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By Sam Graham
Starship Troopers
The most noticeable difference here is that in the film, the Mobile Infantry are foot soldiers with gnarly uniforms, whereas in the book they stride across the battlefield in nuke-launching power armour (interestingly, this book has the first usage of the term ‘power armour’).
The book however, is a laborious read.
Paul Verhoeven’s 1998 future war film uses in-movie adverts to satirise a militaristic empire that encourages its citizens into serving by making those that don’t feel inferior. It does this by showing propaganda that is so overtly over the top that they are obvious satire. A commercial for a prisoner’s televised execution ends with the time it’s on, a kid in an MI uniform promising to sign up for the military when he comes of age, “the only good bug is a dead bug”.
Robert Heinlen’s book features a similar military state akin to the Spartans of ancient Greece, however the book does not do this as satire. It takes this society very seriously and treats it like a realistic course of action. It’s the sort of future all those gammon-faced alcoholics in bomber jackets want. “What we need is a good war. That’ll sort them snowflakes out” they hark whilst never having served in the forces themselves, but are now too old, fat and useless for the draft.
The book is not without its merits; There’s a whole chapter dedicated to detailing the mechanics of how the power armour works, which is very interesting. It shows a lot of ingenuity. The book follows Rico’s military career from cadet to MI to officer, then back to MI as his first command goes to shit and he gets busted.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Frankenstein is in my top 3 ‘Books I hate the most’. See here for more details. The reason Frankenstein made the list is pretty much the same as Dracula. The book is very drawn out, giving us Victor Frankenstein’s superfluous life story before getting to the part where he went to med-school and discovered galvanisation like today’s students discover cocaine.
Unlike Dracula, which was penned by an author with years of both life, and writing experience under his belt, Frankenstein was written by a child. And it shows. The book takes the Victorian hyperbole to its logical peak. At least when Oscar Wilde rambled on a tangent, it painted a mental image that served the story (mostly). But Mary Shelley’s book seemed more concerned with rudimentary pseudo-eloquence that, after only a few pages, comes off as banal.
Kenneth Branagh’s hammy acting aside, the film trims the excess fat and keeps the audience focused on the man and the monster. Robert De Niro was a strange casting choice, but he nailed it. The monster’s monologue in the ice cavern portrays in a few short words what Shelley failed to do with an entire book and a thesaurus by her side. The monster is wracked with dissonance. It knows it must have no soul, but it feels it has one regardless. It never asked to exist, but now that it does, it deserves better.
Few books-to-film adaptations manage to take only the barest concepts from the source and successfully craft a new thing entirely, but 2018’s Annihilation manages this brilliantly.
That concept is that there is a portion of America has become host to a landscape of extra-terrestrial origin (Shimmer in the film, Area X in the book), and a group of scientists are sent in to investigate.
Firstly, the group in Alex Garland’s film have a purpose: to investigate the lighthouse, the source of the Shimmer. The book’s troupe however has no such goal. They are simply there. They meander around taking samples and having a bit of a look. If there is a purpose to their supposed scientific target, it’s failed the first letter of SMART targets: Specific.
The film is lifted by superb acting from Natalie Portman. She plays the stern and determined biologist, Lena as she seeks to find out what happened to her husband in the Shimmer. This gives her focus and gives us something to hope for. We’re just as intrigued as she is.
Portman’s book counterpart however, is the biggest problem with the book.
I should say that its interesting that Jeff VanderMeer managed to create a protagonist without a single redeeming quality. Through the many flashbacks, we are constantly shown that she is apathetic towards everyone in her life, her parents, her team, her co-workers, her husband’s friends, and even her husband. At one point she reassures her husband that she is not cheating on him when she goes for late night walks around the city. Then later she mentions that she fucked some local guy whilst working in the field and thinks nothing of it.
