If all you amateur filmmakers are going to wax poetic about how, in order to make a movie, or in this case, a movie adaption of existing material, you need to put something of yourself into it, I would very much like to know what you think that means. Not condeming your viewpoint, just curious to know specifics.
You're twisting what I said. At this point, I'd rather just drop it and move on because you're clearly not going to even try to see this from my point of view on anything.
I wash my hands of this thread.
Actually, I'm not twisting anything. I'm responding to what you very clearly said. If you misspoke, feel free to correct your statements. But I thought, per your PM, that you weren't going to bother responding to me and my "ridiculous lawyer" bit anymore.
It's about making what your translating or adapting work for the other medium, and I think that Snyder was less focused on making the piece work dramatically in its cinematic medium, and more on filming a tribute to the book with a few changes and streamlining here and there.
Ok...this is a fair beginning of a point. So what exactly does your statement mean?
What does "making the piece work dramatically in its cinematic medium" specifically mean, in terms of adapting the source material?
That's why I say Zack Snyder seemed to think more along the lines of "Hey, this is a great book and most everything works, let's not change it too much", admittedly admirably, but with less thought into how it would work cinematically.
So then...what doesn't work cinematically?
i agree with guard imo Snyder really doesn't have much room for creativity without deviating from the source material and pissing off the fans.While TDK has years and years of material to choose from and choose what story he wants and what characters to go with. While watchmen is 1 story and 1 story only doesn't leave much room for creativity because original source material is already creative.
It is, at once, not quite that simple and very much that simple. If you're adapting, say, OLIVER TWIST, or any classic work, or any work, period, you do not simply generally make up new things for the entire story because you're making a film adaption of it. You honor the original material. This should, at it's core, be the key reason that you, as an artist, creatively adapt an existing property. At least, that's how it used to be. If you want to add elements, and improve minor elements along the way, great. But for someone to suggest that the entire story needs to be reworked? I think too many people are looking at WATCHMEN through the lens of the usual superhero adaption, where a filmmaker often has no choice but to distill the material, to pick and choose from the mythology, to condense said mythology, and to create new elements that often combine existing ones.
I keep seeing people say "He followed the book too closely". Go tell that tale to a true, die-hard WATCHMEN fan. See what response you get.
No, the quality of the existing material does not, in itself, prevent one from being creative in adapting the material. But what's the point of adapting an existing property if you're just going to do your own thing all the way through?
Lost on many people is that Snyder DIDN'T just take everything that's already there and put it onscreen. He created a movie with additional scenes, elements, and in some key cases, new approaches to various concepts that also honored the source material. He also removed several elements of the source material.
Major changes:
-Sally Jupiter's portrayal
-The nature of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's costumes, inhibitions, and impotence angles.
-The ending and exploration of the morality of the ending has changed, and some of the book's key themes are brought to the surface in important ways.
And that's just spitballing. There are countless other visual additions, thematic alterations, and story alterations that have been made to the source material. There are little changes he made, and there are large ones.
Now, I liked Watchmen, but I think Snyder's problem is not that he had one story or that the story is good, but that his style relies too much on it. He seems to think that if the material is great, all you have to do is taking it to the screen frame by frame with a little ornamentation here and there.
Can you elaborate? Where, specifically, does the movie suffer for this approach? Why is this not an appropriate approach to making a movie, especially if you do alter the material for cinema along the way?
And it doesn't work that way. It seems that Snyder feels that he doesn't have to have a personal vision on the story since the original source (and its author) already has it. But that shows.
It just strikes me as ridiculous to even remotely suggest that none of Snyder's personal vision is found in WATCHMEN.
Nolan, on the other hand, went to the point of understanding the characters not only basing his vision on the comic books but on what they really are, beyond the original source. Joker is more than the white-faced psycho clown he's in the comics; he's a modern terrorist with a solid anarchist ideology.
Especially in the last 20-30 years, by any standard definition of the phrases, the Joker has been a modern terrorist with anarchistic elements. He's almost always been about causing chaos, tearing down authority and structure, etc. This is not a new element that Chris Nolan created, the Nolans simply used an existing character element very well. But when you think about it, while it's not used as well, even Tim Burton's BATMAN used similar elements over 20 years ago.
Batman comics have been using this element for YEARS, as far back as his first appearance, and it's even found in the 40's and 50's.
Many people feels that Nolan bat-movies are not too batman-ish or comic-esque, and they're not. He found a way to portray the story in a much bigger scope.
A bigger scope? In what sense? In terms of comparison to the comics, or to other Batman movies?
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