Batman vs Superman...oh, and everyone else, too

Today, Zach Snyder the director of the upcoming Batman vs Superman film (and every other DC film as far as anyone is aware) tweeted a picture of Jason Momoa as Aquaman. As everyone pretty much expected, he has donned the tradition bright orange jumpsuit with green underpants on the top, or rather that’s what i was hoping to see. Instead, I was greeted with a rather more appropriate looking Aquaman who is bearded and brooding. I shall include a link to Zach Synder’s tweet which has the picture attached below so you can Conan the Aquarian for yourself.

https://twitter.com/ZackSnyder/status/568650209581858817?s=09

Taking into consideration the time frame of the filming of the DC cinematic universe films, the posting of this picture would suggest that King Triton will be appearing in Batman vs Superman. This seems problematic given the number of other DC characters rumoured to also make an appearance in this film. The confirmed list (as far as im aware) of who will appear in this film is as follows: Batman, Superman, Lex Luthor, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Alfred Pennyworth, and Cyborg. All of those characters apart from Superman need to be introduced in a 2 hour period. It seems to be an impossible task. They will either play major roles and therefore have a poor introductions due to time restrictions or the majority will be cameos, which would make me question why they’d been forced in the film in the first place.

The picture of Poseidon was pretty much what I expected. Jason Momoa looks like the Aquaman I have been familiar with in DC comic for several years now. Essentially, this picture changes nothing of my feeling towards how he will play the character, just the way in which I think the Batman vs Superman film will play out. I truly hope it isn’t a case of having too many big fishes in a small pond.

Conor M.

Film Adaptations That Surpass Their Novels

To say that a film adaptation is better than the novel of which the story came from is, put simply, high praise, and it would be the standard to assume that book will always be better than its adaptation. But with that in mind, there are a handful of films which I personally feel surpass their written word precursors. I will obviously only highlight films that are relatively known to be adaptations and not just throw out films that people didn’t even know where adaptations, like The Godfather.

First off, I’m going to address the obvious two which are The Shining and Shawshank Redemption. Both were originally pieces of writing from Stephen King but were, in my opinion, brought to new heights in their cinematic forms. The Shining was originally more of a ghost story and made no qualms about making that clear. Kubrick in his adaptation brought out a more eerie feel to the story, and ultimately it felt more natural. Then there is Shawshank Redemption which was initially just a short story which only had echoes of the storytelling that was achieved in the film.

Another film that I believe built upon the original novel is Fight Club. For those of you that haven’t read the novel, it follows quite closely to the events of the film, but the reason I feel the film surpasses it is due to the way in which cinema lends itself to this physiological approach. As with The Shining, the ability to visually represent psychosis is a lot more endearing and accessible than it is on paper.

Finally, the last film that immediately came to mind is The Silence of the Lambs. This choice is because of many things – the direction, the story, the acting, but the thing that makes the film better than the novel is the fact that it brought Hannibal Lector to life in a big way. Anthony Hopkins’ performance really made Lector into something that could never shine through in the novels. Furthermore, if you also consider the fact that Hopkins improvised a lot of the more memorable lines, we can see that The Silence of the Lambs succeeded in doing what all adaptations should aim to do which is make the story its own.

SO WHO CARES IF THE FILM IS BETTER OR NOT!?

Conor M.

REWATCH REWATCH REWATCH

Sometimes, it can be really bloody hard not to get yourself too hyped up after seeing a spine tingling trailer for an upcoming film. You only have to look as far as the measly one and half minute Star Wars teaser trailer to see how much people hype and over-estimate their favourite films. We allow our inner optimistic some much needed and long overdue exercise time, as we let our imaginations run wild with the best things we can imagine being in a modern Star Wars movie.

And that’s great, sometimes the chase is more satisfying than the capture as we enjoy the speculation and rumours more than the finished product but when we finally come to judging the film, we can leave ourselves feeling deflated and let down that The Millennium Falcon didn’t do quite as many barrel rolls as one might come to expect. Which is why, to gain an accurate perspective on a film’s quality, it is paramount that you re-watch multiple times.

You could go to the cinema on Force Awaken’s opening day, your wildest Star Wars expectations smuggled in your jacket with your illegal sweets, and leave bitterly disappointed. The film could be good, hell it could even be great, but we all have our own unqiue perspectives on what Star Wars should be and The Force Awakens couldn’t possibly fulfill EVERYONE’S expectations.