The way she talks about people, I get the sense that she sees herself as being superior to everyone. Like her not caring about their thoughts/feelings makes her above them. Like she is aware she is intelligent and judges everyone else according to her own degree of intelligence. She acts like an edgy teenager stuck on passive aggression. That kind of childish ‘The world doesn’t appreciate me, so I don’t care about the world’ thinking. Why did she even marry the guy is she didn’t love him? She never says so and never shows so. She clearly states that she doesn’t even like the word love.
Is she just with him, because he won’t go away?
The last few chapters begin to wax lyrical about Area X, but don’t have any focus, coming off as pretentious rambling. It fails to strike upon any deep meaning, because the Biologist’s revelations lack emotional weight. She has consistently shown no emotions to anybody in her life, so I am not invested in her enough to care when she does decide to go off looking for her husband at the end.
She does not deserve to find him.
Garland’s film does show what the Shimmer does to life forms, which is important to a film about scientific discovery. This should be a no-brainer really, but they have to actually discover something. The book asks more questions and answers none. By the end of the novel, the reader has no insight into the nature of Area X, what it does, nor what the venture into it was for.
One of the things that made Roadside Picnic- a clear influence on Area X- work was that it discussed the ramifications the alien landscape has on Humanity’s place in the universe. Roadside Picnic does it clearly, coherently, and uses a metaphor that makes perfect sense (its the title of the book).
Characters aside, the biggest annoyance about the book for me was that much of the plot revolves around hypnosis.
That’s right: a story about scientists on a scientific expedition revolves around a pseudoscience. The psychologist- de facto leader of the group- simply has to utter a phrase in italics and the team do as she wills.
It’s silly, and its all through the entire book and I’m expected to believe it as a realistic course of action. And getting drunk in an unknown, uncharted alien zone? Red Schuart (Roadside Picnic) wouldn’t let that shit fly.
Brace for impact.
Watchmen- the film, is better than Watchmen- the book.
First of all, Alan Moore fans are the comic equivalent of Stephen King fans and Kiss cultists: they just can’t accept that he’s fallible. Yes, his work is usually a cut above the average stock, but even he makes some mistakes. Such as when he made Rupert The Bear a sex-crazy abomination of Doctor Moreau’s who regularly has cops off with a robust (Alan’s words) gypsy woman in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II.
Zach Snyder’s 2009 adaptation is a masterful display of tracing the still images from Alan Moore’s book onto film. Its almost a shot-by-shot transference. While the film trims some of the more interesting elements, such as Hollis Mason’s book and his death later on, the film wins on two fronts:
● Snyder ditches the Black Freighter sections (theatrical version only). I get that they are a mirror of the main plot told through the medium of a comic within a comic about a supernatural freighter; it’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t stop it from completely spoiling the pacing several times. And it all comes to nothing when the kid reading it and the shop owner get annihilated by what’s in bullet point number two.
● Space squids. They were a terrible idea. For a story where a man becomes a veritable God, it jumps the shark. It’s so far out of nowhere and aside from a few dribs and drabs of mystery about Ozymandias’ secret island base, is quite ludicrous.
The film keeps the same level of threat, but uses an already established character as the fulfilment. Many characters comment on how Doctor Manhattan is losing his sense of humanity, how he’s forgetting what it was like to be one of us, how apathetic he is to political strife and Mutually Assured Destruction, because he sees existence on a cosmic scale. That becomes the fuse for his alleged attack on Earth. The loss of Human life is nothing to him. It ties into his character, one that’s been built up since chapter 1, and makes for an excellent twist.
Space squids out of nowhere doesn’t do that. Space squids. Squids that live in space, that all of a sudden decide to attack Earth, stops the Cold War.
Read that aloud, and if you still don’t like it, go and tell Glycon on me.
Enjoyed this piece? Then 'like' The Crusades of A Critic on Facebook. Sam also has a Tech Noir novel, 'An Inside Joke', which can currently be viewed here; his first novella 'Iron Country' is available to buy here; a horror short story, 'We Must Never Found Out', published here; and finally, another short horror story 'Eagal' available to buy here. Phew.
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