Friday, May 8th, 2009
Star Trek vs. Wolverine: How To Treat Your Source Material
Just got back from the midnight screening of Star Trek. If you’re a Trekkie and you’re worried that Director J. J. Abrams has raped and pillaged your favorite fantasy world, don’t be. The film keeps the characters (including their catchphrases) and the best qualities of Star Trek in tact. If you’re not a fan, still go see this movie. It’s fun and full of action, with a lot less of the scientific/philosophical blah blah snooze which turns people off to the franchise in general.
Star Trek manages to win on both the “it needs to be a good popcorn movie” front and the “there are rabid fans who’re gonna go apeshit if you mess this up” front. So why can’t that be the case with all nerd property adaptations?
In movie-making, you often need to change the source material somewhat in order to tell a good film story, so if your favorite book wasn’t adapted completely faithfully, that’s why. Movie story structure is different from book or “graphic novel” structure. They’re different beasts. However, I think Hollywood sometimes uses this as a license to fuck with the original source because they think it’s cool. I realize now that X-Men Origins: Wolverine has that sensibility written all over it.
<SPOILER JOKES> “Wouldn’t it be cool to give Deadpool eye lasers?” “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could squeeze Gambit in there somehow?” “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we pissed all over Wolverine and were proud of ourselves for doing it?” </SPOILER JOKES>
But Star Trek respects the original (and its fans) enough to know what not to change. Certain elements already work, so don’t “fix” them. Kirk is arrogant, so let him be arrogant. Rather than alter him to make him emo-ier or some bullshit, the film asks the question: why does he appear so arrogant? Abrams doesn’t fight the source material – he uses it as a jumping off point to explore the characters further. That’s not just good film making, it’s also very logical.
9 Comments
May 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Agreed. The little details count as well, and Star Trek captures these faithfully–paying homage to past renditions, such as having Kirk eat an apple in the Kobayashi Maru simulator.
May 8th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I wonder how big a fan J. J. Abrams is of Star Trek, cause everyone’s impressed by all the small details he worked in. I think that stuff is awesome.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Great points. Makes me really anxious now to see Star Trek.
They definitely took some liberties with Wolverine.
May 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Thanks, Todd. Yeah, check it out this weekend – Trek is the movie that should have started the summer.
May 9th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
JJ isnt a star trek fan. That is probably why the movie is so good.
May 10th, 2009 at 10:27 am
That makes sense, but at the very least, JJ respects Star Trek enough not to completely fuck with everything.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
They should have done the alternate timeline with Enterprise like they did with Star Trek (the movie).
I always thought the “temporal war” thing should have revealed that the bad guys had successfully erased the Enterprise crew from history, so all the previous star trek had been a tad different because they didn’t exist. Scott Bakula could have made things right that once were wrong by making sure they weren’t erased…
… but nobody comes to me for awesome ideas.
May 15th, 2009 at 10:19 am
They should, Paul. They should!
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