aisle7

🏠[quickie/rant] The problems with adaptation movies - Cork

Watched Warcraft (2016) a couple weeks ago. Having not played WoW ever, I think this movie has the same problems as Slaughterhouse-Five where the significance of the events in the source material is lost in the adaptation. It just jumps from fanservice scene to scene, and they're technically cool, visually impressive, and have all of the hallmarks of a real blockbuster... but it's really hard to follow when you don't know all of these characters. I couldn't really care about Garona or any of the other WoW guys when everything happens so fast and nothing really gets time to set in.

Slaughterhouse-Five is an impressive sci-fi movie, and im glad Vonnegut liked it, but it manages to be completely tonally dissonant from the book despite having the exact same events happen. The same characters die. Pilgrim dies the same way at the end. I think making Paul Lazarro the big bad in this breaks the point of Slaughterhouse-Five: there are no real baddies, just lunatics and quiet, complicit bystanders. Billy's death at the hands of Lazarro was honestly really fucking funny in the book, because it's dropped like 3/4ths into the book. It's irreverent. It's just one of many, many insanely dumb things that happen to Billy. But making it this climactic moment just breaks the tone of the book. I'm glad Vonnegut liked it, but seriously, the movie manages to feel nothing like the book whatsoever.

Obviously death is never funny, but the way Vonnegut sets em up in Slaughterhouse-Five manages to make it really grimly funny. Like when Valencia dies because she loses her car exhaust system trying to find Billy and she chokes to death in her car. It's a miracle that Vonnegut can make something so tragic so.. irreverent. It has the same weight as an anvil being dropped on Wile. E. Coyote. Death will come, and it will be stupid.

It's almost like the movie runners went "wow, a lot of these scenes about shitting and pissing and just general silly lines are kinda dumb. we want this to be a serious movie." And so focused on the more emotional impactful bits. But that was my favorite part about Slaughterhouse-Five: the comedy enhances the tragedy. Billy is less of a character of his own and moreso a sad drifter, unaware of what he really wants. Living life with agency that he doesn't exercise.

Plus, a lot of the scenes adapted.. completely miss the point of their inclusion in the actual novel? Like the "American Nazi" guy, Howard Campbell, is supposed to be a satire of American nationalism. We get to read like 3 pages about his anti-american, pro-fascist ideology earlier on. But in the movie: you could just remove him and nothing would change. Edgar Derby doesn't even get his (arguably what I'd consider the climax) climactic moment at yelling at nazis about patriotism moment. Or maybe that's the point of that scene's inclusion in the movie. There's no point in arguing about ideals in war- noone's gonna care or take notice. Either way it felt weak as hell.

Or the scene where Billy gives a speech at the Lion Club. That part specifically involves Billy talking to his son about serving in Vietnam (to my knowledge, I don't have a copy of the book on me.). The irony therein is that Billy is thinking about the bombings and the civilians killed, all while commending his son for going overseas and helping aid the US bombing and killing civilians. In the movie you could have, again, cut this scene out and just had him mention being its president and literally nothing would have changed. The "Billy buys his wife a new diamond ring" part serves in its role instead, to comment on how Billy's social functioning is impaired by the war, but in doing so loses political relevance imho.

The non-linearity of the novel is still there via cuts to past, present, and future, but putting the Trafalmadorians at the end and not involving them as a recurring motif like the book also weakens their inclusion. Within the novel they serve as symbolism for Billy's perception of time. But the movie removes all ambiguity in their existence, and just.... I don't know how to word this. Shoving them in at the end and making it more about Billy the character makes this a completely different movie entirely. the focus on billy FEELs different from the book. I don't know exactly how to phrase it.

I don't hate the movie itself though. It was a nice sci-fi flick. It was a nice exploration of Billy Pilgrim the movie character, albeit incongruous to Billy Pilgrim the novel character. The additional focus on Billy's family (when they're really not as important in the novels) was an interesting way to spin the story. If there's one thing the movie did well, it's Valencia. In the novel, Vonnegut is always describing her in the most disparaging ways possible. Fat. Ugly. Fat. Stupid. Fat. Selfish. Her death is a joke. Her motivations a joke. She feels like a giant joke. Billy forgets about her passing incredibly quickly. But in the movie, with Billy being this Family Man and not an apathetic, traumatized dude (well movie billy is also traumatized.) we get to see more of her as a genuine, well rounded character. as a human and not a caricature. I know Vonnegut is a satirist, but being a satirist does not excuse your ideas from critical examination. And from what I've read of Slaughterhouse-Five his depiction of women is a bit (i despise the word problematic) questionable at parts. So I do appreciate the movie working to round her out more as a character.

I have a couple pages of notes I took while watching the movie. Might collect those here later. Final verdict: Slaughterhouse-Five is a good movie but not a good adaptation. But is there really a way to adapt such a novel into the film medium? Probably not. It was the best adaptation they could do, methinks, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily a good one.

Also if they really wanted a villain, they shoulda done Roland Weary. That guy was way more interesting than Paul Lazarro.

+++ the next person to say "oh its satire" as an excuse to never critically think about what they read gets it. Satire is a WAY to deliver ideas it is not AN IDEA!!!! THINGS CAN BE SATIRICAL AND STILL HAVE BIGOTED/PROBLEMATIC ASSUMPTIONS AT THE ROOT OF IT. conversely they can be well intentioned and still racist. (heart of darkness.) Christ stop acting like satire is a commentary shield. "it was written a long time ago stop trying to criticize it it's SATIRE its a product of its time" Does critiquing bigoted ideals immediately mean the critique-ee is illiterate? that they do not understand that authors of yore were racist, sexist, bigoted? Why are people pointing out prejudice / possible bias in gaze (again heart of darkness tries to talk about imperialism by painting africans as a monolithic race. it gets its point across by writing them as inherently awful. Same with Habibi by Craig Thompson: it tries to talk about anti-arab racism by portraying arabs as racist caricatures Which I could also write another rant about maybe.) automatically assumed to be complete fucking dumbasses that have no idea what they're talking about? Asking why an author wrote/framed something a certain way and it being handwaved with "well its just fiction" is real silly. Sure, it's a fictional world, but fiction isn't created by people in a vaccumm. This is probably going to circle back into if Death of the Author should be the standard for literature, because my argument assumes the author's intentions matter, and open up another huge can of literary worms. Rant over. I think examining bigotry in satire is actually really interesting and i dont think it should be an indictment of the authors.

but christ I am so sick of people acting like pointing out bigotry in a satirical work = tarring and feathering the author and saying it's a horrible irredeemable work. You can analyse the shit out of ANYTHING else, the curtain colors and weather and character archetypes, but the moment you point out anything related to bigotry it's "making a big deal out of nothing". aaargh.