Hey Miss Fox,
what parts made you think it was improved?
Few things here. First, I enjoyed the novel too. Very immersive. It doesn't feel like 600+ pages because you're there with them. But it
was Takami's first novel, and it shows at a few points. The film tones down a lot of the bad...
(Novel Spoilers follow)
The novel's Program co-ordinator had no function beyond being plain evil (I later found out he's a parody of the kind-hearted, down-with-the-kids Kinpachi-sensei character: a Japanese in-joke.)
The movie improved on this with Kitano who was interesting. He added to the plot by tampering with the game to save surrogate-daughter Nakagawa. Also through his daughter - the disconnected, respect-less voice on the phone - he epitomised the entire theme (below).
Kiriyama was awful. Book Kiriyama was a genius at EVERYTHING - martial arts, sports, violin, math - an epic Mary-Sue. BUT, had this totally made-up brain injury that had turned him into a terminator.
His difficulty distinguishing good and evil without emotion to guide was interesting, but overall I felt his character was a cop-out. Takami lacked the energy to have 40 real characters kill each other so he threw in a terminator. It cheapens the premise IMHO.
The movie left him as unknowable - with just a hint that he was in it for fun. He still weakens the premise, but it's better.
Sho was removed: good. To be fair they could have toned him down kept his storyline. But the storyline wasn't great anyway (follow Kiriyama, make innuendos, lose head). The character HAD to go. I think the author's only character-reference for gay men was Haado Gei.
Oda, also removed. This character was definitely someone real from Takami's life. I think someone from school who was better than Takami at sports, was dating whoever Takami was horny for, and who all Takami's friends liked a little bit more than they liked Takami. And he probably beat Takami in a creative writing contest too. Something that hurt.
There is just no other way to explain the venom in his writing for this character. How unflinchingly awful and pompous he is, and how the narrator actually breaks off to gloat over the character's death!
Finally the theme. The novel made do with nicking bits of Orwell (mostly
1984 and
Hommage to Catalonia) and went with 'Facists are baaad, m'kay!'. It doesn't quite work. But close enough. But it's pretty meaningless.
The film at least goes for something real: generational divide. It frames BR as an escalation of inter-generational mistrust. The adults have failed, the economy's crashed, confidence is gone and noone knows what to do. So out comes the old narrative that "The country's going down the pan because kids are out of control, feral, selfish and unmotivated. They need a good war to knock them into shape. So let's give them one!"
It still doesn't really work. But at least it has some real-world meaning - and Kitano's relationship with his daughter reflects this.
I'm also quite pleased the film got rid of the car chase showdown, and the weird references to the three dancing soldiers!
Don't take this wrong. Overall, I enjoyed the book. I'm saying it had flaws, and the way they cut it, and added to it, for the movie was damn masterful!
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Frantastic_Miss_Fox
10 years ago
Very interesting points! I can definitely see your reasons and I do agree with some of them!
I was also pleased with the exclusion of Oda and the car chase scene felt very out of place in the novel! I didn't mind Kiriyama and found him fairly interesting, but I do agree that it got a bit silly that he was literally good at everything and seemed to have no flaws besides the fact that he was evil. Sho I found fairly dull and uninteresting but I thought his death in the book was very well done so I was slightly disappointed that that death wasn't included.
Luckily all my favourite characters were still in the movie as were some of my favourite scenes/parts so I didn't have many complaints! I still prefer the novel but I did thoroughly enjoy the movie, and I thought some of the changes were very good!
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The_Zig
10 years ago
Hey,
Yeah, and to be fair, I might be being a bit overly harsh on the novel. Here and there my brain conflates it with the manga. The novel is good, but with bad bits. The manga... well, let's just say the manga takes all those bad bits, just about everything that is overdone, exploitative, stupid or just plain bad in the novel, and turns it up to 11! (i.e. amplifies it by a LOT!)
I bought the first six manga in a set before I even started reading them. Big mistake. Just this weekend I spotted them still packed in a box with a bunch of other books in the care of a relative. I went beet-red and actually taped shut the box just so that she doesn't discover them.
This'll have to do until I can sneak into the house when no one's there, slip out the mangas and replace them with something less humiliating like porn, nude selfies, Justin Bieber calendars or something.
Anything.
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Frantastic_Miss_Fox
10 years ago
Luckily I haven't read the Manga and, based off of most of the reactions I've heard about them, I'm glad I haven't!
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Dessek
10 years ago
It's probably just because of my love for the original novel and my even greater love for the movie adaptation, but this is a fact: I have never despised any creative work as much as the BR manga. It takes all that is good and wonderful in the novel and rips it out or twists it into grotesque melodramatic nonsense; it takes all that is awful and poorly conceived and inflates it and glorifies and revels in it, until every page feels like an affront to the creative powers of humankind. It is in every way the worst thing that anyone could do to the original concept, where the BR movie is (in my view at least) probably close to the best thing that could be done with it.
I remain firmly of the opinion that its publisher ought to atone for its sins by buying back every single copy in circulation and firing them into the sun.
________________
"I'm weak, and useless, but I'll stay by your side. I'll protect you."
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Dessek
10 years ago
Thanks Zig. I was gonna write all that, but then you did it for me.
I think these points really sum up why the movie is the more mature, balanced and meaningful version of the story. It relies less on cardboard cutouts, on the agency of "pure evil", and on a hamfisted political message. It replaced a ridiculous, totally unbelievable caricature of a game supervisor with a layered, ambiguous character who has real motivations of his own. It replaced the completely custom-made, impossibly skilled, unrelatable plot device Kiriyama with something that amounted to a grinning blank slate - it's not the best solution, but it's a huge step forward.
There were other things as well. The novel sadly likes to indulge in splatter horror, describing the carnage with morbid fascination, even inserting things like Shuya's dream to get an additional chance to describe the bloodied corpses of the students. In the movie this sort of thing is mercifully cut short. The violence is intimate, not gratuitous. The bloodshed is functional, not spectacular.
Sakamochi, Kiriyama, Oda and Sho were not the only poorly written characters in the novel. Both Mitsuko and Shinji Mimura were blatant Mary Sues - impossibly skilled at an improbably wide range of trades, incredibly good-looking, and with no negative traits whatsoever (with Mitsuko even getting excused for being evil through an absolutely terribly conceived backstory that thankfully got cut from the movie (and only briefly glimpsed in the Special Version)). The movie did both characters much better. They were less supernatural, more ambiguous, more human. Fukasaku did everything in his power to bring these characters down to earth, and in doing so he made the whole story that much more poignant and intense.
The movie also had the good grace to remove the author's clear hard-on for Bruce Springsteen. (Though it was replaced by an altogether different, but no less clear hard-on.)
________________
"I'm weak, and useless, but I'll stay by your side. I'll protect you."
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