(Note: This is adapted from a comment I made elsewhere.)

A good adaptation from book to movie or tv, honors what is worthwhile about the source material, and changes the things that need to be changed for coherence in the new medium or for the audience’s comprehension. It follows therefore that you can’t make a good adaptation of a work that you believe has no merit. For instance, I would be the wrong person to adapt Frankenstein by Mary Shelley,

because I think it is a fairly conventional, sermonizing soap opera of the kind that a number of writers of the period went in for, except that Mary Shelley dresses it up with MAD SCIENCE. A man of the upper classes illicitly fathers a son and abandons him, except that instead of fathering the son in the usual way, he does it with MAD SCIENCE. The abandoned son grows into a selfish, resentful, morally challenged person, rejected by society…but he’s rejected by society because daddy’s MAD SCIENCE has made him an uncanny valley horror. The abandoned son finds his wayward father and bullies or blackmails him into finding the son a wife; in the usual novel of this period, the father would resort to kidnapping and shady clergymen to try and make it happen, but instead wayward father turns to MAD SCIENCE to try and make it happen. If the wayward father repented in a different novel of the period, he would probably release the kidnapped bride-to-be and be murdered for it by the illegitimate son or his henchmen. In this novel, the wayward father simply disassembles the unfinished bride he was making with MAD SCIENCE. Even the part where the illegitimate son murders the wayward father’s love interest could happen in a conventional melodrama of the time, although it would probably be a much younger second wife. All MAD SCIENCE does for this part of the story is make the father, son, and murder victim relatively close in apparent age.

So, yes, according to me, trying to make a “good adaptation” of Frankenstein the novel is a meaningless exercise, and anyone complaining that the handful of Frankenstein movies I like or respect(1) are not faithful to the source material tends to make me go, “yeah, and?” Meanwhile, Dracula the novel is a decent thriller-adventure story with horror elements, which has spawned some iconic movies like the 1931 adaptations, which ditch or alter every single character and their story functions, except maybe Van Helsing, and largely omits the adventure element. Then there’s another iconic movie from 1958, which keeps Dracula closer in personality to the books, but shuffles, merges and omits large portions of the human cast. It only homages the adventure elements of the book because the actor playing Van Helsing was a frustrated swashbuckler who did what he could to work those elements back in. In other words, they’re all good and influential movies but not great adaptations. For the “Dracula as romantic lead” versions (starring Jack Palance, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, and whatever twerp Luc Besson has hired), I have nothing but contempt, no matter how many overlooked plot points and characters they tap into or how nice the production values look. Even if they’re honoring the plot and the characters, they’re not honoring the ethos of a novel that in my opinion has an ethos worth honoring.

By the same token, you can’t be a good adaptor of older works if you believe these works are hopelessly corrupted by Evil Past Values, and are best adapted by taking the names, costumes and a handful of plot points and applying them to something you actually want to make so you can ride on the coattails of a more famous name. But also by the same token, nobody can be a good adaptor of the parts of Tolkien’s Legendarium which take place between the Sinking of Beleriand and the events of the Hobbit, because there simply isn’t enough “there” to adapt coherently, let alone faithfully. All you can do is try to tell a coherent story which respects the setting and ethos of the more developed stories of Middle Earth, and that’s where Rings of Power and apparently(2) War of the Rohirrim fall down.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Basically, there’s a Golden Age of Adaptations which starts around 1989 with Poirot and Campion, continues through the 90s boom of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen adaptations, and culminates with the release of Return of the King in 2003. To me, the best book to film adaptation is Hunt for Red October, which was made in 1990 and falls squarely into this period. It preserves the suspense, military ethos and emphasis on sea-going danger, high technology, and cloak and dagger stuff that are the book’s strengths. It develops the characters more fully without being overly mawkish or sentimental in a way that would clash with the overall tone. It trims distracting subplots and streamlines the technobabble. It condenses the end of the book, which is well-done but kind of spread out in time and geography, into something that happens all in one time and place. The best book to tv adaptation is probably the Agatha Christie short stories adapted for the early seasons of Poirot, or the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, although the latter’s fanbase annoys me from time to time, and I’ve gotten very tired of this idea that Darcy must be a gruff, rather abrupt and inarticulate oaf.(3)

But both P&P 1995 and early Poirot combine solid production values for the time, with competent story-telling abilities and an understanding that these are stories worth telling, about people whose social protocols and priorities differ from ours. Maybe some dissonance between their values and ours has to be swept under the rug for the viewers’ peace of mind, like Mr. Bennet’s casual assumption in the novel that his favorite daughter would be in some sense subordinate to whomever she married, and that this is part of why she must marry a man she can respect. Maybe some effort to add charm and nuance to Poirot’s recurring cast of allies should be made. But broadly speaking, the adaptations from this period at least try to recognize that the foreignness of these past cultures is part of what makes them interesting. These adaptations try to show us how people lived by different rules in different times, and maybe teach us something valuable about our own times and our own priorities by showing us the alternatives. I’ve been speaking in terms of period adaptations just now, but most of what I just said also applies more or less to adaptations of the works of Stan Lee, J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien. They are also showing us people living differently from us, because their worlds are different from ours.

