Adaptations: what does it mean to stay true
I am the lucky owner of a Cineville card, which means I get unlimited access to my local cinema all year round. This had been particularly nice during the heatwaves this summer, since the cinema is one of the only spaces in my town where you can be sure there will be air conditioning. The two latest movies I went to were The Odyssee and Vaiana and they made me think about movie adaptations and what makes a good one.
Both The Odyssee and Vaiana are adaptations of older stories, one is originally a centuries old epic poem and the other is the remake of a Disney animation from less than ten years ago. Both tell the story of a protagonist crossing the seas and being challenged by monsters and Gods to return home to their own island as a hero. I personally love these type of mythical stories and am a bit of a fan of both Odysseus and Vaiana. And yet, both of these remakes failed to truly move me. Yes, the visual stunts in the Odyssee are impressive and the casting of the live action Vaiana is great, but I felt no emotional reaction, no reason to rewatch these films, no need to recommend these movies to my friends. Why?
My theory is that these movies stay too close to the original. In Vaiana this is pretty obvious, it is a very literal remake of the original movie. Much of the script is a one on one copy, the shots are the same, the characters look the same, even some of the actors are the same (The Rock as Maui, Jemaine Clement as Tamatoa the creepy crab). This in contrast to a lot of other Disney remakes that made real changes to the original storylines.
Most Disney remakes have been of movies that are more that thirty years old and therefore contain stories that would now feel outdated. In the 21st century we are no longer that interested in stories about the helpless princess who needs to be saved by Prince Charming. This is why Jasmine got a new song and became the new sultan in the Aladdin remake, why the prince in Snow White became a Robin Hood-like figure who leads the resistance against Maleficant. Whether or not you think these adaptation were actually good, they definitely had something new to offer. The stories were adapted to appeal to a contemporary audience. And this is exactly what makes adaptations interesting in my opinion. By looking at adaptations through the ages you can learn something about the zeitgeist. What kind of stories are people interested in and what values do people admire in their heroes? And this is exactly what I missed in the Vaiana remake. I guess in ten years, the zeitgeist hasn’t changed that much, at least not enough to need a change to the original story of Vaiana. Maybe Disney should have waited a little longer for a remake on this one.
And then The Odyssee. The character of Odysseus has been the inspiration to many new stories over the centuries. One of my personal favourites is O Brother Where Art Thou, a film directed by the Coen brothers starring George Clooney. Clooney plays a man who is imprisoned and forced to work on a railroad in 1930s America, when he escapes with two friends. The trials he faces on his journey home are inspired by the adventures of Odysseus. I read somewhere that the Coen brothers used their high school knowledge of the story to write this movie and did not even bother to reread the poem. And perhaps that is why it works. It was never their intention to stay close to the original text. Instead they took the key moments they remembered and gave them meaning in an entirely different context.
This in contrast to Christopher Nolans reiteration of the Odyssee which seems to be an exercise in being as truthful as possible. This is, in my opinion, a pretty useless mission. Let me explain myself.
Nolan based his script on an English translation of Homer’s Greek poem. A translation is in its essence always an adaptation, especially when we’re speaking of an ancient text like the Odyssee. Which means Nolan’s Odyssee is already inevitably an adaption of an adaptation. Is this a bad thing? No, I don’t think so, but it begs the question what it means for an adaptation to be truthful. Does it mean to stay as close to the original text as possible, even if the original text was created for people who lived about 3000 years ago? Maybe. But I believe an adaptation can also be truthful to the original if it succeeds to make an older story meaningful for a contemporary audience, even if it means changing parts of the story.