This is where the second viewing comes in. You now know what to expect when you pay your extortionate ticket prices and sit down in that soda stained cinema seat. Sure, you know the plot and there are no more surprises in terms of reveals or mysterious characters but you go into this re-watch with your expectations curbed, ready to just enjoy a (hopefully) great Star Wars movie. That character that you didn’t quite like in your first watch because he isn’t who you thought he would be; now you find him endearing and magnetic. Sometimes, enjoying a good film is about perspective.

The multiple watch system works both ways, and you can find yourself going into a movie wanting it to be great so bad that you instinctively ignore and push past the obvious shite that you are watching. For example, and I’m a little ashamed to admit this, on my first watch of Amazing Spider-Man 2, I came out of the cinema buzzing from having seen a fun Spider-Man movie – I knew there were faults but I was ready to defend the film against anyone questioning its overall quality. Then I watched it for a second time.

And I barely got through the film again. It was 60 minutes when I first started checking my watch, which I continued to do for the next hour and forty minutes until the credits finally rolled. ‘How could I have been so blind!?’ I thought to myself, ‘this film is an absolute fucking mess’. My bias for Spider-Man got in the way of me judging the quality of a film – I wanted it to be good so bad, and I felt everything was in place for Amazing Spider-Man 2 to build successful on the solid foundations lay down by its predecessor. I got caught up in my own lofty expectations, as well as the speeding hype train that subsequently derailed spectacularly in a turn of events that led to Spider-Man joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe (yay!).

It’s almost impossible not to get caught up in the marketing campaigns that blockbuster films like Star Wars and Avengers have these days, with their trailers and advertising material specifically tailored to get you pumped for their film. You can’t escape it so take the appropriate steps to make sure you judge the film in the way it deserves to be judged. Watch the film a second time with your lofty expectations left in your other coat. It might reveal something surprising…

Alex A 

The Best Comic Book Directors and How they Rank

With the resurgence of the superhero genre and comic book adaptations in general in the late 1990’s, there has also been an emergence of directors who seem to be specialists in this genre of film. This is a list acknowledging these perhaps lesser known film makers and seeing to what degree they are specialists.

Bryan Singer

Bryan Singer had already established himself as a great director in general when he provided films such as The Usual Suspects in the mid 90’s, but since his directing of X-Men in 2000 his name has become synonymous with comic book films. X-Men and X2 both led the way he way for how future comic book adaptations should be approached. Superman Returns...not so much, but then he won us all back with arguably his best comic book adaptation yet X-Men: Days of Future Past

Overall Rating: 8/10

Joss Whedon

This man has never been a stranger to comic books as he has had a successful and critically acclaimed run as the Astonishing X-Men’s lead writer, while also successfully adaption his TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer into a long running comic series. Whedon’s really moved into the public eye which his 2012 release of The Avengers, the first cinematic venture into a film with a vast number of superheroes, and boy did he pull it off, as I’m sure he will do with Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Overall Rating: 9/10

Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi is something of a veteran of the modern superhero film, because as early as 1990 Raimi had created his own superhero in Darkman and made the sort of brooding, dark adaptations we are used to seeing more recently. He then went on to make two of the most quintessential comic book adaptations in the form of Spiderman 1 & 2. He also did Spiderman 3 though...he loses points for that one.

Overall Rating: 7/10

Christopher Nolan

There is no possible way i could claim Chris Nolan is a strictly ‘comic book’ director, rather, he is one on the finest directors of the past 20 years. However, his Dark Knight trilogy is an example of a experienced film maker, making comic book adaptations that will not be seen as great comic book films, but great films in general, and in an arguably snobbish film era we live in, that takes some doing

Overall Rating: 9/10

Matthew Vaughn

Matthew Vaughn is different from almost everyone else on this list in that he is not well known for directing traditional comic book adaptations (bar X-men: First Class, which was excellent), but rather for directing more obscure comic books in the form of Kingsman and Kick-Ass. The two aforementioned films really complimented the directing style that I feel Vaughn is most comfortable with, and bring out the best of Mark Millars comics.

Overall Rating: 8/10

Conor M.

The Increasingly Confusing Oscar Nominations (2015 Edition)

Award shows for film (and in most other forms of art) are essentially redundant. Recipients of these awards can surely be chuffed with receiving them, but ultimately they do not represent the overall success of the film as a piece of art, and it definitely does not place a film above other films which have not won awards. This is blatantly obvious in the world of music where you have artists such as Justin Bieber and One Direction as shoe-ins for awards, but it is less obvious with film because there is a certain amount of perceived prestige that goes with an Academy Award. This is an Award that you will receive after a chosen selection of ‘experts’ including academy members and critics vote for a majority, unlike the shit award shows which allow the general public to vote for the winner. However, the Oscars still manages to fuck a lot of shit up every year.

