Friday, January 17, 2020

Adaptations and Far Cry (2008)


Movies are a complicated form of storytelling. The audio and visual aspects must come together in a pleasing way that enhances the story. The story should be well thought out and capture the audience’s attention. The performances need to make the audience feel something about the characters. It could be positive or negative. As long as it isn’t indifference, the actors did their jobs. The director should bring everything together into a nice little package.

Sometimes that works out. Other times, there can be major issues in getting those elements to come together. One area of film where that becomes very apparent is adaptations. A story that worked in one form of entertainment might not always translate to cinema. There have been attempts of all sorts. Books are frequently used as a source for movie storylines. Television shows and comic books are also frequently used as inspiration. Video games have gotten their fair share of film adaptations. Even poetry and music can sometimes inspire a movie idea.

In order to bring stories from any of those origins to the big screen, certain elements must be changed. No two methods of storytelling are the same. They each have elements that the others don’t, which require some changing in order to fit the story into the new medium. Video games don’t work in a direct translation to film, and songs don’t work in a direct translation to television. The people behind the adaptation will need to figure out how to properly change the story in order to have it fit the new outlet.
Books were one of the first story forms to be adapted into films. They’re also a form of storytelling that requires a great amount of retooling in order to work in the audiovisual world of film. In order to understand the major changes that must be made, the distinction between the different forms of storytelling being lumped into books must be made. The first, major distinction is between fiction and non-fiction. Fiction involves made up stories and characters, where non-fiction is relaying real world information to the reader. Within fiction, the types of writing can be broken down into novels, novellas, and short stories. Those depend on length.

These more specific categories can be seen in film, as well. There are documentaries. They tell real stories in the real world in a, mostly, factual way. Then there are the fictional movies that tell a written story. The stories might be based on real events. Or they could be completely made up. Real events being depicted may have been changed to better service the story. There might be made up elements of a real story added in to give a better story arc. That’s kind of a historical fiction situation. The length of a documentary or fictional film can also determine whether it is a short film, feature length, or an epic.

Having both books and movies be separated into so many different forms and styles means that there are various types of adaptations when books are translated into films. There can be short stories that get turned into short films (Stephen King’s dollar babies), short stories that get turned into feature length dramatic films (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), novellas that become feature films (The Shawshank Redemption), and even non-fiction that becomes a feature film (The Perfect Storm). The adaptations between books and film are wide and varied.

Some issues arise in the adaptations, however, because of the different ways that stories are told between books and film. Looking at fiction only, there’s much more introspection in books than there is in film. The characters share their thoughts and describe things in much greater detail than they could on screen. Narration can help to bridge that gap, but it could never be as in depth as a book when it comes to sharing a character’s thoughts and motivations. As a reader, you know exactly what the character is thinking. The thoughts can be described. In a film, the audience sees a look on a character’s face, or hears a little bit of narration. But the audience puts their own interpretation into what the character is thinking. Thus, the introspective depth that books provide, as the reader lives vicariously through every piece of the character’s being, cannot be replicated on film.
The trouble with adaptations only becomes more apparent as they branch out from books. When it comes to adapting television shows to film (Mission: Impossible) or film to television (Westworld), there are some big differences in the structure of the storytelling. A film has an hour and a half or, in some cases, three and a half hours to tell a story. That story can flow through that time seamlessly. It can be one long arc for the main character as they go from the beginning to the end. That’s different for television. The stories in television are told episode by episode. A season could have an overall story. The character’s arc could flow through the whole season. It could flow through an entire series. But the story needs to be broken down into smaller portions. Each episode should have its own story that arcs from beginning to end. Within the big series long story there are smaller season long stories that involve even smaller episode long stories. It gets complicated in a way that the storytelling of film doesn’t. And that’s only when talking about the modern, serialized television.

In older, much more episodic television, most of the episodes were stand-alone. There was no real change for the characters throughout the entire series. There was no PVR, no streaming, no home video. If the audience missed an episode, it was gone. Thus, the characters couldn’t drastically change. They couldn’t have big storylines and had to remain stagnant. If the audience missed an episode or two because they had to do something else that night, the showrunners wanted them to be able to come back in and not feel like they missed something huge. Everything was super-episodic and self-contained without much character change.

Either of these methods of television storytelling tend not to work in film. Audiences want to see a character struggle and change through the runtime of a movie. That completely rules out the old style of television where there was no change so that viewers could come and go as they pleased. The characters would need an arc that would change them from who they were on the show. As for the newer, serialized television where every episode matters, it would involve condensing a storyline and trying to make it feel like the story isn’t chopped up into its own episodes. Sometimes that involves the movie just being like an extended single-episode continuation of the show. Look at things like The Inbetweeners Movie or El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie for examples of that. Adapting television to film form is all about changing the story structure.
The story structure of comic books must also be changed a bit when being brought to the big screen. First, a distinction must be made on the comic side of things. There are two major sources to get comic book stories. There are the weekly/monthly/bimonthly comics that are ongoing series. Then there are the graphic novels that come out. The ongoing series will have storylines go from issue to issue, but always have an arc for the individual issue. They are similar to television series in that way, with each major storyline being kind of like a television series. That’s probably why The Walking Dead has been able to become such a successful television show after being a successful comic series. Graphic novels are usually, but not always, self-contained stories that might be a part of a comic book’s mythos. They aren’t a part of the main series, though. And sometimes they’re not connected to any series at all.

