Arrival is a Fantastic Movie, and a Wonderful Adaptation of Story of Your Life

Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve might be my favorite movie of the year. It’s definitely in the discussion, and probably the frontrunner at this point (which is no small feat, given that it’s up against movies like Sing Street and Swiss Army Man*). And on the one hand, that shouldn’t seem like too much of a surprise. The novella that it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing.

*I meant to write about each of these earlier in the year and never got around to it. Maybe I’ll circle back around if I have time.

But it’s not always that simple. When the adaptation was first announced, I was incredibly skeptical that such a project would work. After all, when you look at the story, it has approximately zero or even negative overlap with what you would traditionally associate with a blockbuster movie.

I mean, it’s a hard science fiction story that’s mainly about how linguists would handle a first contact situation, with long passages of exposition informing the reader about the mechanics of the process and an inverse amount of action. Meanwhile, it’s structurally non-linear with a major emotional twist that hinges on the medium being prose; the second that it would be displayed visually, it would give itself away. If any of that screams “$50 million blockbuster” to you, you’re lying to yourself.

And yet, they pulled it off. It may be the best adaptation of an already-incredible source material since…shoot, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World maybe? And much like Scott Pilgrim, it’s perfect in part because it realizes the key to making a great movie from a great book (/short story/series of graphic novels, in these cases) is not to make it a 1:1 adaptation of the source material, but instead to understand the different constraints of the different mediums and make changes to preserve the feel of the original in a way that works better for the screen.

What I’d like to do here is just dig in a little deeper to those changes, and pull apart what they are and why they were made. And I’m going to try and do it in a way that doesn’t spoil either Arrival or Story of Your Life because, seriously, they’re fantastic and everyone should check them out. However, if you have only seen the former or read the latter, that should be fine. The film is a faithful adaptation, know that the basic story beats are the same, and you already know where the other is headed*. Hopefully, I will be a good enough writer to explain the situation, whether you experience one, both, or neither.

*I mention this because I was concerned that the short story would be made unrecognizable to work as a movie script, but this was thankfully not the case.

First, to fit in with the demands for of modern blockbusters, Arrival needed the addition of some form of “excitement”. The original short story was much more exploratory in nature, with the conflict being driven more from a question of whether the aliens could be communicated with. Thankfully, screenwriter Eric Heisserer resisted the temptation to make that addition “action scenes”, like I feared might be the case based on advertisements. Instead, he expands the role of the military to add tension with the main characters over a difference in approach over how to deal with the aliens, a good way to underscore the themes of the piece without feeling out of place.

But the most masterful translation might be the successful preservation of the original story’s twist. As mentioned, in Story of Your Life, Chiang is able to conceal a major surprise by virtue of not having to visually portray something. It can shock you with the “what” of the story (what is going on, essentially). Villenueve and Heisserer thankfully decided they needed to find some way to translate this emotional gut-punch. But how does one do that?

Similar to the first problem, by extrapolating from the text. The book explained the “how” of the problem (how the language works, how language and perception overlap) so that it could shock you with the “what” (what it ultimately means. With that option out of the question, they instead lay all their cards on the table from the start. With that “what” out of the way, they manage the same emotion gut-punch that Ted Chiang pulled off instead using the “how” of the story; namely, how all the events fit together. They mimic the story’s non-linear style to obscure all of the implications of the events, while also developing their own connections to deepen the meaning of the reveal. And these new connective ideas, while not necessary in the original (one of them even explicitly changes a fundamental aspect of the original in fact, while the other is totally absent), do add a lot to the story, especially with regards to its theme of interconnectedness.

I’m simultaneously worried that I both didn’t explain myself well enough and gave away too much and any further explanation would certainly give everything away, so that’s probably a good sign to stop for the time being. They key take away from this should be that everyone should check out Arrival, as well as Story of Your Life even if they weren’t both fantastic on their own, comparing the two is highly instructive.

The Strategy for Adapting a Live-Action Pokémon Movie

Rumors have been swirling around Nintendo wanting to adapt their franchises to movies, and one of the first franchises attached to this news was none other than Pokémon. I’m not sure what to think of this news yet; it’s exciting to see something that were such a large part of both my formative years and my life as a whole getting a big adaptation, but there’s so much room for things to grow horribly wrong. And unlike, say, comic book movies, which have sort of always just been a part of my life since I was young, this will mark totally new ground.