This year in the best picture category we were treated to some distantly ‘okay’ films as opposed to literally the best possibly films of the year. The films I am refereeing to are The Imitation Games and The Theory of Everything. They are both Biopics of which the stories themselves are quite interesting, with Alan Turing’s efforts to crack the Nazi code, and Stephen Hawking’s genius and decline in physical health. However, the way that these stories are presented is so formulaic that it is unbearable at times, and i don’t even mean strictly in terms of progression of story. Throughout both films the cinematography was awful, just straight shots of one person in a room then switch to a straight shot of someone else. Little Movement. Little Imagination. As Alfred Hitchcock famously said with regards to this back and forth way of shooting scenes “All i see is photographs of people talking, and it bears no relation to the art of the cinema” It limited both films and for me shelved them as ‘safe’ films.

The cost of whoring out these safe, samey films has been to the detriment of more inventive and interesting films, which were better in many ways. My thoughts are drawn to the lack of nominations for both Interstellar and Nightcrawler. Both films were left out from the Best Picture category where and I feel they easily should have been, and Jake Gyllenhaal I feel was extremely hard done by to not be nominated for best actor for his creepy performance in Nightcrawler.

 The final major thing which caught my eye from browsing the nominees was the omission of The Lego Movie from the Best Animated Feature category. This was one of the biggest box office smashes of the year, and its not as if it did a Transformers either, The Lego Movie was also critically acclaimed. To add insult to injury, Boxtrolls managed to get a nomination out of nowhere, a crudely animated film about trolls that live in boxes. Whatever.  

As i said, Award shows don’t matter. Great pieces of art will live on regardless of whether they won an award  or not. Just be thankful that Award shows like this exist and that not all of them are public voted, otherwise I would suspect Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie would be taking home Best Picture

Conor M.

F4nt4stic Four Tr4iler Re4ctions (That's annoying, right!?)

Well, the Fantastic Four (Fant4stic!?) trailer has finally dropped and it surprised everyone that it looks set to be an actual film with a proper release date and all. Before now, we have basically heard nothing about the film or seen any sort of footage – you know, apart from the rumours of Josh Trank getting ridiculously blazed on the set which, coincidentally, is what I would do if I found myself working for Fox. We had a cast and a release date, and that’s it but now we have a trailer.

Ignoring the fact that the trailer treads the age old superhero trailer path of slow music, foreboding narration and a little tease of the heroes, I liked the trailer – it peaked my curiosity enough that I’m excited to go and watch this film in the Summer. The film has a strong cast behind it with Kate Mara, Miles Teller and Michael B Jordan all impressing with their recent work in TV and Film – you would be hard pressed to find a better trio of young actors rising through Hollywood at the moment. Plus the film looks beautifully shot, if not slightly Interstellar-y, so I am excited to watch Trank’s finished product.

That doesn’t mean I’m totally sold on this reboot. The official description of the film starts off with “a contemporary re-imagining of Marvel's original and longest-running superhero team” which fills my head with all sorts of images of ancient Fox Execs huddled in a board room writing down what they think the kids of today like, and that fills my heart with dread. Nothing says cool and hip like Hollywood trying desperately to talk street and pretending to like rap music. All this boils down to the fact that I’m worried that Fox are going to detour too far from the source material which may give us a good sci-fi film that will result in an awful Fantastic Four movie.

It’s also extremely worrying that we have had to wait so long to see any footage of the movie at all. My instinct tells me that the producers didn’t have enough confidence in the footage that they had previously to release it to the public – we are now 7 months from release and we have only just had our first trailer, the marketing guys have a real job on their hands to get people hyped up for the Fantastic Four in such a short amount of time.

To be honest, even if the trailer was bad, I was going to watch Fantastic Four but now I’m going to go in to the cinema with a little bit more hope – well, at least with more hope than I will have for the next Amazing Spider-Man. Seriously Sony, fuck you.

Johnny Depp: Hollywood's Hidden Joke

I have always maintained, and shall continue to maintain until sufficiently proven otherwise, that Johnny Depp is a bad actor. That is not to say he cannot act, because he certainly can act. Although his acting rather strikes a balance that I find comparable to Jim Carrey – boringly serious or stupidly outlandish. To give credit where it is due, Depp has found success in the past through playing the outlandish caricatures of Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands, and yet as of late even the goofball characters have been flopping. Badly.

