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Watchpoint: Gibraltar - N4A Chat Thread - August 2017


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20 minutes ago, Schmengland said:

What I wonder is, how did Edge of Tomorrow, a film based on a manga that's relatively obscure, manage to be decent where most of these other adaptations have fallen flat?

All You Need Is Kill was a light novel written in 2004 and the movie was based on that.  The manga adaption coincided with the release of the movie.  Light novels are actual books so--barring otaku-pandering bullshit genres--they can typically be devoid of all the convoluted, fetishizing or ridiculous tropes and storytelling sensibilities present in anime and manga that have trouble translating into other cultures.

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23 minutes ago, Schmengland said:

What I wonder is, how did Edge of Tomorrow, a film based on a manga that's relatively obscure, manage to be decent where most of these other adaptations have fallen flat?

It's based on a light novel as far as I know. 

 

They decided they didn't need to be super faithful but they also didn't toss out the stuff that made it good. That said I'm not actually really a fan of Edge of Tomorrow. 

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Any anime or manga that is very distinctly JAPANESE is going to have a hard time transitioning into other mediums because the cultural differences in acting, drama, comedy, storytelling and how they prioritize them are different than western culture.  The reason why you hear people wanting American adaptions of sci-fi properties like Cowboy Bebop or (until recently at least lol) GitS is because it's a genre that has some universal sensibilities that are easy to understand regardless of what medium they're from.  You have to adapt things that you can expect to work and be understood by people who don't watch anime or manga. y;

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this adaptation was probably the worst thing that could have come out of death note, which i found incredibly fun to watch and overall quite good and a classic anime 

 

it was somehow even worse than i expected but at least it was fun to make fun of 

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3 minutes ago, Schmengland said:

That's just it: This description applies to most of the adaptations we've had so far outside of Dragonball Evolution.

EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH not sure I can endorse that.

 

And the irony there is that Dragonball is a property that's popular all around the world and recognizable by virtually anybody with an interest in seeing it.  I thought that was less about it being a bad English adaption and moreso it being a live-action adaption.  I mean it's fucking atrocious for both reasons but DB did not strike me as something that should ever be live-action. y;

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2 minutes ago, ___ said:

EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH not sure I can endorse that.

 

And the irony there is that Dragonball is a property that's popular all around the world and recognizable by virtually anybody with an interest in seeing it.  I thought that was less about it being a bad English adaption and moreso it being a live-action adaption.  I mean it's fucking atrocious for both reasons but DB did not strike me as something that should ever be live-action. y;

That's what I mean: Dragon Ball anything was ill-suited to the treatment regardless of how anybody tried to hack it. All You Need Is Kill, Ghost in the Shell, and Death Note were much better candidates, both relative to Dragon Ball and in general.

 

Yet, Edge of Tomorrow remains the sole example that is popularly regarded as decent.

 

Basically, what I'm saying is that I can't just chalk this up to poor choices in source material.

 

Even with that said, I'm not entirely convinced that there are as many poor choices in properties as we offhand think, mostly because it is my opinion that superhero(ine) comic books, as campy as they are, should not be able to translate to live-action as well as they have recently (saturation aside). Yet, we have (some of) the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman, and the Nolan Batman film trilogy. In other words, if we can make these work worth a damn, we could have fucking made something of GitS and Death Note.

 

But we didn't.

 

So what is it so far? Poor choices in directors? In producers? In screenwriters? The wrong film companies? A general misunderstanding of what makes these properties good?

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33 minutes ago, The Moon said:

no filler so far 

 

or nothing i would consider filler at all, as far as i can tell

I looked it up. Seems like the internships episode was mostly filler. But it seems that it was mostly just expanding on the brief flashbacks and author notes that the manga had, so it is still mostly canon?

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4 hours ago, Schmengland said:

So what is it so far? Poor choices in directors? In producers? In screenwriters? The wrong film companies? A general misunderstanding of what makes these properties good?

d) All of the above. Especially the last point, which if you ask me, is probably the driving force behind all the other points. A lot of bad adaptations can be chalked up to studios hiring filmmakers who are not necessarily bad, but ill suited to the material, because studios have poor understanding of their own properties and see filmmakers as interchangeable. Zack Snyder would be a good example. He made a fairly satisfying Watchmen adaptation, but was totally wrong for Superman and Dawn of Justice. It's pretty clear he was hired to direct the latter two because he had prior success making comic book movies, rather than because his style would be appropriate for Superman. I haven't seen the new Death Note, but I do see similarities: Adam Wingard is a hot filmmaker who's gotten some buzz in the last few years, and was a hired hand brought in for a project that studios have been trying to get made forever. There's a good chance they've just been drawing names out of a hat (at one point, Shane Black was supposed to direct it).

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