Book v. Film
Two enter, one leaves
Last week I was scheduled to be on a panel as part of QuaranCon2022 to discuss the age-old battle of Book v. Film. Unfortunately due to work commitments, I was unable to participate live.
Fortunately, I had prepared my answers ahead of time to moderator A.M. Justice’s great questions, and so below you read my contribution to the topic!
If you’re interested, you can watch the full panel below and check out the schedule for the final day of the con here.
1. Embracing the VERSUS in the panel title: If you were alone on a desert island (which happened to have electricity and WiFi), would you rather have access to every film/TV show ever made or access to every book ever written? Your kidnappers who marooned you in this place say you must choose!
There are many more books than TV shows and movies, and certainly more great books than great TV shows and movies. So books it would have to be. Plus, the paper in the not-so-great books would make for great kindling, and there are probably more books on how to survive on a desert island, so the utility of the book collection would be much greater!
2. Tell us about your favorite film or TV adaptation of a speculative fiction book or series and why you love it. Speculative fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all sub-genres.
Non-comics, it would have to be the original Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Honorable mentions include the 1978 Hobbit animated film, Game of Thrones seasons 1 – 4 and Season 6, episode 5 (The Door), Dune, Arrival, and Stardust.
Special shout-out to All You Need is Kill & Edge of Tomorrow. Both manage to tell the same overall story, but are satisfying in different ways.
On the comic side, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will probably stand the test of time for movie & TV show adaption for many decades to come. Distilling the incredible amount of source material available and creating compelling stories across multiple mediums for 15 years is an amazing feat. The movies made me care about comic characters I had never even heard of before and no movie moment landed quite like “On your left” in recent memory.
3. Are there any adaptations you thought were particularly bad, and why did you dislike/hate them? (I have one of these.)
I loved reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and the Robot books in high school, but was convinced they were unadaptable. With the ridiculously stupid I, Robot movie, which was basically an entirely different movie with Asimov terms sprinkled in at some point after the project was greenlit, I was proven correct. When the first Foundation trailer hit the Internet, I sent a text to my dad (who is a huge Asimov fan) that I don’t remember so many spaceship battles and explosions in the books, but maybe that was just in the first episode.
Turns out that again, they were using the Asimov source material as window-dressing, paying lip service to the story, while trying to tell an entirely different story. The show does explore some interesting ideas (the triumvirate Emperor Dawn, Day, and Dusk is interesting and who doesn’t love Lee Pace?), but I couldn’t work up the nerve to watch the final two episodes of season 1. I do think that it would be MUCH much easier to adapt the Elijah Bailey robot books into three seasons of a TV show, as they revolve around a murder mystery and a detective trying to solve it.
On the fantasy side, the Harry Potter films failed to capture the details and magic of the books. I remember a huge slew of mysteries introduced during the course of each book, with the promise of answers to some (but not all) by the end. These book-ending conversations with Dumbledore landed flat for the most part in the films. I still don’t know why they made the incredibly puzzling decision in the first movie to not show Harry actually cast a spell! Then at the same time the third movie took a giant leap in terms of cinematography, set design, and quality, but it completely whiffed on the revelations at the end. Same with the end of the fourth movie. I hope that Warner Brothers is planning a prequel TV series starring Harry’s parents that does a season for each year of school. Doing a TV show will allow room for all the details from the books that the movies cut out.
4. We’re in a golden period of fantasy film (which I mean broadly—to include TV/streaming as well as feature films), but for a long time fantasy storytelling on film wasn’t very good, at least relative to science fiction. Do you agree this is the case and why do you think it is or isn’t?
The number of fantasy films and TV shows has certainly caught up with sci-fi, but I’m not sure the quality is there. Certainly the first few seasons of Game of Thrones reached the pinnacle of all TV, which I don’t think a sci-fi adaption has managed to do. But with a lot of shows going to Netflix, it feels like they come and go so quickly that nothing gets a chance to build viewership via word of mouth. There are such enormous expectations for the Lord of the Rings show that I think it will be impossible to live up to.
5. What book (or book series) would you love to see adapted?
I think Mistborn would be amazing as an anime. Not sure how the battles could be captured in live-action; it’s basically a full-on climatic Marvel movie fight every time.
I would love to see a Realm of the Elderlings TV show, following Fitz over the course of his life (and I have fancasted Miranda Otto as Kettricken since I first read the books). But I can hear a TV executive, when learning there are two interconnected series with completely different characters, saying something like “viewers are too stupid to learn that many new names. What if we just used the same characters in the Liveship and Rain Wilds seasons”?
a. Are there any books/series you would not want to see adapted?
No more Asimov adaptions unless I am doing them!
Well, that’s all I have to say about that! Where do you fall on the side of Book v. Film? Leave a comment below and let’s keep the discussion going!