quote: | Originally posted by LAdazeNYnights
I understand what you're getting at, and of course you're right. Perhaps I was wrong to suggest that it should have been adapted to take place in America. A lot of the issues brought up, though, are quite universal. My point was just that it feels so wrong to speak english with so much foreign context. The movie could've been adapted into an English speaking one without referencing any exact place - I thought Feinnes did an exemplary job with this in Coriolanus. I don't think that the film would've suffered as a result of such things. I suppose the whole 'suspension of disbelief' thing doesn't work for me as well when it comes to language. |
Yeah, I think you're kind of rationalizing your own personal preference here.
I haven't seen Fiennes' Coriolanus, nor am I familiar with the original play, but knowing other Shakespeare's works and the fact this one is set in ancient Rome, I must assume that it was originally written as a timeless story - or, in other words, as a story about past that reveals a lot about present. That's not even considering the amount of time Shakespeare's plays exist in cultural discourse and how many times they were adapted and modernized. Hell, Emmerich's Anonymous even thematized this mythical nature of Shakespeare by presenting the writer himself as a (sort of) ghost we don't really know - validity of this specific conspiracy theory notwithstanding, here the true identity of the author is problematized. Shakespeare and his plays are now no less mythical than ancient legends; they share, for the purpose of this argument, the same metaphorical space.
Larsson, however, is a contemporary author writing about contemporary Sweden. Some of the themes there are definitely universal, but that's true of almost every story. The book is too recent for it to become a part of a mythical canon, and it's closely tied to a current social climate in a specific country. It would make no sense to rewrite it for a different location as well as shoot it in Swedish, since those films already exist. I think Fincher made right decisions and thematically (also formally/stylistically, of course) went further than the original movies, even though it may not be immediately apparent. The two ways of investigating (Mikhael vs Lisbeth) are fleshed out (and compared) a lot better, the role of new media is handled with typical Fincherian ease and the story is told much more confidently. It doesn't need to move from the swedishness of the original because it makes changes (and improvements) on so many different levels.
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