Comment by mpalmer
7 days ago
Adaptation is a creative act.
If it were a simple matter of not deleting things, why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Choosing to include details like this is a risk, because it means X% of the production's budget goes into making this detail apparent in the final cut. Painstaking production design work, location scouting, etc.
Working through the details is a big part of the process, and Crichton gets the credit. But translating his detailed world faithfully to the screen is neither simple nor easy, nor does it automatically make your movie a box office success.
> why haven't we seen more totally faithful adaptations of well-written, detailed speculative fiction?
Because people always think they can "fix" it to make it better.
No, it is because you can’t tell the same story in a different medium and expect it to work. Things that work in a book, like a character’s internal monolog, don’t work in a movie. Just taking that “facts” from a book and filming them almost never works. You have to look at the theme, tone, and the overall message being portrayed in the book and make a movie that captures those.
The book has two tyrannosauruses, but is that important? Or is the singular focus on one tyrannosaurus work better in a movie? In the book, Hammond falls into a ditch and is eaten alive by compies. Would showing that in the movie been the best way to convey to the audience his downfall due to his own hubris, or would have felt more like a “cool dinosaur death”? Maybe it is better to show him looking old, sad, and defeated taking one last look at his park, before being helped into the helicopter by Dr. Grant. Him being slightly startled when Grant takes his arm shows how lost in thought he was, and the audience can imagine what thoughts are running through his mind about how his life’s work and legacy came to such utter ruin.
Adaptation is an art and there is no one right way to do it, and the more I here people talk about “make it just like the book” the more I realize people have very little understanding about what makes good movies, or good stories in general.
> have very little understanding about what makes good movies
I've seen many thousands of movies, and that does give me knowledge about what makes a movie better.
For example, music makes a huuuuge difference, even if one may not even be aware of the music. For example, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be diminished considerably without their very good soundtracks. You can see this with the Hobbit movie - a lousy soundtrack, which severely damaged the movie. 2001 was greatly enhanced with the soundtrack. I read that Kubrick spent hundreds of hours listening to records searching for the perfect music. It paid off handsomely. What would "Blade Runner" be without the Vangelis soundtrack?