Jenna Coleman had the most faithful portrayal of John Constantine I’ve seen.
I have not read the source material, only vaguely aware of stuff through osmosis. I’ve watched the first two episodes and like it so far. Soon I will avoid this thread due to spoilers.
Brian
I’ve read the original comics and watched the first six episodes, and I am generally pleased.
That said, there’s a fair amount of things I would have done differently. Cain and Abel, for example- the actors were good, but Cain just isn’t Cain without red hair. Johanna Constantine needed to be a little more dissolute.
The scenes in the dreaming just weren’t dreamlike enough for my taste. Maybe it’s just me, but I always pictured the place as being full of sleeping humans having, well, dreams. The dream realm should run on dream logic.
I don’t think they went far enough in emphasizing dream’s stubborn obsession with rules, protocol, and duty.
Question: did the original comics version of John Constantine actually do any flashy magic? It’s been a while, but I remember the character as a supernatural noir detective- he always loses in a stand up fight, but is powerful because he knows all the supernatural “word on the street “, combined with guile and trickery. The screen versions all seem to turn him (or her!) into Dr. Strange in a trenchcoat.
Depends on which book. When he’s in his own comics, he’s mostly as you describe. When he’s in a Justice League comic, he gets a lot flashier.
That’s what it looked like in the opening scene.
Yes. Not very often, but he was certainly capable of it.
The Atlantic loves it less that The Economist:
I think that was it from me until I’ve watched past spoiler territory. So, it’s ten episodes to start with? Let’s see how long that takes me.
I think for now my conclusion is that the series is a competent adaptation of the original. It’s biggest flaw is that a TV show can never be quite as fantastical as a comic book and has less scope to imply things rather than just showing them, but that is a limitation of the medium.
If the books were going to have to be made into a show, then this is probably what one could hope for from a faithful adaptation. What I wonder though is whether the degree of faithfulness prevented the development of something new. The best adaptations aren’t just faithful; they are also original and creative in their own right.
I watched the season and then went back to read the first two volumes of the comic. I’ll say this: the one thing that I like better about the show is the diversity of the cast. It was a bit of a shock going back to the comic and seeing 99 percent white people and disproportionately male.
I’d say that nearly every casting choice was not only perfect but actually enhanced the character. This was the one major way that the show added something new to the work.
The one bit of CGI that I thought was great was Azazel.
I do wish that there had been a scene in which I could see all the sigils of the Endless clearly though.
Still no Scouse accent though. :>
I wish they’d released these one at a time so we could talk about the little changes more specifically like Dream not being exhausted by …what came before…(I assume.) and things like Corinthian telling Burgess what he’d caught.
30 minutes in the first episode and the most fantastic thing IMHO is how gorgeous it all looks. And the casting.
There’s a thematic reason for some of the males. I covered this with Dibble. It was an interesting convo. Others like Lucien(nne) are because he was a host of a comic like Cain and Abel. The only thing I didn’t like about that swap was I like Lucien being taller then Dream.
The only swap that made me raise an eyebrow was the Kincaid family. But it occurs to me that if Sykes was that well-off and socially integrated, then why can’t they.
More than the Matt Ryan? I have not yet gotten to the Johanna Constantine appearances in the show.
Yes, it am fully aware where those characters came from. That is not a “thematic reason.”
I didnt say it was. “OTHERS LIKE”
Just finished ep one. Weirdly, the only black person I remember from the first few comics, Sykes, got his part cut way down.
MY JC stops with Ennis’s last issue. I tried to go further but couldnt do it. I think an American writer took over immediatly after him.
As for the Justice League Dark shite?? It can go straight to hell.
I was also hoping they would gender-swap Constantine’s lover. Since its such a trope that ‘women are the weaker sex, prey to temptations’…i thought it would have been very interesting to see a male in that position.
It seems this presentation of The Sandman is excluding the events of Overture and just making Dream subject to capture because he is in the Waking World to rein in The Corinthian. Which pains me because I would dearly love to see The Sandman:Overture done properly.
Maybe I liked it because there were so many shout outs to Ennis’ and DeLano’s runs.
I’ve finished all ten episodes, and to copy some of what I wrote over in the “Series you’ve recently watched…” thread (I’m assuming casting isn’t a spoilerable point):
BTW, it took me a while to place Sarah Niles until her American accent slipped and I realized she was Dr Fieldstone in Ted Lasso.
Agreed. And I was impressed that not only was her nightmare/memory taken straight from the Hellblazer comic but it was THE thing that I found most disturbing in all of the HB comics I’d read.
Ha ha!
Neil himself kinda agrees with you:
I absolutely loved this series; finished all ten episodes yesterday.
Hard disagree from me here. In my opinion, if I love a book/comic series/whatever, and I want to see it on screen… well, then I want to see IT on screen. If I wanted to see something else, I would watch something else.
That isn’t too say there isn’t room for adaptations into a visual medium; for a master-class in phenomenal adaptation of a character to screen, see the BBC’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency… done by writing an entirely new narrative, but in such an evocative way that you couldn’t help but feel it was a new visit into a well-loved universe. I acknowledge mine might be a minority opinion, seeing as Dirk Gently was cancelled after series 2… meanwhile, The Wheel of Time, which was so bad (in my opinion) that I cancelled Amazon Prime in (unheard) protest, has been renewed for at least 3 seasons…
Not so much. He’s more like a stage magician, in that he already hid all the actual work out of sight, and then reveals that his opponent walked into a trap. His strength lies in his ability to mystify, intrigue and lure. I’d say he lost his taste for flashy magic when his first big production (reproduced as Joanna’s nightmare in the Sandman series) failed so horribly. After that, he wound up in the same mental hospital John Dee stayed in.
To me, that’s a huge yawn. If you are making the effort to adapt a work, do something new. Otherwise, I’ll just go back and read the original.