Depp’s last three leading roles have been in films that are arguably the worst he has ever been involved with – Dark Shadows, Transcendence, and Mortdecai. An Adam’s family rip off, an attempt to be as thought provoking as a slice of toast, and just classic Depp (that is not a compliment). Dark Shadows represents another outing of the outlandish Depp and could have tricked you into thinking it was an Adam Sandler film, which is sort of ironic given then even Sandler’s attempt at a Dracula/Adam’s Family Hotel film, Transylvania was a better film than Dark Shadows.

Transcendence, you could say, is the cinematic equivalent of any time Joey Barton decides to try and become a philosopher on Twitter. It is lacking in the ability to provoke thought, and the origin of this pseudo-philosophy is a joke at the best of times. In my opinion, as the film goes on Depp figuratively does an Agent Smith and turns into Neo (Keanu), to the point where his acting is so wooden he is quite literally becomes a machine.

Finally there is Mortdecai where Johnny Depp plays a posh Jack Sparrow. There is surely a plethora of jokes to be made about Depp’s acting in this too, most likely based around his moustache. How about, his acting and character throughout the film is essentially Peter Griffin doing a long moustache fart. That’ll work.

Ultimately, i have just proceeded to poke fun at Johnny Depp for his most recent showings, as they are all indeed terrible films. Yet somehow these films, and Depp himself, are still considered blockbusters. In this sense, Depp and his films are comparable to Adam Sandler and such films as Jack and Jill and Grown Ups 2, or perhaps Jim Carrey and Dumb and Dumber Too, all racking in the money, all terrible films with terrible leading men. Johnny Depp truly deserves this company as he is no better than them.

Conor M.

North Korea 1 Hollywood 0

Wow, now I did not see that coming. Sony has canceled the Interview, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, with no clue as to whether the film will actually ever get released. This comes in the wake of the Sony hack that gave us the knowledge of that potentially phenomenal Spider-Man news but the hackers weren’t happy with just potential, they demanded that Spider-Man return to Marvel immediately and have threatened to take extreme action if their demands aren’t met.

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I think it’s something to do with North Korea being a little peeved about The Interview’s portrayal of their great and powerful leader, Kim Jong-un. They also aren’t overly happy with the films central plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un for the good of the world or some shit, and have threatened action against the moviegoers of America if they choose to watch this abomination!

This is a dangerous precedent with the censoring of freedom of speech and creative integrity and all that jazz, coming under scrutiny. It sends a message to the whole of Hollywood that if you are well organized and half-decent with a laptop, then you could pretty much shut down any film that rubs you up the wrong way. I am personally thinking of taking an advanced computing night class in an effort to take down Terminator Genysis on the grounds that if you can’t spell genesis right, you don’t deserve to make another Terminator film.

Not only has Sony’s decision have paved way for Americans to remind us that they are American and they won’t stand for un-American things, but other studios are following suit with Steve Carell’s upcoming North Korean comedy also being cancelled as well as Paramount refusing to let any theatres show Team America as a replacement for The Interview. I mean, come on Kim Jong-un, your Dad was cool with Team America in all of its awesome, depraved puppet glory! Why won’t you let us watch Seth Rogen try to kill you for 90 minutes!?

There has been a lot of criticism of Sony, calling their actions cowardly and un-American (they are a Japanese company after all), but Sony were up against the major theatres of America, who didn’t trust that the safety of their customers who went to see The Interview was guaranteed. Here’s the thing, if Sony feel like they can’t keep people safe by releasing The Interview then they probably made the right call in cancelling the release for the foreseeable future.

People will end up watching this movie, whether Sony have a change of heart or decide to sell the distribution rights or even if the film just gets leaked on BitTorrent. People will find a way to watch The Interview, the only real loser in all of this is Sony, so normal service resumed I suppose.

Alex A.

Is Spidey Coming Home?

Who would of thought that a controversial film released by Seth Rogan and James Franco would start a chain reaction that would give us our most exciting piece of Spider-Man news since the train wreck that was Amazing Spider-Man 2. Yes, those North Korean hackers are wrong to do illegal hacky things to Sony but how much can we really complain when we were given the knowledge that Spider-Man COULD join the Marvel cinematic universe?

