Bad Adaptations, Good Product

[Trekkin]

You can really just pretend the first ones don't exist. The only ones that even reference each other are III, IV and V (Rogue Nation does reference the break-in from 1, but it's blink-and-you-miss-it stuff.) it's really easy to just 'forget' the first two and pretend Jim Phelps retired and lived a long and happy life.

I'm with Christopher on really only liking them from 3 onwards. My big problem with the earlier ones was I didn't think much of Hunt. He wasn't unlikeable (except a little bit in the 2nd), but I just didn't think he had much personality and I couldn't invest in him. It basically felt like 'Tom Cruise! In the role of Protagonist-that-makes-the-plot- happen!'.

Though I did like how the climax in the original briefly had the on-screen action timed to 'beat' with the main theme. That was nifty.

 

[Christopher]

Unless that reference to the first film goes along the lines of, "Guess what? Jim Phelps wasn't the bad guy after all!", I don't see myself ever mustering up any enthusiasm.

Phelps is never referenced one way or the other in any of the sequels. As I said, except for one passing reference to the iconic Langley break-in scene from the first movie, the later films in the series are essentially completely unconnected to the first film in any way. The first three movies aren't a series, they're three totally independent spy thrillers whose lead characters happen to have the same name and which are very loosely and superficially inspired by the same TV show. Only movies III through V are a series.

Look, I'm as displeased by what the first film did with Phelps as you are, but it has no bearing on the later films. The writers and director of the first film have had nothing to do with any of the later films; the only people they have in common are Tom Cruise (as star and producer), Paula Wagner (Cruise's producing partner on the first three films), and Ving Rhames. Both the second and third films are essentially soft reboots from different creative teams, and the rest of the series has followed on the third film. Refusing to watch movies III-V because you didn't like the first movie is kind of like refusing to watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe because you didn't like the Ang Lee Hulk movie. Yes, they have a character in common and draw on some of the same source material, but they're different takes on the premise from different creators.

it's really easy to just 'forget' the first two and pretend Jim Phelps retired and lived a long and happy life.

And of course the M:I universe is fraught with impostors. It's easy enough to assume that Jon Voight's "Phelps" was an impostor who'd infiltrated the IMF. I like to think that the mission Ethan was offered in the closing scene of the first film was the rescue of the real Jim Phelps.

Although I'm unconvinced that the movie series is in the same continuity as the TV series. There's never been a cast member from the original reprising his or her role (the first film pretty much burned that bridge) or a direct reference to any of its characters or events other than Phelps, who was unrecognizable aside from the name (and was really a lot more like Dan Briggs, Phelps's predecessor from seaosn 1). Moreover, in Rogue Nation, Brandt says the IMF has existed for 40 years, and the original series ran from 49 to 42 years ago. There's never been any clear suggestion that the movies were a continuation rather than a reboot.

I'm with Christopher on really only liking them from 3 onwards. My big problem with the earlier ones was I didn't think much of Hunt. He wasn't unlikeable (except a little bit in the 2nd), but I just didn't think he had much personality and I couldn't invest in him. It basically felt like 'Tom Cruise! In the role of Protagonist-that-makes-the-plot- happen!'.

Yup -- he had no discernible personality in the first two films, no emotional depth. He was just the guy that stuff happened to. What makes the third movie such a breath of fresh air is that it finally turns him into a full-fledged, relatable, three-dimensional human being, all within the first ten minutes of the film, so that for the first time in the series you actually care about what happens to him and the people in his life. My biggest disappointment with Rogue Nation is that, unlike Ghost Protocol, it doesn't really continue that deeper characterization of Ethan, painting him more as just a maverick agent who's intensely driven by a personal vendetta against the bad guys.

 

[Greg Cox]

This is why I have not bothered with any MI movies since the first one.

