Hi guys.
I've been thinking alot lately about films and TV series bades on pre-existing franchises. For the most part it seems to me like whenever anyone tries to capture the essenceor quality of source material they almost never get it right. Case in point, the Michael Bay Transformers movies.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Bay is a bad film-maker. Heck, one of his films, "The Rock" is one of my all-time greats. What I have a problem with is that his attempts to make a live-action film series on this franshise falls flat because he fails to grasp the basic premise of the series. An age-old conflict between two ancient groups of giant robots exiled from their world due to civil war and hiding amongst the peoples of Earth in the form of everyday objects and vehicles.
That basic story could have been used to create any number of fantastic storylines or philosophical concepts, such as the damaging effect of war on a civilisation, the philosophical differences between peoples which can divide them, the notion that even a civilisation as mighty as one can be can still fall, the value of machine life against the life of a human. And thats just to name a few.
What Bay did instead was create stories which focused on a college student and his girlfriend, the amred forces of the USA with occasional brief scenes with the titular transformers. Seriously, if you did not know the title, you would never guess that these giant robots are supposed to be the main characters. No-one going in to see a film called "Transformers" is going into it to see the antics of a college kid or a generic group of soldiers.
What's worse is that Bay has publicly admitted to having no liking for the franchise. This is what gets me the most. To me, a film should be given to a director who cares about the story being made, not to one who does'nt.
Adaptations like this, are not rare. They get made all the time, the continually bad video game movies being made or the terrible series of Highlander films after the original.
Notice that whenever a good adaptation is made it is always a result of being made by a director who cares about the source material. Films such as the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, or the Simpsons movie, all made by people who know the stories and the characters well enough to make a good movie out of them.
What about you? If you were asked to make a film about a story you know and love by heart, with all your knowledge of the characters, locations and general mythology of that story, do you think that the film you make would be better than one made by someone who knows nothing about it, even if they are a good director?
I've been thinking alot lately about films and TV series bades on pre-existing franchises. For the most part it seems to me like whenever anyone tries to capture the essenceor quality of source material they almost never get it right. Case in point, the Michael Bay Transformers movies.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Bay is a bad film-maker. Heck, one of his films, "The Rock" is one of my all-time greats. What I have a problem with is that his attempts to make a live-action film series on this franshise falls flat because he fails to grasp the basic premise of the series. An age-old conflict between two ancient groups of giant robots exiled from their world due to civil war and hiding amongst the peoples of Earth in the form of everyday objects and vehicles.
That basic story could have been used to create any number of fantastic storylines or philosophical concepts, such as the damaging effect of war on a civilisation, the philosophical differences between peoples which can divide them, the notion that even a civilisation as mighty as one can be can still fall, the value of machine life against the life of a human. And thats just to name a few.
What Bay did instead was create stories which focused on a college student and his girlfriend, the amred forces of the USA with occasional brief scenes with the titular transformers. Seriously, if you did not know the title, you would never guess that these giant robots are supposed to be the main characters. No-one going in to see a film called "Transformers" is going into it to see the antics of a college kid or a generic group of soldiers.
What's worse is that Bay has publicly admitted to having no liking for the franchise. This is what gets me the most. To me, a film should be given to a director who cares about the story being made, not to one who does'nt.
Adaptations like this, are not rare. They get made all the time, the continually bad video game movies being made or the terrible series of Highlander films after the original.
Notice that whenever a good adaptation is made it is always a result of being made by a director who cares about the source material. Films such as the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, or the Simpsons movie, all made by people who know the stories and the characters well enough to make a good movie out of them.
What about you? If you were asked to make a film about a story you know and love by heart, with all your knowledge of the characters, locations and general mythology of that story, do you think that the film you make would be better than one made by someone who knows nothing about it, even if they are a good director?