Most of the inner thought element of typical books are removed for comic books and graphic novels. There’s not enough space for that, in most cases, because the imagery is taking up so much of the page. They are a visual medium with a bit of reading added in. There are writers, editors, inkers, letterers, and all other sorts of employees that get involved in the comic book business. Sometimes there are a minimum of them, and other times there could be an entire team putting them together. They make things highly visual and stunning to look at.

Comics tend to be some of the most adaptable materials. The biggest movies of the past few years have been based on comic books. The visual storyboard already exists from which the story can be based. The stories are there through the storylines that the comics tell. That’s how you end up with Watchmen. Zack Snyder took the graphic novel and replicated the visuals into his own style. He took the story and told it with his own Zack Snyder flourishes. The ending was changed, but most of the story was intact. The characters, their interactions, what they looked like… It came from the graphic novel. Like I said, they’re basically storyboards for adaptations to be made.
Video games are also a visual medium, which seems like they would be easy to translate into films. That’s not the case. There are very few successful video game adaptations. One main reason is to blame for this lack of quality adaptations, and that is the interactivity of video games. Part of what makes video games as big a form of entertainment as they are is that they are interactive. The person playing the game chooses what happens within it. To a certain degree. They fill in the role of the character in the game. The progression of the story depends on the actions of the player. If they defeat the bad guy, they move on. If they don’t, they start the journey over. Or they start from a checkpoint. The experience is completely different for each player because their actions dictate what unfolds.

This can’t be the case in movies. Unless the movie is Bandersnatch. The audience watches a movie. They don’t interact with it. They don’t choose the actions that progress the story. An audience must sit back and let the filmmakers take them on the journey. The writer, director, and editor get to guide a viewer through the world, telling the story. The viewer has no influence on what might happen. There’s a different connection to the characters because of this lack of interaction.

A film must create a reason for the audience to empathize with the characters and be interested in the events unfolding. The audience is a bystander that should feel for what the main character is experiencing. In a video game, the player becomes the main character. The main character is a vessel for whatever the player experiences as they explore the world. A film must give a reason for the audience to live vicariously through the character and their actions.
Far Cry is a good example of this shift in viewer perspective. The video game was a first-person shooter that put the player right into the shoes of the main character. The camera’s point-of-view was through the eyes of the main character as he attempted to save a reporter when the boat they were on was destroyed by mercenaries. The player was the one saving the reporter. They were doing so by controlling the main character. When Uwe Boll directed his film adaptation of Far Cry, the audience wasn’t as involved in the story. Jack Carver was played by Til Schweiger. The audience watched him as he attempted to save Valerie Cardinal (Emmanuelle Vaugier) from the evil Dr. Krieger (Udo Kier). There was no interaction between the audience and the characters. They could only sit by and watch the story unfold. It wasn’t quite the same story as the game, either, which disappointed the Far Cry fans. That’s what happens with any Uwe Boll video game adaptation, though.

That’s not to say that there weren’t fun moments in Far Cry. It just wasn’t the immersive, interactive story that the video game was. Uwe Boll made a 30-million-dollar action movie. If there’s one thing Uwe Boll can do, it’s action on a budget. He may not get the best actors. He may not have the best story. But he does manage to make the action fun. Watching Jack Carver dodge, duck, dip, dive, and destroy was fun. As was the genetically enhanced soldier fighting. And the shootouts. If there was one positive about the Far Cry adaptation, it was the action. It just wasn’t interactive action, which the video game had. The action couldn’t connect the audience to the characters. Had more effort been put into the other aspects of the film, particularly the writing and acting, audiences could have connected with the characters on an emotional level and feared for their safety.
Adaptations can be difficult. There are so many things that must change between formats. Books have a character’s inner thoughts. Television have a complicated story within story within story structure. Comics have a visual style unlike most other forms of art. And video games have an interactivity that can’t be matched. When each of them is adapted into a film, changes must be made in order to allow the film to work. Different formats have different requirements, and as such, they must be made in different ways.

The key to adapting something is to find where those changes must be made. That begins in the writing. Then it goes to the directing, the acting, the cinematography, the stunts, and the sound. Finally, it comes to the editing and effects generating to bring it all together. A strong team can make something that was successful in one format become successful in another. A book could become a movie that’s just as popular, if not more. A video game could be a compelling television show. Any number of adaptations could happen. It all comes down to how the people behind the adaptation come together to make the new thing as entertaining as it originally was, now in a new package.
There are a few notes that should be made before we head out of this post:

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