I realize that it is difficult to transfer literary characters from the printed page to the silver screen, but I usually appreciate it when a sincere effort is made to do so. Sometimes though the portrayal is haphazard at best(and absolute shit at worst).
As an example, there is The Asylum’s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes(2010). The title character looks like a grown-up Alfalfa, acts like dandy, and is not particularly intelligent. Leaving aside the giant mechanical dinosaur and the roboctopus, they fuck up the very basics of Holmes’ history, because the villain of this bastardpiece is his brother…Thorpe?? You know-the brother that worked alongside Lestrade in Scotland Yard. Frankly, if they had removed all references to A.C. Doyle’s characters and had merely made this an unassociated steampuck pic, at no time during those 85 minutes would you have said, “Y’know, that little bit right there kinda sorta reminded me just a tiny bit of Sherlock Holmes.”
Anyway, that is just a small example of what this thread is all about, so if you have anything to add when it comes to the mistreatment of your literary faves, feel free to jump in.
I assume you mean something more like character assassination than literal assassination? A complete misrepresentation of a literary character? It would help if you told us what you were looking for, rather than just giving an example (that I’m not familiar with).
In Egyptian folklore, Imhotep was a good guy. In The Mummy (both the original, with Boris Karloff, and the remakes, with Arnold Vosloo), Hollywood turned him into a villain.
I of course mean character assassination, and I am surprised that it wasn’t obvious by the example given. If I thought that someone might have taken that I meant slamming an actual television or movie screen onto the head of a fictional character with the purpose of killing them, I would have tried to make it clearer.
In the Arabian Nights stories, Jafar is generally portrayed as a good guy (or at least a loyal servant of the Caliph). Hollywood usually turns him into a villain.
Remember that when someone asked James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, among many others, “How do you feel about Hollywood ruining your books?” responded “They didn’t — they’re all right up there, on the shelf.”
That being said, I think Walt Disney should have been shot for what he did to Alice in Wonderland.
Disney for what they do to just about everything they adapt.
Among its countless other sins, Starship Troopers turns Sergeant Zim into a mindless sadist, rather than the complex and nuanced character of the book.
I felt the same way about the Robert Downey 2009 Sherlock Holmes. I stopped watching it in the first few minutes, when Holmes was in some kind of MMA cage match. For all I know, it’s a good movie, but I was looking for something about Sherlock Holmes.
I assume you are referring to the 2010 film rather than the 1951 animated version. I don’t think the latter seriously changed the character of Alice. In both the book and the 1951 film, Alice is brave, adventurous, and challenges authority, standing up to the Red Queen even as she threatens to execute her.
The 2010 film was incredibly unimaginative in how it tried to “update” Alice. At the end it made her into an action hero who defeated the Jabberwock through violence, rather than intelligence and cleverness.
While Downey was hardly Conan Doyle’s Sherlock, those elements come in part from the books. Holmes was described as being exceptionally strong (capable of bending an iron fire poker), an expert amateur bare-knuckle boxer, a skilled swordsman and singlestick fighter, and adept in Japanese martial arts. (The fact that he was a cocaine addict is also from the books.)
IMO, a much worse assassination was Nigel Bruce’s depiction of Dr. Watson in the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies. Bruce’s Watson was slow-witted, fat, and bumbling. The original Watson was a former soldier and strongly built, frequently called upon by Holmes to back him up against dangerous criminals. He was an excellent doctor and quite intelligent, sometimes contributing to the solution of cases, but just didn’t have Holmes’s deductive abilities and specialized knowledge.
Yes, whatever you might think of the movies in general, Jude Law’s Watson was a reasonably faithful version of the original.
I rather enjoyed the first few series of the Benedict Cumberbatch/Martin Freeman Sherlock, when the cases were recognizably based on some of the original stories, although I felt it went increasingly off the rails in the later series. I thought the Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson were fun updates on the characters, and usually based on their characteristics in the books.
However, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes essentially had nothing to do with the original character, and Mary (Morstan) Watson was an absurd travesty (even though Watson’s wife wasn’t a significant character in the books).
What HBO’s D&D did to Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones is unconscionable. I mean, they screwed the pooch on a lot of things with that show, but I think the way they handled Stannis was the worst.
Well, I’m with you up to the word ‘quite’ (and maybe ‘excellent’). Clearly, Watson is intelligent enough to write well, but I’m not sure there’s any example of him demonstrating any significant intelligence other than that (though of course, he’s obviously modest enough that he’d leave it out, anyway, so we can’t say absence of evidence is evidence of absence in this case). We have no idea how good a doctor he is, either, other than he seems to be able to maintain a medical practice in London.
Hollywood does this often, and not just with literary characters.
The entire character of Gene Roddenberry’s universe, from people to institutions, have been maligned and destroyed by modern incarnations of Star Trek.
Well, he’s intelligent enough to be a doctor, at least. He only looks like a bumbling fool by comparison to Holmes, but then, everyone looks like a bumbling fool compared to Holmes.
Everything in that film was in the canon. They were careful.
But it wasnt in those horrible Basil Rathbone films which showed Watson as a blithering idiot, as **Colibri **pointed out. So, there is one example for the OP. (Mind you, Rathbone was a great actor, it is not really his fault)
Watson was by no means in Holmes class, of course.
Next is League of Extraordinary gentlemen, by Alan Moore, where the heroic Allan Quatermain is turned into a drug addict. Alan Moore also did that to Alice, Dorothy and Wendy in his weird kiddy porn travesty. For some reason, Moore has troubles coming up with his own characters.
Another example is Gregory Maguire and his assassination of the Wizard and others in his travesties. The Wizard is at worst a well meaning conman, hardly a fantasy Hitler.
Zack Snyder and his hatred of superheroes.
I concur with CelticKnot- the Chris Pine version of Capt Kirk is a assasination. Not to mention the really bad Spock.
