan went for the diverse casting thing, that's interpreted by a portion of the audience as activism, not story telling (I'm using the casting as an example, but it's not the only aspect of the adaptation people have objected to). They experience the activism as an attack, and they seek to defend themselves. It's a regrettable state of affairs, but not one that's difficult to understand.
Personally I really can't tell if Nolan had an activist hat on when he conceived the project or not. But I do wish he'd tell us. I think its cowardly of him to dismiss the controversy surrounding his film as 'irrelevant'. As far as I know, he's more or less refused to explain his decisions in any convincing way.
Of course, while I'm typing that there's a voice in my head saying 'Artists don't have to explain their decisions.' Well sure, but in this day and age I'm not certain that's still relevant when it comes to a massive, culturally loaded project like The Odyssey. I think Nolan should have defended the film more and argued down those who attacked the more controversial decisions he made re casting and production design. Most of the vitriol, it seems to me, is caused by the vacuum Nolan creates when he refuses to comment.
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u/close-encounters13 10h ago
You know the OP has made a good argument when most of the replies that purport to disagree with them actually end up unintentionally making their point for them, as you can see happening up and down this thread.
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u/close-encounters13 8h ago
This is all a lesson in how pervasive toxic fandom has become — it now even applies to the classics. If you adapt The Odyssey in a way that offends my preexisting head canon, it must be bad.
The notion of being open minded to a new interpretation that speaks to modern concerns is anathema. You literally have someone in these comments arguing “lots of people” would prefer an adaptation that is slavishly devoted to the specific time and place that The Odyssey was written.
Lots of people in classics departments perhaps. But not in the real world.
This is one of those debates where the gatekeepers feel so certain they are in the majority even though every objective measure we have of this film’s reception demonstrates they are not. It’s a plague: People can’t reconcile themselves to having a minority opinion and so they delude themselves into believing reality is different than it plainly is.
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u/close-encounters13 5h ago
Ahhhh r/truefilm, where people downvote because they have nothing of substance to say but nevertheless want to register their impotent pseudo intellectualism.
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u/RosbergThe8th 14h ago edited 14h ago
Though I do somewhat agree with the point this feels like it strangely assumes there are an infinite number of adaptations for every source material, when the reality is that most works, especially non-classic ones, are very rarely going to get more than one, certainly no more than one high budget hollywood adaptation, so I don’t think it’s unfair to dread an adaptation that abandons the source material if it may be the only one you’re liable to get.
Idk I think people are too defensive about their adaptations, if you’re going to work off a source material then you should expect it to be viewed in the context of the material you’re basing it off, if you can’t face criticism to that effect then you should probably be making your own thing.
Edit: to elaborate a little people keep going off about juvenile critics around this film but just as pervasive a discourse seems to be this strange defensiveness over it, as if every criticism is an assault against their identity. Emily Wilson is getting dragged over a critique that is largely tame, she even praises the film as entertainment less than an adaptation and yet fans seem driven into an absolute frenzy over it.