So, since the news broke, I’ve been thinking: what could a Pokémon movie look like? How can you adapt something like that to a movie? And almost as importantly, what exactly is it that made me like Pokémon? Because that last question especially will be important in adapting the work into a new medium for a larger audience.

With that in mind, I’d like to propose my hypothetical list of dos and don’ts for adapting Pokémon to the silver screen.

How I Would Adapt Avatar: The Last Airbender (Book One)

One of the greatest shows on television is coming to an end this week, and for the second time. And yes, even though Legend of Korra is a cartoon, I will firmly defend its and prequel series Avatar: The Last Airbender’s collective spot as the greatest show on television (I realize I haven’t not seen every show on television, but bear with this hyperbole for a moment).

For that reason, I wanted to write something about the show. I couldn’t think of anything for the current episodes, though. Which is when I turned my thoughts towards the future of the franchise, including possible adaptations.

I realize that the M. Night Shyamalan film exists, and is a large failure. I haven’t seen it myself, but I have reason to avoid it, though. However, I don’t think the failure was on the part of the source material based on its quality, and I am of the opinion that anything could work as a movie if you do it correctly.

So yes, I think a Last Airbender movie could work; however, you would have to do it pragmatically. Something like the Scott Pilgrim movie (the gold standard for adaptations, in my mind; the movie stands out just as much as the source graphic novel) could work, where the changes are all necessary to fit the medium, but make sense in the context of the story just as well. It lost a lot of the detail of the comic, but still made for a fantastic movie by just simplifying a lot of the plot in sensible ways.

With that in mind, what would be essential in a pragmatic adaptation of The Last Airbender? What if we wanted to reduce Book One to a single movie (that was longer than 100 minutes), or possibly even a two-part film? Well, in season one at least, we have these episodes:

Adaptations and Quality, Part 2

Last week, I wrote about adaptations and how faithfulness is second to quality. Since then, I’ve been thinking about my stance more and more. Which is good; part of the reason I write about these things is to reflect on my opinions and see if they hold up.

And in reflection, I feel like I might draw the line somewhere. I mean, it would be one thing to change the origin of a character to better fit in different take on an adapted universe. For Christopher Nolan’s Batman films; the more fantastic elements of Batman are gone (a super-drug that grants strength? Or a hole in the ground that resurrects people?). Or, see last week’s Iron Man example; gone is the traditional Mandarin, with ten magic space rings that don’t particularly fit in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not even getting into the unfortunate racial implications of the character, since he started as something of a stereotype).

But we have to draw the line somewhere, right? It might be unlikely, but let’s pose a hypothetical: since I’m a Spider-Man fan, let’s say Sony decides to scrap the Amazing movies and move in a totally new direction. Gone is the awkward-yet-well-meaning teen inventor Peter Parker; in his place is a violent gun-wielding 30-year-old vigilante defecting from a gang known as “The Spiders” who intends to clean up their crime ring.

Now, let’s ignore how bad that idea sounds (to be fair, that took me all of two minutes to come up with) and pretend that it becomes an actually good movie. Like I said, it’s always important to make a good movie first and an adaptation second. I stand by that; if you’re going to go through the trouble of creating anything, you might as well make it something good.

Adaptations, Comic Book Movies, and Quality, as Seen in Iron Man 3 Versus X-Men 3

We just passed the one-year mark on the release of Iron Man 3, and it’s still generating strong opinions on the internet. IGN just ran this (spoiler-laden) interview with one of the film’s stars, Guy Pearce, about the major change to the Iron Man mythos the film made.

If you’ve seen the film, I probably don’t have to tell you this, but just on the off-chance that I do: in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Mandarin, classic Iron Man foe for decades, doesn’t exist. Well, technically, he does; he’s just, a fictional character drawn up by Pearce’s Aldrich Killian to use as a front for his terrorist schemes.

I actually loved this plot twist. It genuinely surprised me, something that I can’t say about many adaptations where I know the plot (to some extent) going in. What I haven’t loved is the reaction that the twist has inspired. By which I mean: it’s almost impossible to have a serious conversation about how good of a comic book movie Iron Man 3 is, and for reasons that I think are ridiculous. The two big ones that I see are: 1) Tony didn’t spend enough time in the Iron Man suit, and 2) the film “ruined” the Mandarin.

I just can’t take these complaints seriously, because they just didn’t affect the quality of the movie in any tangible way for me. However, to some, it apparently “ruined the movie”, and I just can’t comprehend this.