Essays, Not Rants! 365: Adaptational Change

There’s a delightful twist late in Captain Marvel that adds a nice layer of added depth to the narrative. It’s one that I didn’t see coming, but a friend who’s less familiar with the comics thought it was well telegraphed. The reason I didn’t expect it is arguably because of how used I am to the way things are in the Marvel comics. Turning things on its head is a concept so wild as to be unthinkable, and it’s something that the movie can uniquely do since it’s adapting a prior work.

Adaptations are weird beasts. We’ve all seen movies that failed to do the book justice, just as there are movies that take a book’s source material and improve on it. There’s a natural tension since what works well in one medium won’t necessarily work well in another. Oftentimes, the best adaptations aren’t the ones that try to recreate the source material but instead use it as a base to build something new. Aragorn is a cool character in the books, but Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings gives him a much more complex arc that’s far more dynamic to watch on screen. Because sure, reading about Aragorn as a man ready to be king who’s preparing for his return makes for a compelling read, but it could play dull on screen. Giving him self-doubt and swinging his arc so that it’s about his accepting of the mantle as he grows from Strider the Ranger to King Elessar makes for a real interesting watch. The heart of it is the same: Aragorn will be king, but it’s been developed to work better for the chosen medium.

Now, superhero movies as adaptations are a little odd, mostly because they seldom adapt one particular narrative. For the most part, these characters have massive mythologies unto themselves. This vast mythos allows storytellers a whole lotta room with which to craft a narrative. The Dark Knight isn’t a retelling of any specific Batman story, instead, it takes elements from the Batman mythos to create a new, compelling story. Arguably, one aspect of why The Dark Knight works so well is its distillation of its characters into their core archetypes: The Joker is chaos personified, so to oppose him Batman is the embodiment of order. Two-Face comes to exist between the two, in some ways offering a vision of a fallen Batman. There’s no question that these characters are who they purport to be, It’s a totally new story; unconcerned with retelling a specific comic book arc it’s able to do its own thing with these larger than life characters.

Carol Danvers, like so many other superheroes, has decades of adventures to inspire Captain Marvel. I’ve read just about all of the Captain Marvel comics with Carol holding the mantle and so in the lead up to the movie I was really curious as to what story they’d tell. Would they adapt "The Enemy Within?" Would it be a more spacey like DeConnick’s second volume? Or were they going to incorporate something from Carol’s time as Ms. Marvel (which I tried to read but really couldn’t get past the high-cut leotard she was in most of the time)? More importantly, were they gonna get her character right?

They do, not be recreating a particular arc or anything, but by keeping her her. Even though there are a bunch of changes from the comics regarding her backstory, she’s still her. More than anything, that’s what I wanted from the movie. As much as I wanted to see Carol hang out with Jessica Drew, Kit Renner, and Tracy Burke, it’s far more important for her to be that determined, headstrong woman from the comics. A twist that simply wouldn’t work in the comics works in the movie because, as an adaptation, it’s allowed to take those liberties and we go along with it because the character at its core feels so right.