Film It: The Art of Adaptation

The thing about adaptations are - and this has been harked on for years, so I'll be brief - that they're hard to do.

They're incredibly hard to do when you have diehard fans angsting and quibbling over what got dropped.

It's what Jackson transcended with Lord of the Rings so many years ago.

Now granted, Jackson had a few different scenarios than the Harry Potter films - he never had to compete with Twilight for one thing, and Tolkien is, uh, kind of dead - but the kind of sporadic, and confusing results of the newest film is mind-boggling:



Now, granted, this isn't just a writting issue. Some of it was issues with editing, and overall feels, to a certain extent like they're not even trying anymore.

Because, to be honest, they really don't have to try - at least, not to make money.

And there's no way to actually keep everyone happy with things like this - the rejig of Star Trek, being an epic restructuring in a beautiful way has spawned blogs against it.

But, this is where the question of focus comes in, and what Jackson did was amazing.

And what seems to have been lost, at the essence, of the newest blockbuster. Certainly there's scenes that play better in the film than the book, and that book is a clunky, long-needed-editing-itself darkening of the Harry Potter "world", but the long standing issue with the films has been the lack of communication to those that haven't read the books.

And since it's been a few years since, this film itself just got a couple too many single-emo-tear-loss of character moments mixed with a jumpiness that just made it hard to follow.