It's a mistake to judge the later films on the basis of the first film. The later ones are from completely different creative teams and have very little to do with the first one. Heck, the first three movies don't even feel like a series. Despite the shared title and the recurrence of two characters and a few tropes, they seem like completely unrelated action movies with radically different styles and sensibilities and essentially no mutual continuity. The series didn't gain any real coherence, consistency, or quality until J.J. Abrams took over with the third. His continued involvement as producer on the fourth and fifth films has made them finally work as a series, but I consider the first two films to be essentially failed pilots for a series that didn't properly start until the third movie. (I believe the newest movie, the fifth, is the only sequel that's directly referenced any event from the first film at all, and that was a single line near the beginning.)

Unless that reference to the first film goes along the lines of, "Guess what? Jim Phelps wasn't the bad guy after all!", I don't see myself ever mustering up any enthusiasm.

The Phelps thing is a non-issue after the first movie. He's not even mentioned as far as I know.

 

[FredH]

Annie is a great crowdpleaser Broadway musical. It is also, in presenting the New Deal as a happy ending, the political antithesis of the very conservative original comic strip, which I understand was extremely anti-FDR. Which presents an interesting question: I love Annie, or at least I did as a child when I saw it twice on Broadway--but is it ethical to present an adaptation whose message directly opposes that of its original source? I mean, if the original strip had been pro-New Deal but the play presented it as a terrible thing, I'd probably have been annoyed.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Or, maybe the exact reason why HAL failed is irrelevant in the film. All that is important is that he failed, even while being the pinnacle of human achievement, thus representing the essential fallibility of mankind and an intrinsic limitation that is to be overcome in the next stage of human evolution that transcends even death.... WHOA!

Deep man, deep... You do drive a good point, though.

 

[Christopher]

Annie is a great crowdpleaser Broadway musical. It is also, in presenting the New Deal as a happy ending, the political antithesis of the very conservative original comic strip, which I understand was extremely anti-FDR. Which presents an interesting question: I love Annie, or at least I did as a child when I saw it twice on Broadway--but is it ethical to present an adaptation whose message directly opposes that of its original source? I mean, if the original strip had been pro-New Deal but the play presented it as a terrible thing, I'd probably have been annoyed.

I don't think it's unethical. Creativity is a dialogue between different creators' works. Every work, original or adapted, builds on ideas from earlier works, sometimes by reinforcing them and sometimes by challenging or refuting them. It isn't the job of an adaptation to be a slavish imitation of the source; the job of an adaptation is to be a response to the source, an interpretation and modification of it as the next step in the cultural conversation that it's a part of. It's not supposed to copy the original creator's voice, but to re-express the ideas in someone else's voice and thereby add to the dialogue.

And sometimes that means that adaptations critique the ideas and attitudes of the original, or even repudiate them. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is more or less an endorsement of military fascism, or at least a thought experiment examining how it might be beneficial to society; but Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is a biting satire and deconstruction of military fascism. Between them, they offer two sides of the issue, and that's arguably more valuable than if they both just parroted the same take on it.

Then again, I can certainly see how a creator who had a certain point of view behind one's creation might be offended to see it subverted to represent an opposing point of view. From that perspective, it could be seen as inappropriate -- that's not what my characters stand for, so use your own characters instead! I probably wouldn't be as philosophical about it if someone did it with one of my own creations.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The first Mission: Impossible movie comes to mind. The team (which was the emphasis of the show) was killed of in the first act, and the lead character of Jim Phelps is turned into a villain.

This is why I have not bothered with any MI movies since the first one.

This bothered me at first as well, but there's two reasons why I don't care anymore:

- The M:I films are obviously not in the same continuity as the TV series. So whereas the MOVIE Phelps might have been a bad guy, the TV version never was. (That being said, I definitely don't blame Peter Graves for being so angry that he walked out of the premiere...)

- Who's to say that even was Jim in the first film? IIRC, the concept of wearing realistic face masks to pretend to be other people was already well established in that same film. So that could have been somebody else posing as Jim.

As for other bad adaptations, I put forth this example: The Naked Gun movies.

