'Age Of Empires' Designer Sandy Petersen Blasts Modern Hollywood Directors For Believing They Can Make Adaptations "Better"
Sandy Petersen, one of the designers for Age of Empires II as well as Halo Wars, Doom, and Quake blasted modern Hollywood directors and producers for believing they can make the story “better” when adapting projects to film or TV.
In a post to X, Petersen observed, “One of the great failures of modern cinema is that when they adapt or remake something, the director is filmed with hubris that he can do it ‘better’, not realizing his job is to present the original vision in a new form.”
From there he pointed to adaptations that he believes were well done, “It was done well by Peter Jackson for Lord of the Rings. He knew which parts of the book needed to be focused more in a film (Paths of the Dead) and which parts could be ignored (Tom Bombadil). He didn’t try to ‘fix’ the original works - he adapted it to a movie format, which has different needs from a book.”
“It was done well by [The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society] when they did The Whisperer in Darkness,” he added. “They added extra characters to the early story, so Wilmarth would have people to have conversations - in the original take, everything happens in letters or inside Wilmarth’s head. Also, the climax of the written story happens about an hour into the movie. But cinema needs more than that reveal, so it goes on for another 30 minutes, to its advantage I think, and does not betray the story’s promise.”
In contrast, he pointed to films that failed, “It was done poorly by Green Lantern which was so bad that Hector Hammond was more interesting than the hero. It was done poorly by The Scarlet Letter (1995) which turned a tale of hypocrisy and societal blindness into an erotic thriller.”
“And it’s being done poorly even as we speak by some ego-huge and talent-small hack in Hollywood to a tale we would otherwise have enjoyed,” he concluded. “It’s gotten so bad that every time Hollywood mentions a new adaptation, the knee-jerk reaction of the potential fans is “ugh” and nervousness rather than excitement.”
Petersen is not the only one to make this observation. J.R.R. Tolkien did it back in 1958 when he shared his thoughts about a film treatment for The Lord of the Rings. He wrote, “The canons of narrative in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.”
Speaking specifically to the screenplay for this adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote, “He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important pan of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.”
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