What if other adaptations got the "hobbit" treatment?

[Meatboy]

Ok let me preface this by saying I actually want to see The Hobbit, I'm not sure how they managed to get 3 movies out of the decidedly slim book, but that's not why we are here. I want to talk about the dwarves. Specificly the part wherein they have become a troupe of wandering badasses, instead of a group of wandering musicians and artisans. Indeed dressed all their armor and weilding all their fancy weapons I wonder how it is that they are going to screw up absolutely everything and be the cause of the majority of the problems that they face throughout the book. I am assuming this was done in the hopes of making a more entertaining trilogy, because there are very few fights in the book. (spoiler: The dwarves run away from everything.)

This got me thinking about if other books or media that got adapted could just toss out or change whole sections in the name of making a "better" movie. Personally I want to see Hamlet set in a post apocolyptic future where Hamlet along with his cyborg/ninja manservents Rosecranzt and Gildenstern must fight their way through a bitter Ice fortress to confront they Evil Duke and the fowl Laretes. There will be less soliliquies and more 'splosions. Because seriously who wants to hear some guy rant on on about his exsistential crisis.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Movies and books are different mediums of communication and entertainment. While they share many tenets they are not entirely interchangeable. Most books are simply not written in such a way as to be able to just port directly to a screenplay. They require adaptation. What a book may take pages to describe may amount to a fleeting few seconds on screen. What a book can say in a sentence may take a great deal of time to visually demonstrate on screen. Movies have slightly different and well-established conventions of narrative structure that a book can handle very differently. What a book must often state openly a movie can suggest with changes in lighting, choices of costume or editing. An excellent example is Dune, a book where great quantities of information and characterization is imparted by what characters are THINKING. That can be handled on film by giving the expostion over to a narrator, providing a voiceover of characters thoughts, or by actually undertaking substantial rewrites to make internal, mental activities into external statements and actions - and that has substantial implications for tone, mood, and on and on.

One of the reasons Hamlet actually adapts well to the screen is that stage plays DO adapt much more readily to film as they share a great many more conventions. However even stage productions of Hamlet are typically slashed from the volume of the original play because you're exactly right - nobody wants to sit in a theater seat for 4 hours listening to Hamlet talk about his troubles. 8 decades or so of motion pictures has given us a preference for being SHOWN Hamlets troubles rather than just having them verbalized at us.

As for how The Hobbit is going to be spread across three films my understanding is that it will be demonstrating a lot of the appendectical (?) material. There was a lot of things happening during the time when the narrative of The Hobbit was taking place which did not appear directly in The Hobbit, much of it having to do, IIRC, with assembling troops to chase the mysterious dark force (Sauron) out of the fortress at the south of Mirkwood.

 

[delericho]

I daresay that if they ever adapted "Pride and Prejudice", they'd find some way to shoehorn zombies in there somewhere...

 

[Hand of Evil]

while not a lot of fights, there were a lot of encounters...trolls, finding of the ring, elves, escape from elves, meeting of the wargs and flight of the eagles, the lake, meeting Smug, Smugs's attack on the lake town, the battle of five arms (which was really seven) and I think this in a way will be like a tabletop game, action and storytelling. You have a lot to show and tell.

 

[Dioltach]

Personally I want to see Hamlet set in a post apocolyptic future where Hamlet along with his cyborg/ninja manservents Rosecranzt and Gildenstern must fight their way through a bitter Ice fortress to confront they Evil Duke and the fowl Laretes. There will be less soliliquies and more 'splosions. Because seriously who wants to hear some guy rant on on about his exsistential crisis.

Have you ever seen the Schwarzenegger version of Hamlet? "Claudius, you kilt my fader. Big mistake!"

(It's in Last Action Hero, in case you're interested.)

 

[Dioltach]

I actually just remembered a movie that did this. The makers of The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising apparently felt that an award-winning children's book wasn't as good as the story they wanted to tell, so they added blunderbuses, martial arts, a love interest and all sorts of stuff that completely ruined the story.

 

[Mark CMG]

I daresay most novels of quality could be adapted into a miniseries, or three movies like The Hobbit, and that LotR could easily have been adapted into three seasons of a show (much as GoT has been handled). That The Hobbit is being treated with such care as to warrant three movies is excellent in my view.

 

[Thunderfoot]

One of the greatest adaptations of a Book to Screen was James Cavell's SHOGUN. It was an epic min-series that took up nearly two-weeks of screen time and was highly rated in the Nielsen Ratings even though it was a Summer showing. It had romance for the women, sword fights and battles for the men and kids and even some off the wall technology history stuff that added to the kitsch value.

The only other mini-series that have done as well were the North and South (which followed pretty much the same format) and the rest are all bodice rippers that glued women to the chairs but left the rest of the family wondering where dinner was? (It's a dated reference, please don't slay me on this - Hell, I'm the one cooking dinner in my house at the moment while my wife works).

And Shakespeare stands up regardless - even the Leonardo DiCapprio version wasn't totally horrible.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And Shakespeare stands up regardless - even the Leonardo DiCapprio version wasn't totally horrible.

Pretty much true: a local theater group did "Taming of the Shrew" as a Western- complete with thick Texas drawls*- and it was brilliant. One of my favorite adaptations of that play.

Even Romeo Must Die with Aaliyah was a lot of fun.








* I still crack up remembering it.

Petruchio: Come, come, yew wasp, DAYUM yer tew hornery.
Katherine: If Ah be waspish, best bewar mah stang.
Petruchio: Mah rem'dy is then to pluck it owt.
Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who don't know where a wasp done got his sting? In his tail.
Katherine: In his tung.
Petruchio: Whose tung?
Katherine: Your'n, if you talk of tales, and so adios!
Petruchio: Whut, with my tuuuung in yer taaaaaaail?

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

The dwarves in The Hobbit are supposed to be badasses. Many of them are veterans of the War of Dwarves and Orcs, and Thorin got his second name, Oakenshield, from taking up a tree branch to fight with after his shield was broken in battle.