If I’m going to be blunt about Sony’s multiple takes on Spider-Man then I would say that they have only delivered one great movie out of 5 attempts – Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 was a true showcase of how to do our favourite web head. If there is one company that I would completely trust to take Spider-Man forward in the right way, it would be Marvel (they could make a good video game movie for Christ sake) but does their icon appropriately fit into their interlocking universe?

The logical entry point for the wall-crawler is Captain America: Civil War, with Spider-Man playing a huge role in that comic book storyline but how would this translate on to the big screen. The comic book dealt with superheroes and their secret identities, with Peter Parker removing his mask to the world in support of Iron Man, but that doesn’t fit into Marvel Cinematic Universe seen, as there are no secret identities. If the storyline is boiled down to just superhero registration then how does Spider-Man fit into this film without coming off as forced and gimmicky?

And for that matter, if Marvel were to retain creative rights for Spider-Man, what would that mean for the lesser-known characters of this universe? If Marvel had rights to Spider-Man from the beginning, would we have films like Guardians of the Galaxy with Marvel not needing to reach into their deep lore for movie inspiration? How many more great, risk-taking movies could we be denied if Spider-Man returned home?

To be honest, I’m just playing devil’s advocate, and the notion of Spider-Man making an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes me all kind of ‘I need a new pair of pants’ excited. Don’t fuck this up for me Sony, do the correct thing and give Marvel the rights because I swear to god, we are done if you make that Aunt May solo film.

Alex A 

The End of Hollywood Supremacy: Cinema Goes Global

If you live in what is known as ‘The West’ then your idea of cinema, and the films that you are constantly seeing advertised and shown at your local cinemas is mostly made up of...Hollywood. For everyone in the west, American cinema reigns supreme, which may seem normal, unimportant, however, there is a problem. Each nation in the west comprises its cinema of films from its own film industry and American films, as does nations in the east. The problem with this being that there is very little going in the opposite direction. America wants nothing to do with foreign cinema. Hollywood lives in a bubble, one that is about to burst.

American Cinema wants to continue to dominate everywhere and give nothing in return, and they have employed many tactics in order to keep it that way. One of the most known examples is American remakes of foreign films: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Oldboy being the most recent examples that come to mind. Now, it isn’t that these remakes were particularly bad, (although the old boy remake was terrible) its more that there was no need for them, no need to remake these films simply on the basis of having them be in English. But money talks, as they say, and a good film from another country can bring in millions as an American remake with millions of dollars behind it. Any show of excellence from another country is immediately paved over by America’s hijacking of it, all to keep the spotlight on Hollywood.

Another way in which America is trying to maintain its bubble is by giving the allusion of foreign cinema being present in America. In 2009 Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture at the academy awards, along with winning seven other awards in different categories at the event. Now, I’m not saying Slumdog Millionaire didn’t deserve to win those awards, far from it, what I’m actually saying is that a Indian orientated film with an all Indian originated cast winning all those awards at an American award ceremony gives the impression that Bollywood has broken into America, when it just hasn’t.  It was a British film, by a British director, that America took credit for. Im not saying there was any corruption either, it was a happy coincidence for the American microcosm.

But, this is all changing now, and the American bubble is ready to burst. America has become saturated with remakes of its own films and of foreign films. It is showing that it is running out of ideas. Soon enough people everyone will see that there are fantastic films coming out of Europe, Asia, and Australia. They are finally seeing that cinema is a global commodity, and that other cultures have unique narratives, directors, and actors to offer. This is of course only helped by the growing popularity of eastern cultures in the west, most notably Japan’s. Very soon American cinema will not exist, and neither will foreign cinema, we will just have a global pool of interesting and engaging films, a global cinema.

Conor M.

Do video games really need movie adaptations?

Do video games really need movie adaptations? It’s a simple enough question which you can give a simple enough answer: No. They don’t ‘need’ them, but do they actually do anything worthwhile? In other areas of art (Yes, I am including video games as a form of art) there is a lot of cross over in this regard, the most notable being novels adapted into films, Gone Girl being the most recent successful example of this. There is certainly success with book to film adaptations, and whether this taking from books is or isn’t a problem is something to discussed at a later time, but for now, the question is can there be success with video game film adaptations?

