Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential to the film of the same name:

If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film.

I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was.

Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.

> the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel

I disagree entirely. In fact I would claim that the movie fails precisely because it deviates from the novel in exactly the way that makes the novel great.

Spoilers follow.

The whole point of Ender's Game as a novel is the way it leads you into a comfortable, safe zone. You think you're just reading another "child overcomes tough conditions, grows as an individual and succeeds at hard task" novel a la Heinlein. Oh no. Just when you are comfortable, when you've been set up to think, ah, at last, the war, let's watch him think circles around the bugs with his well trained superior brain... you get slapped in the face so hard with the plot twist it leaves you reeling and then the book ends and you can't stop thinking about it for weeks.

In the movie, the plot twist is pretty much revealed near the beginning. My memory is fuzzy but I remember Harrison Ford communicating with the army and exchanging status updates as the point where I "deduced" that they were at war and not travelling to it. It was very important that the novel be entirely from Ender's point of view as the military conspired to create the illusion that he was training, because the illusion was key to his being able to make the final decision of the war.

To reveal that the war was actually ongoing, and that there was no waiting time, was a major early spoiler, perhaps to allow the audience to digest the idea, trading the comfort of an hour and a bit of "training" for the tension of knowing something Ender doesn't (that it's not a game). This tension has much less of an emotional impact on the viewer than surprise would have had, especially since it is one of the most overused plot devices both in Hollywood and in print.

So you are left with (very) nice visuals, fairly good acting from heavyweights, and a typical Hollywood plot. A summer movie. So disappointing.

> Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it.

I felt the same way about Watchmen. The film is remarkably faithful (mostly), but I guess the flow/rhythm/pacing just doesn't work the same way on-screen as it does on-page.

Interestingly, there are examples of the book author also being the screenwriter and doing a fairly loose adaptation. The most prominent example that comes to mind is The Princess Bride; the book had a much darker and more cynical tone than the film.

You may be right about Ender's Game. I'm not sure what was exactly wrong with it; I just found it flat and fairly uninteresting while the original novella is one of the best.

Of course, it's tough in SF where there's always a loud contingent (of what is your most natural constituency) over pretty much any deviations from a beloved book. Yet, there are aspects to novels that don't translate well into film and, in most cases, films need to simplify--dropping characters and streamlining plots.

I think adapting the original Ender's Game novella rather than the novel would have made a lot of sense and would have made for a much tighter movie. I think there's just too much stuff in the full novel and trying to cram it all into the film made it impossible to pace things well.

I've long been of the opinion that novella-length stories are the best match for movie length (2-ish hours) adaptations and that novels usually just have too much stuff for a faithful adaptation. The Ender's Game movie just happens to be a really good recent example.

I confess to having forgotten it became a novel after it was a novella :-) (I did read the sequels--with declining interest as I went along.)

>I think adapting the original Ender's Game novella rather than the novel would have made a lot of sense and would have made for a much tighter movie.

Was that not what they did? Having read the novella but not the novel, I don't particularly remember any scenes I didn't recognise...

As to shorter stories being easier to adapt than longer ones, I have often thought the same - though I would strengthen that to "short stories" rather than "novellas", especially when it comes to sci-fi.

Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation also addresses the strains and mutations involved in porting art to a different medium with different demands. The movie self-referentially concerns adapting the book The Orchid Thief into a very-different – but perhaps necessarily-different? – film.

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