Good Adaptations

An adaptation is translating a story from one medium in which it exists to another. The most common one is adapting a novel for a movie or TV/streaming series. More rarely, a computer game is used as a basis for a movie or series or a novel is turned into a game. Sometimes, a movie comes out with a novel adaptation alongside it, turning the usual process on its head. There are other forms of adaptation possible, of course, but I’ll mostly be talking about what happens when you turn a literary medium, such as a novel, novella, or short story, into a visual medium, such as a movie or TV/streaming series.
Adaptations always come with problems, but I’ll be dipping into a few examples for what can turn an adaptation into a good or a bad one.

The main thing I want to talk about is a faithful adaptation. It is never possible to 1:1 turn a book into a movie. You can’t always use the same sort of storytelling devices in a literary and a visual medium. Instead, a faithful adaptation is one which keeps the core of the story intact, which keeps the important plot points, the important character traits, the important aspects of the setting and the action and uses them correctly in the new medium. I admittedly can mostly think of bad adaptations in this aspect. Let’s look at two of them, one of which many thought a good adaptation when it came out: “Relic” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”.

“Relic” makes changes to the story which are not wise, considering the novel it is based on (also called “Relic”) is the beginning of a series. Two character who survive in the novel are killed in the movie. At first glance, that would not be a problem, but both play a pivotal role in the second novel and killing them makes a sequel based on it impossible. Special Agent Pendergast is in the novel (and the series is ‘his’ to boot), but doesn’t turn up in the movie, where his character is fused with that of the local police detective. In general, fusing two characters into one or omitting a character can be a good idea during the translation process — novels can get away with more characters than a movie, as adding one more doesn’t cost anything in a book, but casting actors costs money. Yet, if you fuse two main characters, you should have a very good reason for that.

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” seems at first to be very faithful to its source material. We find the diary-based style, we get opulent late-Victorian sets, we get a lot of details which are rarely reproduced for a movie. Yet, the movie already deviates dangerously with its prologue, for one thing it’s linking Dracula to Vlad the Impaler (while it is clear from his notes that Stoker had heard about him and chose ‘Dracula’ as his vampire’s name after he had, it’s clear from what the count says that his life is not based on Vlad the Impaler at all). For another, it tries to set up a ‘star-crossed lovers’ romance between Dracula and Mina that is simply not there in the book. It does the opposite of “Relic”, too, by having Quincey P. Morris in the movie. Quincey as a character is not that important in the novel and usually left out of adaptations for that reason. Quincey does nothing which another character can’t do and his death in the end lacks the depths of a ‘sacrifice’ or suchlike which would make it important to the story. It’s fine for him to be in the novel, but a movie adaptation doesn’t sorely need him. Van Helsing and Mina are both given a completely different character, too, which hurts them both. Mina turns from an over-powered female lead (highly intelligent and persevering) into a helpless little lady (who cheats on her absent fiancé with Dracula). Van Helsing turns from a warm-hearted mentor (with strange verbal manners) into a cold-blooded scientist with a personal interest in the vampire as a such. At first, the opulence of the costumes and sets might impress you, but as a reader of the original, you will soon see how much the movie deviates from the source material and not in a good way.

A good adaptation is an adaptation which you will enjoy, no matter whether you know the original or whether you don’t. My examples above both are good movies and highly enjoyable if you don’t know the original text. If you have read the books, though, you will see the problems with the movie adaptations and they will probably spoil your viewing pleasure.

Despite changing some plot points — such as cutting out the ‘curse’ sub-plot with Linda and her try at suicide because of it, “Evil Under the Sun” (1982) as a movie adaptation is a good one. It preserves the original setting of the cut-off hotel where no regular person can come and go unnoticed. It mentions the earlier murder which Poirot was asked to look into for an insurance company and which will help him solve this one. It keeps the motivation for the main characters, their general behaviour towards each other, the murder which only works with two culprits, everything plot relevant in the novel. It injects a few details, moves the hotel from the southern area of England to somewhere on the Balkan and pulls an American couple with little reason to be around into the circle or suspects while cutting other characters completely, but that doesn’t hurt the story, because it doesn’t matter where that island is or whether there’s a land connection during low tide or not. The cut characters had no bearing on the plot in the first place and their work can be done by those left in the movie.
If you’ve never read “Evil Under the Sun”, you will be entertained by the movie. If you’ve read the novel before, you will still enjoy the adaptation very much and have a good time without thinking ‘that’s not how it was in the book’ the whole time.

A good adaptation stays faithful to the story, not to the details. It’s not about turning a book into a movie while preserving every line of dialogue and carrying across every detail of every scene. Characters will most likely be cut or merged. Minor details or sub-plots which aren’t necessary will be removed. Scenes will disappear. If you leave the spirit of the story intact, it will still be a good adaptation and will be enjoyed by both those who know the source material and those who don’t.