They are pretty funny when taken as isolated examples. But as faithful adaptations of Police Squad!, they totally blew it. Frank Drebin is not supposed to be a bumbling idiot; he's actually a very good cop who is just the ultimate straight man (taken to extremes of course). It was the movies that made him the moron that most people know him as. But Drebin isn't supposed to be like that.

And Starship Troopers? I've already said what I feel about that one. The Cliff's Notes version of my opinion: 1) Heinlein was not a fascist, he never endorsed fascism, and Federal Service is something different entirely; 2) The film was originally a standalone product that had the Starship Troopers motif imposed on it after the fact; 3) It's still a fun film to watch, even though I don't agree with its viewpoint or its treatment of the novel as a joke.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I liked the first 90 minutes of Minority Report but it needed a darker ending than it got that was a little more philosophically complex than we got.

I stop Minority Report when Tom Cruise is captured. Everything after that, I feel, is the happy ending he dreamed in incarceration.

I'm not sure how that interpretation will with with the upcoming television series which, as I understand it, is a sequel to the film.

 

[Kor]

The Princess Bride. The book was a satire, while the movie was more of a feel-good fairy tale with some cute humor, though quite entertaining and well-done.

And for me, the true IMF team leader will always be Dan Briggs.

Kor

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I liked the first 90 minutes of Minority Report but it needed a darker ending than it got that was a little more philosophically complex than we got.

I stop Minority Report when Tom Cruise is captured. Everything after that, I feel, is the happy ending he dreamed in incarceration.

I'm not sure how that interpretation will with with the upcoming television series which, as I understand it, is a sequel to the film.

A lot of people have that interpretation, and it's got some merit as they say "It's like heaven". But it would be more consistent with what I know of Steven Spielberg if it were not a dream.

It seemed to me like they made the use of precogs into a binary issue. Either it's completely okay to use them and incarcerate people totally based on faith that they were right, or we shouldn't use them at all. And the ending didn't really improve things much when we get down to it, we still live in a surveillance state where people are given life sentences without trial, just we don't prevent all murders anymore.

But no, Agatha has hair so happy ending.

 

[Christopher]

And the ending didn't really improve things much when we get down to it, we still live in a surveillance state where people are given life sentences without trial, just we don't prevent all murders anymore.

I think the implication was that the exposure of the imperfections of Precrime, as well as the removal of the precogs who made it possible, would've brought an end to the whole arrest-without-trial policy, because the foundations of it would've been proven invalid.

Although we'll find out in 12 days, when the series premieres.

 

[JoeZhang]

Spoiler about minority report TV show:

Spoiler: Abut the tv show

Everyone who was arrested due to precrime was released - many of them suffer from health problems due to problems with the freezing process.

Absolute Power is a passable thriller but very different from the book in that the Clint Eastwood character is killed off quickly near the start of the book and its about his daughter and em... someone who helps her (its been a while).

 

[Trekkin]

Wasn't the Minority Report video game supposed to be part of the movie's continuity? Besides Tom Cruise likeness being absent, of course.

I thought of another one - the movie and the television adaptations of Tales from The Crypt. The movie toned down a lot of the grue, is very 'Hammer' in presentation, and had some stories that were all from EC Comics. The TV series was closer in tone, but tended to tweak the story detail a bit more, when they weren't just adapting whatever they liked or writing original content. Oh, and the show had the zombie/ghoul/mutant Crypty instead of the traditional Cryptkeeper.

 

[Greg Cox]

Annie is a great crowdpleaser Broadway musical. It is also, in presenting the New Deal as a happy ending, the political antithesis of the very conservative original comic strip, which I understand was extremely anti-FDR. Which presents an interesting question: I love Annie, or at least I did as a child when I saw it twice on Broadway--but is it ethical to present an adaptation whose message directly opposes that of its original source? I mean, if the original strip had been pro-New Deal but the play presented it as a terrible thing, I'd probably have been annoyed.

