Lost In Translation

When a story written for one media is converted to another it fails to do the original justice, the fans are disappointed and it's considered a flop. There are many reasons for this which I'll explore more in other posts. In this post I'm going to explore the concept of being lost in translation. This is not about language, nor is it about local cultures; these can be worked around. It's about moving from one media to another. Like so much in life, every project is different, some are better adapted than others. It really comes down to the motivations and priorities of those involved.

I'll use three examples of this from different perspectives.

Star Wars

The Star Wars saga was written for the screen in a movie format. This means the entire story had to be set up, and told in a single two hour (give or take) session resolving all of the main plot lines. It also had to hit all the right notes in terms of a balance between action and build up, tension and release, in addition to setting up who all the main characters are and what they want or don't want.

When writing for the screen, everything is done through the lens, which means budget comes into it, as well as time constraints. Every scene must be thought through with an eye on preparation of sets, costumes, make up and after effects. Staff are being paid, money is being spent and you have a deadline to produce.

This means that you don't need to write lots of sub plots, or long dialogue scenes with peripheral characters. Everything in a scene has to do one job; move the story along to the next scene. This can make a movie seem to jump more than it feels it should. Sometimes a conversation in a movie can feel rather forced in how it reveals what it has to reveal, this is why. A good director can minimise or even remove this feeling.

The Episode III Revenge Of The Sith novel is packed with so much more depth that the movie feels like a badly edited 10 minute short in comparison. With so much more it lets scenes and situations build up very naturally. It's one of the best novels I've read, partly because of the story, and partly because of the writing style of Mathew Stover which I'll go into detail on in a separate post.

Harry Potter

The Harry Potter series was written as novels first, before the franchise was turned into movies and games. The novels all stand on their own as individual stories but also layer more and more depth onto the universe JK Rowling has created for Harry and the others.

With a novel, people can read it at their own pace, so you can add in lots more detail like a wider range of characters, more background, more subtle build up to events, more natural dialogue and more sub plots. All of this means the novels have a pacing and balance of their own.

They also introduce more and more peripheral characters from Hogwarts as well as the wider magical world. If that's not enough they weave in various timelines at once, from Harry, Ron and Hermione's current day to day happenings at school and the current mystery to figure out, to Harry's parents and their friends at the same age, as well as Lord Voldomort's past and present.

When you try to translate a novel into a movie, you have to strip it back to have a hope of fitting into a two hour movie sitting. First this means chopping away as much as possible of the sub plots and extra characters. After that you're left with a very unbalanced plot with lots of loose ends. You have to find ways of joining them up, as well as rewriting scenes to do more than one purpose, like having a conversation in a different place, or by different characters. The more characters you have to introduce, the more time it takes, so you double up.

A screenplay is about one minute per page. So a 480 page novel at a one-for-one ratio would be an eight hour movie. Of course it's never going to be a straight conversion as you can show something it may take a page to describe, or minutes can fly past with little dialogue. Even accounting for natural differences you're talking about a screenplay being around 120 pages long. Most of this averages out over the length of the story.

All of this means that beloved characters, scenes or lines in the novels are left out. This is a large source of the vitriol that the fans heap on movies made from their favourite novels. I see it as understandable however when changes are needed, it's important whether the director has tried to stay in keeping with the feel of the novel and the characters or whether they've ridden roughshot over the material. In the Harry Potter franchise they've been pretty faithful for the most part, with one major exception in my opinion.

If you have only seen the movies, here's a few changes (from many) offhand for you. Dobbie the house elf appears in every novel from The Chamber Of Secrets onwards, it's him who gives Harry the gilliweed in the Goblet Of Fire, its him who finds the Room Of Requirements for Dumbledore's Army to practice in The Order Of The Pheonix. It's Cho's friend who squeals to Professor Umbridge about the DA, not Cho. Cho gets a bad deal in the movies, she's actually cool in the novels. Most of the characters are, with the exception of Crab, Goyle and Pansy Parkinson who are nothing more than undeveloped hyenas with the sole trait of insulting Harry, Ron and Hermione at every oppertunity, as well as fawning over Malfoy's every move. Draco Malfoy fixing the vanishing cabinet is only revealed at the end in the novel, until then the reader is as much in the dark as Harry, Ron and Hermione about what Draco is planning.

Movies must be understandable from a standalone viewpoint; ie you need to be able to get it, even if you've never seen any of the others. This would mean setting up who Dobbie is as well as Cho's friend (offhand I think her name is Mariana someone). This means time. Adding to this, Dobbie is a main protagonist in The Chamber Of Secrets, but a peripheral character in the others, so it's easier to give his parts to another character and leave him out.

To re-balance the plot you have to change things around a bit, this is where you can kill interest from the fans or win their loyalty. As I've said, there's one unforgivable change in The Half Blood Prince for me. I understand there needed to be some action point around the middle so a Deatheater attack on the Burrow was a decent idea, and well done. When you leave out a major part of the climax ie the Deatheaters attack inside Hogwarts itself, this is unforgivable. From the time constraints perspective, not doing the Burrow attack would have left time and kept the running time around the same. From the "let's focus on Dumbledore" perspective, we go back to that when the battle has died down anyway. Doing this properly would have given The Half Blood Prince a proper climactic ending and had the fans leave with a smile on their faces, instead of feeling like it was an anti-climax and that they were short changed.

The Force Unleashed

The Force Unleashed is primarily a video game with a story. The story is built up in terms of levels and goals. The novel is actually far better than it has any right to be under the circumstances, although it does still feel like levels in a video game. For the first section of the novel the main character is only ever referred to as "the apprentice". He gradually finds out his past and name. This anonymous, disconnected feel is essentially "player mode".

Video games have one purpose; action. The video sequences in games to do the storytelling are aimed at giving the gamer hints or instructions on what to do next, as well as rewarding them for completing a goal or task. Gamers don't buy games to be passive, they buy them to have lots of stuff going on. This is a problem in passive media like novels and movies as the balance is all wrong. Any movie based on a video game is by definition an action movie. There is little build up, little character development, little sub plots or peripheral characters.

Everything is seen through the "what does this have to do with achieving my goal" lens. Any characters mentioned are somehow connected to your goal. There's a limit on how complex you can make a goal in a video game without taking the fun out of playing it. Goals are usually set out in smaller sections with a very direct "get to here and find X" model. That sort of simplicity is too plain and flat for a passive novel or movie. This means you have to add more padding and depth which may not feel right.

Storylines in games are also set out from the single person perspective too, where everything revolves around the players character. This would be a first person novel, but the addition of video sequences to give the characters more background knowledge about the plot they're involved in kinda expands beyond the first person perspective at times. Depending on how this is done, it can be awkward and rather forced. A first person perspective movie is almost impossible. The dialogue in games are also done from the perspective of getting the video over with and the gamer back in charge actually playing the game, so like a cut down movie scene, it can feel rather forced.

Like the Harry Potter example, a lot of large budget franchises are multi platform marketing products now, so storylines have to be written to be reasonable enough in passive and active media to convince people to buy them. See the movie, buy the game, play the hero. This can be a case of catering to the lowest common denominator, in addition to the investors ensuring mass market appeal for maximum return on their investment. Any time investors have input like that on the creative part of the process, the result is always bland, albeit sometimes financially successful bland.