Basically, everything boils down to the following:
Movies are their own medium.
They work differently than do novels, songs, plays, video games, and whatever else gets pillaged as source material. In a novel, you can go inside somebody’s head and read about what they’re thinking and feeling; you can’t do that in a movie except by voice-over, which is generally inelegant and obvious. In a play, you can have an actor stand in one place and deliver compelling language for ten continuous minutes; in a film, this almost invariably results in deathly boredom. And so forth.
Conventional narrative movies operate in a fairly specific fashion. You watch one or more identifiable characters performing actions in order to drive a story. The story is indicated by a dozen critical milestones, give or take three or four. Fewer, and it doesn’t feel like much of anything is happening (the latest Terminator sequel suffers from this). Too many, and it gets busy and confusing. L.A. Confidential, for example, is the rare film that succeeds despite twenty or so major plot points; even so, some people complained they couldn’t follow it. And that’s a movie adaptation that greatly simplifies the book it’s based on.
Therefore, when adapting something from another medium for the screen, the producers must change things. They MUST, or the movie won’t work. With the example of Lord of the Rings, if you simply took all of Tolkein’s action and dialogue and put it into screenplay format, the resulting film would be complicated, boring, and impossible to watch. The Council at Rivendell alone would be half an hour long.
The trick is to translate the source material into film language — to look at (say) the emotional effect of a particular scene in a novel, but to present it using the grammar of film. If done well, the audience doesn’t even notice. In fact, paradoxically, if it’s done well, it’s possible the viewer will perceive the movie to be much more faithful than it really is, because it has the same emotional storytelling effect that the original did. Again, L.A. Confidential is generally regarded as closely following the source novel, even though it leaves out more than half of it. The tone, the characterizations, and the themes are all intact, and that’s what really matters.
For another example, which I’ve mentioned before, consider Never Cry Wolf. The film adaptation diverges wildly from Farley Mowat’s novel, but it succeeds brilliantly nonetheless. It looks at what the original is about, and it comes up with its own way of doing the same thing, and exploring the same underlying ideas. The emotional effect, the experience, thereby winds up being remarkably similar. Same destination: hugely different path to get there.
The problem, of course, is that movie producers, knowing that they must make changes in order to translate the material, get into that habit, and sometimes don’t know why they’re making those changes. That’s how we wind up with the LXG situation; the original comic would not work onscreen as-is, and the producers know they have to make changes, but they fail to recognize what to change. In this case, they start thinking about the marketing instead of the movie; their intent, I believe, is to make a film from which a good preview can be cut together, rather than simply a good film. Hence they dilute the very-British feel of the source by adding a couple of Americans, they pump up the visual effects, they reduce the characters to sketches, and so on, all of which is designed to make the movie easier to sell. They don’t care if you hate the movie when you see it; they’ve got your ticket money.
Regarding comics in general, Dewey is correct about the visual aspect, but comics also work as literature. The artist can attempt to control the reader’s eye, arranging figures and frames and borders and colors and whatnot to suggest that the reader should zip through this section, or linger on this other image, and so forth. But the reader is still in control, ultimately. Just as in a strict-prose book, the reader can go back and re-read a section he found confusing or enjoyable; he can hold his place and skip much farther back to review a plot point that has suddenly become relevant; he can lower the book and think deeply about something he’s just seen or read. None of this is possible with a movie (excluding the limited control of home video): You sit there, you look up at the screen, and the movie ticks inexorably along. Pace, intensity, and everything else is totally up to the film. You have a small degree of control in what you choose to look at on the screen, but skilled moviemakers can even draw your eye to particular places without your conscious knowledge. Really, in a film, you’re at the mercy of the medium to a degree not present in any other storytelling form. (Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for a fascinating exploration of this idea.)
Anyway, the point is, I would strongly argue against the idea that a movie adaptation must adhere closely to its source in order to work properly. Things must always be changed for the movie to work. The trick is to change the right things.
) all have the privilige of adding their “creative input”. Even if they do not possess any creativity.