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All three 90 minute episodes available at once they say.
Yes indeed: it’d be amazing if they wrote one: I think it’s noticeable that the end of M:I Rogue Nation stole from the end of Sherlock S1 with Benji/John wearing a bomb vest and repeating the villain’s words to the hero.
I think I’d actually love Moffat to do an Indiana Jones slightly more as I think his style would suit it and he could come up with a great adventure plot, but they clearly love a bit of Bond too. There’s even a wink towards Bond existing in Sherlock when Mycroft mentions an MI6 colleague of his preferring a ‘blunt instrument’ :)
I think Claes Bang would make a rather great Bond villain too: I hope he’s very famous very soon! :)
Well not really: they’ve been very clear that an issue with the source material is that Dracula is barely in it so they decided to make him the star.
I think complaining about this not being faithful is a bit silly to be honest: it was never going to be the book put directly on the screen.
I loved ABC Murders incidentally: I thought it was gripping in a way Christie rarely is and Malkovich was superb.
Did you watch it though? It was perhaps not my favourite of the three and it maybe ran a little too long, but it’s still exciting and creative stuff.
I have not, this was just an observation based on many reactions published on several outlets.
I’m glad you enjoyed it, but your opinions tend to run contrary to most.
When it’s available, I’ll watch all three.
I've only watched a few minutes of it, but so far it's not Dracula's presence or amount of screen time I have issue with. It's the unnecessary changes to the narrative, tone and characters. It doesn't improve on the story or make it more suitable for the medium. So far it's not as bad as the 2006 one. And at least Harker is a more believable Victorian solicitor than say Keanu Reeves.
And since we've had faithful adaptations of Moby Dick, Lord of the Rings, The Maltese Falcon and others, I don't think it's silly or too much to ask for one faithful adaptation of Dracula. I haven't heard anybody complaining about the old Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes for being too close to the source material.
Those are all different novels: some are easier to film than others.
To be honest I don’t really get why people want to see a book they read on the screen. If you read the book and enjoyed it that’s great: why do you want to see it again?
And it is rather silly to expect a Moffat/Gatiss adaptation to be faithful: the point is that they make these and add to them. There’d be no point in getting some of the most imaginative TV writers to just slavishly copy a book out.
And I'm afraid I don't find this adaptation that original or imaginative. So far they have borrowed a lot from other adaptations: explicit mentions of venereal diseases, explicit allusion to sex in a Victorian era setting, Lugosi's accent and famous line, Mina's portrait, and that's what I got with only a few minutes in.
That said, so far they have a far better casting than pretty much most of the adaptations I have seen, their Dracula is properly menacing, they even manage to get a few lines from the book here and there.
Because it's never been adapted faithfully! There's no "other" faithful one, there's not a single faithful adaptation of Dracula. Because like many horror classics, it has been "polluted" by misinterpretation, false information, etc. What would be actually original is an adaptation that is actually close to the source material.
And don't get me wrong: I enjoy many of these adaptations. Nosferatu is a masterpiece. Many of the Hammer ones are great atmospheric gory fun. Even the old BBC adaptation has its moments, sometimes accidentally. I'm looking for something that has NOT been done before, not another free style on the same theme.
I'm glad they were at least honest, unlike Coppola, but that's not what I said. I said that's what I'd love to see and I said why. I also said that if someone could write a faithful adaptation, it would be Gatiss, based on his very good work on MR James. That's it, that's all. Whether he was willing to is a different topic entirely and I haven't been following the production of this one. You are stating I made assumptions that I never made.
I also never said I wanted "another" faithful adaptation as there's not one to begin with. Not on screen anyway, for other mediums it's another debate entirely.
Then you shouldn’t be criticising this version based on your false assumptions about what it is. They aren’t changing things ‘for the sake it’ and the book wouldn’t be fine ‘as it is’. They believed they were retelling the story in a manner that worked for their audience and which adds something.
So you didn’t mean it had been adapted in every way then.
Mostly it’s the stage play getting adapted anyway: an audience expect to actually see Dracula in ‘Dracula’, so giving them what they want doesn’t seem an issue to me.
So far they've been heavily borrowing from previous adaptations rather than making anything orginal. Except for the beefed up role of Sister Agatha, turned cop for the Vatican or something. Is she supposed to replace Van Helsing?
But still, it was a lot of fun imo. Gory and witty with a cool villain/hero dynamic played by two brilliant leads (I'd love to see either of them in a Bond film). Not sure if I'd put it on par with Moffat's best Doctor Who or the first two series of Sherlock, but it was much better than Moffat's worst Doctor Who or the dire last couple of series of Sherlock (and even they had one standout episode each out of the three to be fair).
And, to be fair to them about the departures from the source material, some great Bond films have nothing to do with the Fleming novels they were based on. I think it was still brilliant on its own merits.
@talos7 I googled it and there are positive reviews as well. Most of the criticism seems to come from the sudden change in setting, but I enjoyed that twist personally. You should give it a watch and make up your own mind if you're interested in it.
I'm looking forward to whatever they do next, but to be fair, I probably would be even if I hated this. Even when Moffat fails, he's always shooting for the stars. It's never boring. I just love how ambitious and quick witted all his work is. The man's a genius imo.
Interesting, I look forward to seeing it.
Then why complain that it isn’t something it never claimed to be?
Please actually watch it before criticising it. Yes they’ve drawn inspiration from previous versions, but do you honestly think they’ve added zero new elements? How likely is that? And why complain that it’s not entirely faithful and that it does nothing new? I’m not sure how you can want both! :D
Absolutely: I’d rather watch something new and ambitious (if flawed, as this is in places) than just an unambitious straight novel adaptation. We have the novel already.
I can criticise as much as I want/see and about the intrinsic value of the series regardless of the writer's intentions. And I can change my mind on the work when I see more of it. And I can watch how much I want and when I want. When I find time.
I don't know how often I need to repeat that adapting it faithfully would actually be new. And given the scope of the novel, it would actually be ambitious as well.
+2
Gatiss' Dracula reminds me of his take on Moriarty and the Master. Extroverted, wisecracking, hyper, slightly mad. .. It's like he can only write one sort of villain. And why bother make a period piece then transporting it in modern time if you make the dialogues and attitude of the characters so modern to begin with? That's just clumsy.
Disagree on the tone. I think it was probably exactly what they were going for. Even the episodes of Doctor Who they wrote that were heralded as the scary ones are full of gags. They both started as comedy writers, I reckon that's just their style. It's a tricky balance but in general I think they pull it off, because I think the one liners never defuse the sense of danger and tension in their shows. And when things get really bleak they tend to reign it in and get serious.
I can see why people are annoyed about it not being faithful of the novel because it does claim to be based on it in the credits but, to be fair, Dracula is a big pop culture figure. Asking why they bothered to call it Dracula is like asking why Roger Moore's Bond was still called James Bond. It might have Ian Fleming's 007 in the credits but it wasn't, it was a new spin on an old pop culture legend. Same with this. I think with such iconic long lasting characters you have to be prepared for radically different takes on it.