A carryover discussion from Comments on the last entry: How true are movies to the novels they are based on? And how much does it really matter?
Andy has been discussing his confusion over Chris Suellentrop's Slate article on I, Robot and how it gets Asimov wrong. Andy, and then Laura have both taken the position that "I, Robot" (Will Smith and all) gets Asimov pretty well.
Its funny, I had a similar experience watching Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers", which while not the finest piece of film-making I've ever witnessed, was pretty good. But I kept hearing people complain about how it got Heinlein totally wrong, and I really didn't see it. To be fair, Verhoeven's personal politics are quite distinct from Heinlein, some of which editorializes its way into the movie, but I think he hit most of the themes pretty well. But more importantly, how can anyone capture the depth of philosophical thought found in "Starship Troopers" in a two hour movie, and who would want to watch it? Sure, Verhoeven could have expanded the classroom scenes from 4 minutes to 40 minutes and gone into a more indepth exploration of the concept of civic duty, but it would have been a terrible thing to watch.
So I think there are two things happening.
1) People are expecting a 2-hour movie to somehow encompass the same depth of ideas as a 300 page book. The problem of course is that film is a visual medium, intended to transmit images and emotions rather than communicate ideas.
2) People automatically expect a movie to screw up the book version and so are only looking for the differences, rather than paying attention to what they get right. A great example of this from Starship Troopers is the insistence on combat armor. While the armor as described in ST the book was cool as hell and an interesting concept, it was essentially set dressing, and Verhoeven (wisely, I think) avoided a whole lot of explication on what all this crap was and just cut to the core of the infantry experience rather than complicate things.
I haven't seen "I, Robot" (or read the book, or much at all of Asimov) so I can't comment on that one. What do ya'll think? Any other examples?
(Links to be added later)
Posted by ktismael at July 19, 2004 4:24 PM