On Adaptations
It has been an interesting time for fans of fantasy and science fiction stories that are more niche. It feels like everything is getting adapted. Dune has had great success critically and at the box office, The Wheel of Time released on Amazon Prime Video and Foundation released on Apple TV among many others. Science fiction and fantasy are genres I have only gotten into over the last few years so I am not a lifelong fan like many people who are excited for these adaptations. I still feel the need, however, to evaluate whether these adaptations have done right by the source material. This can cause some problems.
In order to even watch these adaptations I feel like I have to read the source material, which can unnecessarily delay engaging with the thing I’m excited about. In most cases this involves me rereading the source material because it’s been so long since I first read them. I felt like I had to at least reread the part of Dune that the film covers before watching the film, for example. I have an overall feel for what the source material is like but I need to remind myself of the details in order to evaluate the adaptation.
The need to evaluate, in my opinion, can diminish your capacity to moved by a work of art. If most of your focus is on another work of art (the source material) while engaging with the adaptation it can be hard to appreciate what a different medium does. Ticking off things on a mental checklist is not how we experience art anyway. We are immediately affected by all the elements coming together in the work of art before any kind of evaluation of each element can take place. Of course when we’re done experiencing a work of art then the evaluation can begin (not to say that you can’t have some idea whether you like something or not while watching it) but are the best reviews ones in which the reviewer simply goes down a checklist?
In my opinion, the purpose of reading reviews is not to find out if the film or TV show is good or not, you can find that out for yourself by watching, but to get a sense what the work is like. The prospective viewer does not say “the reviewer said the film is bad so I won’t watch it” but “the film sounds like something that I would hate, I should probably avoid it”. The best reviewers eloquently express how the film or TV show made them feel. They describe how the different elements came together to make them feel what they felt in a way that lets the prospective viewer have a vivid picture of what the film or TV show is like. In the reviews I have written on here, I still give an indication about whether I thought the film was good or not but I try to focus more on describing what the film is like and how it affected me.
Simple evaluation (stating whether the work of art is good or not) is fundamental to reviews but leaning too much into it can be detrimental. I have said that the best reviewers give you a vivid picture of what the film or TV show is like but the worst of the reviews are the ones that nitpick the whole time. With the latter type of reviews, you wonder if the reviewer has the capacity to be truly affected by anything at all.
This is my worry when it comes to watching adaptations. I want to evaluate whether they are good adaptations or not but I don’t want this to come at the expense of my ability to moved by a work of art. So what should I do about this? The immediate answer seems to be to forget about the source material and just experience the adaptation as a unique work. This is not possible because of what adaptations are. The source material will always loom large.
I think I just have solve this problem on a case by case basis. In the case of the adaptations for which I have already read the source material, I should just dive into the adaptations no matter how long ago I read the original. In the few cases that I haven’t read the source material, I think I should also just dive into the adaptation but only if it sounds like something I would like. The source material should be respected, the people adapting the work respect the work enough to want to bring it to a wider audience, but it is not some unassailable, sacred text. Perhaps that is the real problem, I see the source material as “sacred text”. There is a reason why people want to adapt the source material. There is something about the source material that speaks so deeply to them that they want a wider audience to experience it. This something, this essence, must be preserved in the adaptation or else why have the same name as the source material? The essence can be preserved, however, while the source material is updated for the new medium and the new time period. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do right by the source material but holding too much reverence for it can actually do it a disservice. We end up saying the same things about the same aspects over and over again. Looking at the source material with fresh eyes and through a new medium can help us to challenge it and find new aspects that make it great that we did not pay enough attention to before.