The recent precedent that has been set with Video Games adaptations isn’t promising. Who remembers Doom? You don’t? Then you’re one of the lucky ones, you didn’t have to see one of the most revolutionary and significant games get made into a laughable action film. It even had scenes where the shots were in first person POV as if you were playing the game, which far from being a homage, was just an example of the lack of experience in adapting a game into a film. Another significant recent adaptation is the resident evil franchise, which may be one of the most successful video game adaptations, albeit not very good but successful nonetheless, due to the amount of money it made. The problem with both of these examples, however, is how they transverse the mediums; Doom was poor because it tried to show, literally, a video game as a film, and Resident Evil only found mild success from completely changing the plot from the games. Neither were true adaptations, so neither was truly successful.

There is another way to look at this question, and it is in view of films that are inspired by video games. While they are not real adaptations, there are many examples of successful films, good films, being created from this approach, the most obvious being Tron. Tron was inspired by pong, such a simple concept, and yet it became a somewhat groundbreaking film that was well received. The digital aspect of pong and the emphasis of shapes, is very noticeable in both the original Tron and its sequel, Tron legacy. This taking of a simple concept is a lot easier to transform into film, due to the ability to build upon the simplicity of the concept.

Finally, it would be apt to look at some upcoming video game adaptations, specifically, Assassins Creed and Uncharted.  For all the details that have been released, it would be difficult to say outright whether these films will be good or bad. However, what I can do is say why these films could be the first of many to be successful adaptations. Recent video games such as Assassins Creed and Uncharted are generally more concerned with both story and cinematics, and for that simple reason they could be good films because they already possess what is important in films. The gaming industries recent trend of popularity towards both AAA games and indie games both lend themselves to the adapting process by taking the story from AAA games without having to deal with the complexity of interwoven game mechanics, and the ability to build upon the simple basis laid out by simpler indie games.

So, do we need movie adaptations? As games get ever closer to filmic standards anyway, probably not, but as they are going to happen anyway, it’s nice to some evidence to suggest they won’t suck massive balls.

Conor M.

Multi-Part Films: Good Idea? (Part One)

An increasingly growing trend in Hollywood, and the film industry in general, is the steady rise of splitting films into multiple parts. We have seen massive franchises such as Harry Potter, The Hobbit and The Hunger Games adhere to this practice but is it a good thing? Is it a creative tool to give the filmmaker more time to flesh out characters and plot? Or is it a cheap money-grabbing scheme from the suits?

 

If we were to argue that splitting films in multiple parts is a creative decision, then we would have to consider the source material that the director/producers are deriving from. Big franchise films these days probably clock an average of 2 hours running time, which in regards to the format, is still considered a large proportionate of time. So, your first big problem when adapting a novel such as The Deathly Hallows is being able to fit all of its plot and character development into a snug 2 hour slot in a way that doesn’t totally slaughter the pacing of the film. The simple answer is what we got, a 2 part finale to the Harry Potter franchise.

 

But that doesn’t solve all of your problems. When you are adapting a novel into two parts, you would naturally cover the first half of the novel in the first film and so on for the second part, except a novel doesn’t usually give you a fitting, suitably exciting conclusion to its first half – instead focusing on setting up characters and plot points, stuff that will pay off in the actual conclusion of the book. My biggest problem with Mockingjay Part One was that it was fucking boring for the most part, ladled with a forcibly exciting finale that wasn’t even written in the book. Basically, when adapting one novel into 2 films, your part one is going to suffer drastically from being all build up with no immediate pay off.

 

So, how would the multi-part films fare when they aren’t being adapted from set stories and books? You only need to look as far as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a film originally scheduled for a single four hour theatrical release that was split into 2 parts released within weeks of one another. Being an original creation, I feel that neither film suffers from the multiple release format with Tarantino able to give each film their separate identity, whilst fundamentally telling the same story. Importantly, the first film has its own narrative structure that doesn’t feel forced or hackneyed with the big build up to her showdown Crazy 88 and O-Ren.

 

The big problems that come when adapting a novel into multiple films is when that novel isn’t actually very long and the filmmaker starts to pad with unnecessary scenes that repeat what we have already seen or are there just to pander to a director. I genuinely enjoy The Hobbit films but I can’t help feel that there is way too much padding and splitting a book as short as The Hobbit into three films was never a good idea – there is probably enough plot for 2 movies that would include a nice link back to Lord of the Rings but with three films we get un-needed cameos from Saruman and a back story for Legolas that we neither asked for or wanted.

 

I do appreciate the need to adapt certain stories into multiple films, with their scope and length too much for one film to handle, but I feel that it’s becoming the norm for these franchises to automatically assume that it is necessary to split the story up so much creating a fractured and awkward movie experience. Seriously, Mockingjay does NOT need 2 parts – that is 2 hours of my life I ain’tgetting back.