One of the grand traditions of filmmaking is to adapt existing literature. At the Oscars, there's a whole distinction between Adapted Screenplay versus Original Screenplay awards.
And from a certain perspective, this makes sense - film is a profoundly expensive medium to produce. Television, in the last 20 years or so, has begun to be held to a similar production quality standard, making a season of TV in some cases significantly more expensive than a feature film. Adapting a known work means that there's a certain buy-in. It's a story that people already know is good (or at least already know) and oftentimes, there's an eagerness to see a work translated to the screen.
Alan Moore was a bit of a mentor, as I understand it, to Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's Sandman comics began when he was in his 20s in the late 1980s, the decade where Alan Moore (among others) really pushed the medium into a more adult-oriented, mature form. Alan Moore has had very bad luck with adaptations of his work - only a handful of movies or TV shows based on his writing has turned out halfway decent, with tons of examples, perhaps the worst of which is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that seemed to shit all over his work.
But Moore has another objection to the very idea of adapting his work: it suggests a hierarchy of media.
At least in America, film has been considered the pinnacle of popular art (again, I think that the Golden Age of Television, starting with shows like the Sopranos in the late 90s, has allowed TV to edge into that space - but the two media are basically fraternal twins anyway,) and in the case of comic adaptations, are often seen as elevating the story to a "higher" form, which Alan Moore has always objected to - he likes comics as a medium, and he writes comic books, and doesn't feel that turning his stories into something for the big screen improves them.
Neil Gaiman has had a little more luck with adaptations, though there have been fewer. The American Gods show didn't turn out so well after Bryan Fuller indulged in his late-Hannibal penchant for naval-gazing at the expense of story. But the movie Stardust is generally well-liked even if not many saw it, and the stop-animated Coraline was also well-regarded.
Perhaps in response to his experience with American Gods, Gaiman has taken a strong hand in shaping The Sandman, as an executive producer, and one who seems to have been involved in the show's process pretty directly.
The result is that Netflix's Sandman adheres pretty closely to the source material. One could even argue that it's nearly a translation - as direct as one can get to just putting the comics into live action as you could get.
That's not entirely true, though. Indeed, there are plenty of changes. Many of the visuals of the comics are redesigned to be more cinematic in nature. Some of this, I'll say, is actually a loss - Dream's battle with John Dee does show our protagonist shifting in appearance with each frame the way he does in the comics, and his journeys through others dreams don't reflect the shift in art style between various peoples' dreams.
Apparently they tested out make-up and wardrobe to make Tom Sturridge appear just as Dream did in the comics, with chalk-white skin, black hair, and full-blue eyes, but they found that, while it looked like he'd nail a cosplay competition, it didn't really look right for the show, which, with physical actors, was naturally going to have to look a bit more grounded and realistic.
Still, I think many of these adaptations like to speed through plot lines, cutting and redesigning with abandon, and The Sandman is a pretty faithful, at least to my recollection (I've been flipping through the trade paperback volumes I got in college to check and see - it does seem that season 1 covers Preludes and Nocturnes along with The Doll's House.
There are elements that are cut - most noticeably the references to the larger DC universe - which only really existed in those early issues, as far as I remember. But the show still retains the structure of the arcs present in those volumes - we get Dream's captivity by Roderick Burgess, the meeting with Constantine (though admittedly a gender-flipped Constantine I think intentionally made to seem different than her DC universe equivalent) to find his bag of sand with her ex-girlfriend, the trip into Hell to play a high-stakes game to get his helm back, and the battle with John Dee over his ruby. We get his following his big sister Death around for a day to learn a bit about humanity, and the centuries-spanning flashbacks detailing his slow-growing friendship with Hob Gandling, and then the whole plot with Rose Walker and her brother Jed, the Dream Vortex, all the fun housemates as well as Lyta Hall, the Corinthian, and the Cereal Convention.
So, it really covers the bases and gives us pretty much anything we wouldn't want to lose.
It's a faithful adaptation, and that's a nice thing to see.
Does it say anything new? That's something I can't really put my finger on.
One thing that would be hilarious if it didn't remind me of how backwards our culture seems to be (and, sadly, especially in "nerd culture,") is the complaints about the diversity on the show. A few characters that were portrayed as white in the comics - Death, Lucien, and Rose and Jed Walker - here are played by black actors (Lucien was also gender-flipped to become Lucienne). Unfortunately, this has caused a vocal minority whose like of Neil Gaiman seems unlikely to complain about the show's "wokeness." The most baffling of all of these complains is against the casting of Mason Alexander Park, a nonbinary actor, in the role of Desire - a character who is explicitly non-binary in the comics. (This reminds me of people who complained that Rue in the Hunger Games movies was black - which she was in the book, too. Your poor reading comprehension is no reason to complain about "wokeness!")
With the first season and approximately a fifth of the original comic run completed, I'm hopeful that the adaptation will continue to succeed. The Sandman is an odd, and in some ways anthological series of comics - the title character is sometimes more of an elemental force in other peoples' stories than the protagonist. I'll be curious to see if the show can lean into that nontraditional story structure as it grows more pronounced. Rose Walker is the protagonist of the back half of the season, though Dream remains fairly active.
I'm tempted to read through the comics again.
No comments:
Post a Comment