Adaptations and Remakes - Part II

The official poster for The Swarm (2023)

It’s been unfortunate, but the past month or so has made it difficult to get as much work done as I would like on account of persistent health problems. That means I haven’t gotten much out in the way of blog or article posts. But I have still been working. I have made a lot of progress on Marble and we have completed recording season two of Stories Across Borders.

With that little disclaimer as to why content has been a little sparse out the way though, I want to talk a bit about adaptations and remakes once again. In particular, what makes for a good one. 

In the final episode of season two, I had the chance to discuss one of my favourite books, Frank Schatzing’s The Swarm (which I did a short review of once) with Jon. During the course of that discussion, we learned that it was actually adapted into an eight part mini-series last year. Naturally, I was very excited because I’ve been wanting to see it on the screen for roughly a decade.

There’s always a bit of apprehension when watching an adaptation of a story that you really love, but luckily I did end up enjoying the TV show a fair amount. That being said though, The Swarm is a very dense story. Between the human drama, the huge cast of characters, the scientific and sci-fi elements and general complexity of the challenges the protagonists face, there is a huge amount of content in the book. This means that while the TV version mostly stayed pretty accurate to the source material, it ended up being highly condensed. The characters had to be made more shallow - or their depth was more implicit than explicit. Many characters were cut. The pacing was sped up drastically. The overall scale of the narrative, while still far reaching, had to be brought down to a much smaller level.

This might seem like a pretty harsh critique - and I suppose it is. Keep in mind though, this was a story I have a deep love for. It was also a show I did enjoy watching. I just couldn’t help but feel it didn’t live up to what I had hoped it would be, even if I did like it. But, realistically, it was never going to be able to reach that kind of level without an unrealistically large budget - and it already has one of the highest budgets in German history. The various people involved did a solid job with the time and resources they had to work with and the performances by the various actors were good. So, despite my criticisms, I don’t think it would be fair to call it a bad adaptation when it did as good a job as it did with what it had. Once again, I feel the need to remind you, I liked the show.

My complicated feelings about The Swarm have caused me to think a lot about what exactly constitutes a good adaptation or remake. I think we as an audience tend to have complicated thoughts about adaptations and remakes in general. On the one hand, we eagerly rush to watch adaptations of our favourite books or comics and nostalgia drives us to eat up remakes of our favourite films. But, we also heavily criticise a lack of original properties and harshly denounce adapted or remade works that don’t meet our lofty expectations. Perhaps our disappointment in adaptations and remakes is why we scream for more original stories to begin with.

Going back to that question then, what makes a good adaptation or remake? I think this is actually pretty hard to answer. We have very high standards for these things. We simultaneously want stories to be perfectly transcribed from one medium to another, but also crave a new spin on familiar tales. This has me thinking that whether or not an adapted work is “good” or not is hard to be objective about and largely depends on what the original property is and how it is adapted. There isn’t necessarily a single, unified and easy criteria.

I think back to two of my favourite adaptations - Jaws and Jurassic Park. I think both of these are excellent movies. In fact, I actually like the Jaws movie much more than the book. I personally feel like the book tends to meander away from its actual premise entirely too often. It felt more like a book about the Brodies’ marital disputes (and also there was sometimes a shark attack in the background) than it did a story about a series of attacks by a shark. The film however was a masterfully suspenseful horror story that kept its focus on the shark attacks with the human drama being built on the effects the attacks had on the community. It was a much tighter story. The Jurassic Park movie definitely made some changes from its source material (mostly in the form of some characters surviving in the film that died in the book), but mostly stuck to the source material. It definitely didn’t change anything with the focus of the story.

Strange, right? I love both of those films, but one stuck pretty closely to the source material while one deviated greatly. My opinion is obviously subjective but, despite that, I can’t help but feel like this gives evidence to my original theory. The quality of an adaptation depends largely on the work it is adapting. 

Things become a little bit more complex with remakes though. A lot of remakes in recent times have been described as “soulless”, “hollow” or “unnecessary.” Even though audiences turn up for remakes in great numbers because of the nostalgia factor, audience reviews are frequently poor. 

I think that is because remaking a previous story is essentially walking a tightrope. Audiences expect creators to put enough of a new spin on the story to justify remaking it in the first place. However, they don’t want the original story in their memories to be tarnished. Personally, I think the best way to do this is to change the focus perspective of the story. Showing us what the story might look like through someone else’s eyes, learning of what motivates someone previously thought of as an antagonist or just making one slight tweak that recontextualizes what we know. That being said though, you have to balance this against the original. If you’re going to take this path, it has to be very clear that this is a different spin; a “what if?” scenario. Otherwise audiences are going to feel like they have been misled.

Alternatively, modernising an old story is also an interesting approach. To be clear though, I don’t mean leaving something in its original historical setting and applying modern norms. That will end up hurting the story more than helping it. I mean moving the general idea of a story forward into the modern era or the future and seeing how that affects it.

I think attempting a one-to-one remake of the original story - essentially telling the exact same story with updated visuals - is tempting. What better way to avoid disappointing your audience than to give them exactly what they want? But, ultimately, I think this is the path where you risk creating something “soulless” that lacks the staying power of the story that inspired you in the first place. Of course, there is always the option of going right back to the origins of an adaptation and remaking it closer to how it started. I think that is a method that can achieve the same general result of giving us a new perspective.

Taking the story of Cinderella as an example: rather than just making a frame-for-frame remake of the Disney animation, consider what would happen if this story was told in the modern era. Finding the person you were looking for would be much easier, no shoe required. But what other difficulties might come up? Or, perhaps, the story focuses entirely on the prince’s efforts to locate the mysterious woman and later rescue her from her abusive situation. Maybe the story could borrow a little more from earlier versions that predate the Disney adaptations. Even a story this well-trodden has a lot of options.

Of course, saying all this is well and good. However, one way or another, someone is going to be disappointed. I really liked Maleficent’s twist on Sleeping Beauty, but it has pretty middling reviews. Audience’s are fickle with shifting - and difficult - expectations too. Guillermo del Toro’s version of Pinnochio also differs from other versions of it, but that has only made people love it more. I liked The Swarm, even if it left me feeling like I wanted more. Some people thought it exceeded expectations. Other people didn’t get it. 

Creating an adaptation or remake is never going to be easy. Everyone has expectations and none of them are going to line-up or be easy to fulfil. In the end, creators should just tell the story they envisage and hope for the best. If anything, that might well be the key. Adapt or remake the story because you have something to add to it. Do it because you love the story and want to tell it your way. I think that sort of authentic storytelling is bound to resonate with people more and have more staying power than something done purely because a popular intellectual property will draw an audience.

I think that’s why so many of us desperately want to see more original stories too. It’s not just about protecting our mental images of the stories we already love, it’s about wanting to see stories coming from a genuine, authentic and meaningful place because those will always resonate with us more. So that, if anything, is the most important factor in telling a compelling story - whether it is a remake, adaptation or original idea.