With reviews for Sony’s troubled adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower arriving (and confirming some of our worst fears about the movie), it’s probably a good time to reexamine just what makes for a good adaptation. Luckily, the Nerdwriter’s latest video essay tackles that very topic, boiling the question down to one very simple takeaway: “An understanding of what made the original so powerful.”
As an example, he compares and contrasts the Ghost In The Shell anime film from 1995 with its 2017 remake, showing how the the former’s use of patience, color, and perspective better conveys the world’s sense of wonder and grandeur than the latter’s beige, overstuffed approach.
“You can’t mine the source material for parts,” he also says, noting that this year’s film adaptation attempts to merge two different Ghost In The Shell narratives. In doing so, it becomes increasingly difficult to pierce the surface aspects of both. The same is true of Sony’s Dark Tower adaptation, which crams material from nearly all of King’s seven-book series into an 88-minute film. Here’s hoping some folks in Hollywood take this advice, because all those adaptations? They’re not going anywhere, and they’re just going to get more and more absurd.