| There are a lot of things in life more disappointing than bad movies, but there are fewer things more likely to piss you off than seeing a book you really enjoyed get butchered on the big screen. As a loyal reader of Michael Crichton, I usually just shake my head and ask why, when one of his novels becomes a movie. Sure, Jurassic Park was a successful amusement park ride of a film, but what about The Lost World? Apparently the title, plus a few plot points, were all the filmmakers needed to take from the book in order to make their own sequel. Treating a novel simply as a blueprint to build upon and change,, instead of as a fully realized product, seems to be commonplace in Hollywood.
There’s been a wide range of results for Crichton adaptations, from the passable success of Disclosure to the recent disappointment of Timeline. But to date none has enraged me more than that of Congo, the suspenseful tale of a perilous research expedition into the darkest African jungle.
To be fair, I guess I should first point out what the film got right. Well, let’s see… the title was still Congo, the characters’ names were right (at least the ones that were from the book), and there were diamonds and gorillas involved.
Now where to begin with the things that made Congo the movie so wrong?
The novel’s exciting elements of international intrigue and industrial espionage are absent from the movie, with the complete removal of the rivalry between the protagonist’s company, ERTS, and The Consortium. This left the film with nothing more than a lame B-movie ‘adventure in the jungle’ tone
In the novel, Amy, the gorilla, uses sign language to communicate, but the filmmakers took the lazy route and decided to have her use a talking glove and backpack unit. It was not only insulting to the audience, but it simply looked and sounded lame.
The novel’s treatment of the antagonistic yet intelligent grey gorillas showed the balance between their natural instincts and their unnatural training, while the movie simply relegated them to being big, scary monsters.
But the biggest sin the filmmakers committed was creating new characters that weren’t in the novel. Adding an ex-fiancé for the heroine changed her from a steely-cold, goal driven woman into a whimpering bore searching for lost love – and worse, it also changed her entire motive for leading the Congo expedition.
And a heavily accented Romanian character was nothing more than a poor attempt at comic relief involving the "Lost City" element of the plot, which the novel nicely tied into other aspects of the story without this horrible distraction.
So, I’d like to give a shout out to all the screenwriters and directors thinking of turning more novels into movies. There are reasons people have enjoyed the book, reasons some people may even love the book, so if you leave things alone, maybe, just maybe, these will be the same reasons audiences will enjoy, or possibly love, your movie.
Mr. Goldsman, Mr. Howard, Mr. Hanks – I hope you’re listening. |
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