Film adaptations

Leaving the cinemas last Friday with two of my other friends was a notably strange experience as although we had all seen the exact same film; our reactions to the film couldn’t have been more different.

First up was me, a tad exhausted due to the length of the film, slightly baffled by the plot but ultimately pleased by the whole experience. Then there’s one of my friends, a little frustrated at parts but thought the film was as good as expected. Finally my other friend, who was positively fuming at what he has just seen and continued to spit disgust about the film for the rest of the long walk home.

Next to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the release of Guns and Roses’ album Chinese Democracy, Zach Snyder’s The Watchman can be argued as one of the most anticipated event of all time. The film comes after nearly 20 years in production hell for what many consider an unfilmable novel. It has split opinions from both critics and the hardcore fans, many of whom have literally most of their entire lives for a screen version of the graphic novel that Time Magazine included in their list of 100 greatest of all time, which also go to show that this film is not just another comic book adaptation.


What makes this irritating is that as I have not read the book I can’t give a full review of the film and with the hype that surrounds the film it just feels like a 2 hour 45 minute advertisement for the novel. My friend even suggested the film felt like someone read the book and tried to remember how it went, missing out vital parts of the story but left in all the sex and violence.

So what does make a decent adaptation? Why do some achieve both high praise for its novel form and its adaptation for the big screen like Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. What did Francis Ford Coppola do by turning a particularly average novel The Godfather into one of cinemas great masterpieces? And how did the ashamingly addictive page turner The Da Vinci Code become such bore on screen. Is there really such thing as an unfilmable book nowadays?

Gavin Clinton, owner of Forbidden Planet in Newcastle, an independent comic book store gives his opinion; “It’s only natural that some adaptations work better than other. How many people talk about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep compared to Blade Runner? And I have only just found out Apocalypse Now is from a short story.

Comic books are especially hard to adapt since you will have an army of fans ready to scrutinise the film if it goes against their expectations, I think only the Harry Potter franchise has a similar burden.

The Watchman comes with so much expectation and has such a complex narrative it was never going to please everyone but should be praised for its more then decent effort.”

So what next in terms of film adaptations, after Alan Moore’s The Watchman could they be an onslaught of apparently unfilmable films heading to a cinema screen near you?

With its unreliable story teller and heavy use of first person narrative, J.S Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has long been associated with one of the best novels never to be adapted to film but unfortunately it may take the death of its author before we see it brought to our screens.

There’s a possibility that Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon director is about to adapt Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, another fine example of a great book which many people just cannot imagine bringing to the large screen.

All I know is that if Shawshank Redemption can be made from a short story and Fight Club and is as complex and brilliant in film as in book form, then maybe there is hope for anything. Except Catch 22, which in my opinion definitely should have been left alone?