Adapting beloved literature for television or film is always a tricky game to play, more so when wrestling with a genre like fantasy, where the readers are particularly characterized by fanaticism (NERDS!) and will go beyond berserk if everything isn’t in its right place.
A remarkable success in the field of fantasy lit-to-screen adaptation is Game of Thrones, taken from the Song of Ice and Fire series by Northwestern alumnus George R. R. Martin (Medill ’70). Another is the recently released The Host, a lit-to-film adaptation of a book by Stephanie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series.
But what about fantasy adaptations that don’t incite this sort of feverish love and high reverence in their viewers? What about the ill-remembered (if remembered at all) failures of the television and cinematic underworld, those groan-inducing, seriously-how-did-they-fuck-this up adaptations that eschew any adherence or respect to the source material in favor of God-knows-what? Here’s a list of five failed fantasy-lit adaptations to avoid like a hoard of angry White Walkers:
1. Eragon (2006) Director: Stefan Fangmeier
Christopher Paolini started writing Eragon, the first novel in his Inheritance cycle, at the age of 15, and his youth and inexperience as an author really show. None of it is terribly original, but Eragon and its sequels--Eldest, Brisingr, and Inheritance--became massive successes with young readers. And despite its flaws, the series is enjoyable by its own merits and ambitions, crafting a simple, easily readable tale about a boy, Eragon, his pet dragon Saphira and their mutual quest to squelch out the evil in the world, embodied by the antagonist, King Galbatorix. The straightforward nature and abundant fantasy of Paolini’s work would appear to make for an easy adaptation, but Good God, Lemon, is Eragon: The Movie terrible.
Bogged down by MicroSoft Paint caliber CGI, Ren-faire style art design, and acting that would make even Hayden Christensen weep, Eragon the film is a fiasco, sapping any narrative energy and wonder out of Paolini’s prose and injecting his world with the type of overly focus-grouped product that gives adaptation a worrisome name. Underdeveloped and undercooked, Eragon just doesn't have any wings.
2. The Golden Compass (2007) Director: Chris Weitz
Northern Lights (published as The Golden Compass in the U.S.) is the first installment in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The story focuses on an alternate universe to our own, a sort of dystopia run by a theocratic government called the Magisterium, or "the Church." In Pullman's other world, each human is accompanied by and tethered to a sentient demon. Seeing the novels' popularity and warm critical reception, movie studio New Line Cinema (who also helmed Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films) sought a movie adaptation, one that would eventually become one of the company's biggest financial disasters.
Every moment of The Golden Compass film feels like a wild miscalculation. Entirely toothless, the adaptation sands off the literature’s anti-Catholic, atheistic edges in favor of ersatz special effects and cookie-cutter fantasy. Though the movie boasts some impressive steam-punk visuals and a battle scene where talking polar bears battle in a CGI ice kingdom (fucking polar bears, man), The Golden Compass film loses much of the novel’s message and religious thematic weight in the transition to the big screen. What was once one of the darker, more provocative novels becomes, in film form, the sort of generic, narcolepsy-inducing fare reserved expressly for late night SyFy channel re-runs, a burden not helped at all by a frighteningly robotic performance from Nicole Kidman as the villain. This is His Dark Materials at its most watered down; it is so diluted that it has little to say, and subsequently feels empty and voiceless where the novel spoke loud and clear.
3. The Lord of the Rings (1978) Director(s): Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin Jr.
Tolkien's works are so ubiquitous in pop culture that it's hard to find someone who can't discern a Baggins from an Orc, or even an Orc from an Uruk-Hai. That sort of popularity and instant "brand recognition" lends itself easily to film adaptation, particularly with The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's most famous series, which details the travels of the young hobbit Frodo as he seeks to destroy the One Ring of True Power. There are so many derivations of Tolkien's aesthetic (read: Eragon) that it becomes difficult to discern what's worth checking out and what isn't.
Like Game of Thrones, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation is all sorts of awesome. Faithful enough to the source material to capture the proper aesthetic and tone while smartly shaving off Tolkien’s more superfluous elements (looking at you, Tom Bombadil), Jackson's LoTR trilogy is a visually jaw-dropping and bracingly visceral cinematic experience. It's one that truly wraps a viewer up in the wonder and mythos of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. But did you know that there was another film version of LoTR? Fourth grade me certainly didn’t, and, unfortunately, rented the late 70’s Rankin-Bass production from my local Blockbuster. From the heinous looking Rotoscope animation to teeth grindingly annoying song numbers, the Rankin-Bass Lord of the Rings series is something so stupefyingly miserable that it becomes almost hypnotic. It’s all so visually ugly and flat but bafflingly marketed towards young children, who will probably be horrified and need years of therapy because its also just fucking awful. This becomes this. Really.
4. Inkheart (2008) Director: Iain Softley
Inkheart, Cornelia Funke's first installment in her Inkworld trilogy, is characterized by the novelty of its core conceit. In a literary genre populated by innumerable derivations of Tolkien and Rowling, Funke crafted something decidedly original, new enough to engage both its younger target audience and older adults. In Inkheart, Meggie Folchart, an avid young reader, discovers her ability to bring fictional characters and worlds to life by reading aloud, and subsequently must engage her great powers to stop the evil force known as Capricorn, lest he escape his book-bound prison and take over the real world. Though Inkheart was followed by two disappointing sequels, Inkspell and Inkdeath, it stands as a thoroughly enjoyable read, more brooding and literary than most Y.A fare, yet still accessible and imaginative enough for kids. In fact, Inkheart became so popular, that Warner Brothers Studios decided a movie adaptation would be a big box office draw.
Eventually a finished product was birthed and, like the career of star Brendan Fraser, was forgotten immediately by everybody. Seriously. I asked around and no one remembers it. Whatever.
5. Dune (1984) Director: David Lynch
Frank Herbert's Sci-Fi fantasy tome Dune (1965) is daunting. At about 900 pages, it details, at great length, the goings-on of the distant future, as various factions vie for control of the desert planet Arrakis, which is rich in the priceless spice 'melange.' There's war, the hero's quest, political intrigue, and about ten thousand names nobody can pronounce. Despite the novel's Biblical length and hard to pronounce names, it became the world's best-selling science fiction novel. Ever. Since Hollywood executives are equally characterized by greed and an alarming lack of level-headedness, they saw Dune's unprecedented literary success and decided. They entirely ignored the novel's absurd density, depth of detail and general weirdness - to turn the phenomenon into a movie.
David Lynch’s Dune is almost otherworldly in its transcendent awfulness. Perhaps what's most bizarre about Dune is how well it plays into everything that marks Lynch as a singular director; a distinct, distinctly weird visual style; an opaque, near inscrutable story; thick veins of surrealism and the outlandish. However, each of these elements is either improperly or excessively applied to adapting the novel, and the film version, which drags its knuckles around for an interminable three plus hours, can’t make sensible ends out of the source literature’s dense mythology. Compressed into the film medium, Dune is blocky, bland, and entirely incomprehensible, plagued by a clunky screenplay that is leaden with lines like “He who controls the Spice, controls the Universe!” and “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” It’s a feckless and artless cinematic endeavor, too much of a slog to enjoy even on a so-bad-it’s-good level of appeal.