How many novels have been written in which Dracula is the good guy-which is pretty much antithetical to Bram Stoker's POV? Or revisionist takes on Beowulf or King Arthur or whatever?

Would Conan Doyle have approved of turning Dr. Watson into a Asian woman? Who knows? But he's dead and past caring so where's the harm?

It's not about ethics. They're just stories.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I have only seen a few episodes of Mission Impossible. Was there any references to Jim Phelps having children? Just presume Jon Voight was really Jim Phelps Jr.

Sure there was only 12 years age separating Graves and Voight. But that is the same difference between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford!

 

[Christopher]

Jim was never shown to have a wife or children, no.

The only team member from the original series who was established to have a son was Barney Collier, with Greg Morris's real-life son Phil Morris playing Barney's son Grant in the '88 revival, filling the same tech-genius role Barney filled in the original. Which was kind of a retcon, since Grant would've had to be born before the original series began, but the original portrayed Barney as single and romantically available.

 

[Dick Whitman]

I remember that 88 revival vaguely. I would have been only 10.

You mentioned Singer's X-men earlier. As someone who grew up a DC Comics fan but rarely read Marvel I had no sentimental attachment to the material. So its been very easy for me to disregard the changes even though I have been aware of them. I am probably in the minority but I think Singer's Day Of Future Past is superior to the very different comic book story it drew inspiration from.

 

[Harvey]

Barney could have had a child and been single, for a variety of reasons. I think it's a little silly to complain about lack of characterization in the Mission: Impossible movies, though. From what I've seen of the television series, it hardly had any character development at all -- it was plot-driven, through and through.

Isn't that why Nimoy left after only two seasons? After playing Spock, Paris was a character with no inner life whatsoever, which eventually became tedious.

 

[Christopher]

Barney could have had a child and been single, for a variety of reasons.

Sure, but in the first revival episode that brought Barney back, their discussions made it pretty clear that Barney was married to Grant's mother and that his intelligence work tended to keep him away from home.

I think it's a little silly to complain about lack of characterization in the Mission: Impossible movies, though. From what I've seen of the television series, it hardly had any character development at all -- it was plot-driven, through and through.

Depends. In the first season and the fifth season, there was more effort made to delve into the characters as individuals, as opposed to the rest of the series, where such things were rare. For instance, in season 5, we got episodes delving into the pasts of Jim, Barney, and Paris (Leonard Nimoy's character) over the course of the season.

And the point is not to compare the movies to the original series, because we're talking about Ethan Hunt, a character who's unique to the movies. And because the movies are extremely different from the series. The series was about the capers and the roleplaying into which the characters subsumed themselves, so Bruce Geller decided that focusing on them as individuals would get in the way of that. But the movies are about Ethan Hunt as a person and his individual struggles to clear his name or protect or avenge the people he cares about, and the capers and the roles he plays are secondary to that. So since the movie plots revolve so heavily around Ethan Hunt and his problems, it's important that Ethan Hunt be a character we can give a damn about. And that's something the first two movies failed to achieve and the third and fourth movies achieved quite well.

Isn't that why Nimoy left after only two seasons? After playing Spock, Paris was a character with no inner life whatsoever, which eventually became tedious.

Actually it was in Nimoy's second season (the fifth overall) that Paris finally did get a degree of character development. So things were trending in the direction Nimoy wanted -- though maybe not as much as he wanted, considering that there was only one episode in the season that really delved into Paris's backstory and personal life (though the same goes for Jim and Barney in season 5 -- they got one personal-backstory episode each).

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Damnation Alley the novel has almost nothing in common with Damnation Alley the movie except for the name 'Hell' Tanner, the landmaster, and the trek across the United States. Everything else is completely different and almost equally as bad.
I remember coming across the movie for the first time late one night on television after it started and thinking that George Pepard was 'Hell' Tanner and not Jan Michael Vincent because Pepard fit the description in the novel better.