Not everything in the Golden Age is infallible: Mansfield Park 1999 is very “current year” in its attitudes and priorities, although well-made and fairly entertaining as long as you understand that the writer/director is almost continuously lying to you about one character or other, and that therefore it is unsafe to carry assumptions from the movie back into your readings of the book. Certainly, its craftmanship and story-telling abilities tower above the caliber of adaptations we usually get today. The superhero movies of the Golden Age are also a very mixed bag, with the first two Batman and X-Men movies maybe being the best of an unimpressive lot.

As far Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies go, I feel that Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition is about 95% of the way to being a good movie and 90% of a good adaptation, and that goes down by 5% in movie quality and 10% in adaptation quality for each of the two followups, so that Two Towers: Extended Edition is about 90% of a good movie and 80% of a good adaptation and Return of the King: Extended Edition is about 85% of a good movie and 70% of a good adaptation.

Some of this decay is due to the way in which certain bad adaptation decisions compounded over time, like the handling of Elrond and Arwen. Some of it is due to the filmmakers doubling down on things that people liked about the first one. There were spectacular cgi-assisted stunts in the first movie. Therefore the stunts in the second and third movies must be so extravagant and outrageous as to make the action choreographer on The Matrix blush. Viggo Mortensen was great at the mournful bedroom eyes thing in his scenes with Liv Tyler, without compromising his character’s dignity. Therefore Karl Urban and David Wenham must also make mournful bedroom eyes, even if the situations aren’t organic to it and they aren’t as good at it as Mortensen. Still, a movie that’s even 85% good, 70% faithful to the source material, is pretty impressive considering the challenging nature of the source material. Were these movies the best possible Tolkien adaptations that could have been made at the time? Maybe not, but they were the best probable Tolkien adaptations that could have been made at the time, and I have no reason to think that better Tolkien adaptations would be made today. (See Rings of Power, above, which I don’t hate but which is pleasantly inane at best and painful at worst.)

This Golden Age is followed immediately by a Silver Age, which starts not quite two years later with the release of the Keira Knightley P&P in 2005, continues with another round of Dickens and Austen,(4) the later and increasingly flawed seasons of Poirot, and arguably most of the better MCU movies (which were based on specific storylines from the comics). The culmination of the Silver Age is possibly Love and Friendship (Whit Stillman’s 2016 adaptation of Austen’s Lady Susan). Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies also go here. According to me, they are entertaining movies but relatively bad as adaptations, although in fairness I will say that the source material is a messier book than LOTR, with elements that lend themselves better to PJ’s Dungeons And Dragons tendencies than LOTR did. My own favorites from the Silver Age include the first Iron Man, Thor, and Doctor Strange movies, the 2008 Sense and Sensibility (less well-scripted than the 1995 film but also with more likable characterizations overall and a more attractive aesthetic) and the 2007 Mansfield Park (which at least tries to acknowledge the heroine’s insecurities and her uncle’s complexities, unlike the 1999 version). I am also fond of the 2007 Northanger Abbey, which has its faults, but also transforms that smug, patronizing little b**** the male love interest into someone worth falling in love with.

The Bronze Age of Adaptations actually preceded the Golden Age, IMO: a cycle of mostly book-to-tv adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic that included the first two adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, the Ian Carmichael version of Peter Wimsey, The Agatha Christie Hour, and some other stuff that’s well-regarded but that I personally haven’t seen yet, like the Pallisers, the Louis Jordain Dracula, Rich Man Poor Man, Shogun, etc. To me, this Bronze Age starts with the 1971 Sense and Sensibility and ends with the 1983 Mansfield Park. My personal favorites from this period are the 1980 Pride and Prejudice, the 1971 Sense and Sensibility, and some of the better episodes of The Agatha Christie Hour.

You have some prominent adaptations that kind of fall between two stools, like the 1987 Wimsey and Northanger Abbey, or the 2004 Bride and Prejudice. If you find it tidier to cut the Golden Age off at, say, 1999 with Kandukondein and I think some Dickenses and Wildes, and declare the Silver Age as starting in 2001 with the Poirot reboot, I’m okay with that too. It means that the Poirot reboot and the Harry Potter movies aren’t straddling two cycles of adaptations, and I don’t mind thinking of the LOTR movies as the best of the Silver Age works rather than the almost-best of Golden Age ones. As for the current cycle of adaptations, there are bright spots, like Emma 2020, but most of the time, the words “Dark Ages” and “Kaliyug” come to mind. See my comments up top about how you can’t adapt a work well unless you believe it has merit and are trying to translate that merit into a new medium. We don’t see a lot of that attitude today.

(1) My approximate ranking, by artistic merit, of Frankenstein movies I consider to be worth sitting through goes like this, from top to bottom: Bride of Frankenstein, Frankenstein 1931, Curse of Frankenstein, Revenge of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein (basically a tie between Son and its comedic remake), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Evil of Frankenstein. My ranking by how much I enjoy watching those movies would drop the Mel Brooks and James Whale movies altogether, for being well-made but not my thing, and more or less invert the remainder of the artistic merit ranking, with Son of Frankenstein moved to the bottom.

(2) I was really intrigued by Helm Hammerhand in the appendices, and making him a bystander in his own story galled me a lot more than anything Rings of Power has done to the vast wasteland of Tolkien’s Second Age. So no, I haven’t seen this one.

(3) My mental image of Darcy, reading the book around 1993-1994, with no exposure to any of the existing adaptations, was of a suave, haughty, sarcastic kind of guy, like a Basil Rathbone villain, and nobody else (well, maybe Georgette Heyer) seems to have picked up on that.