I'll admit that the cinematography, make-up and action sequences in the trailer look pretty cool, but I still can't get past the fact that the "author" basically took the original novel (word-for-word), sprinkled the word zombie in every now and again, and got to earn high praise and huge financial profit from it. It's pretty messed up/disappointing that he's getting rewarded for doing THE laziest "adaptation" in literary history
shareSo yes, most of the book is the original. But he added a LOT of content. There are places where you go several pages before you get back to anything that Jane Austen actually wrote.
shareYes, and the author freely admits how much he "researched"* from the original novel.
But when you do parody or satire you can "research" as much original material as necessary. Plus I believe all of Jane Austen's books are in the public domain (but P&P&Z is NOT) so it's not like any lawyers are going to be serving him with cease and desist.
* see Tom Lehrer
Honestly I just tried to write a review about this. The film was enjoyable, but it felt a little choppy and there were things brought up that didn't get addressed, but overall I enjoyed it. So I went to see what the book was like and could not believe how almost word for word, chapter by chapter the book was a translation of the original text. It was very off putting and seriously at time I would expect him to have tailored or changed things to accommodate them living in a zombie world but nope.. He chose to just swap out some words here and there. It was in my opinion ridiculously unoriginal.
That being said having looked into the PPZ book, gave me a greater appreciation for the film and it's attempts to further explore the idea of a zombie apocalypse world in Regency time setting. The film tried to include more depth to the explanation of the world, the characters and their background, and do more than just tell the story as a direct translation with zombies. Unfortunately I now see that the problems I have with the film spring from them trying to bring more to the story and universe, plus keep the classic P&P story within, all in the two hours or so allotted. Had it had a longer run time I think they could have fixed a lot of these things and it would have been a pretty good film.
In short it's much better than the book, which I find kind of deplorable in its lack of originality and inability to do more than add a fight scene here or there and swap words/phrases out where possible.
The thing is, after this long, the copyright laws that apply to recent books no longer apply to Pride and Prejudice. There're literally hundreds (thousands?) of P&P rewrites that are perfectly legal.
It's different to something like Fifty Shades of Grey, which was a pretty strong case for plagiarism of Twilight.
No it's not. Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
The author clearly credited the original author. No plagiarism.
In addition, if you're publishing satire or parody, you also have a lot of leeway. Just look at Weird Al Yankovic. He records songs that are direct rip-offs of other people's work, but it's all parody so he can do it with no problems at all. He never claims that he wrote the original music his songs are based on.
http://currentscene.wordpress.com
This really has nothing to do with satire or parody laws. Pride & Prejudice is so far out of copyright, you can basically do whatever you want with it. That's why it is popular to film. No rights necessary to obtain.
shareThe author clearly credited the original author.
Which is a lot more than we can say for Amy Heckerling and her film Clueless (1995). Austen didn't receive an on-screen credit, not even for "based-on." She is only mentioned in a featurette bonus on the DVD. The credit omission cannot even be rectified here on IMDb because, apparently, the writing credits for that particular entry were submitted by a member of the Writer's Guild, and therefore, IMDb will not permit any alterations to the writing credits (not even noted as "uncredited") unless they are submitted by that "venerable" institution.
Plagerism? What the hell is plagerism?