"I Am Legend"? You are suck.
Apparently this is "reviews of movies I have not seen" week.
This morning I was watching the MSNBC and some guy was talking about the new film I am Legend. When describing it to the host of the show he said, "It's Castaway with an army of mutant lepers". Upon hearing this I froze, turned slowly towards the television, and felt fear overtake my entire being.
"Oh no," I thought, "they couldn't have..."
THEY DID.
In the new I Am Legend, Will Smith fights "mutant cannibals". In the novel? In the original? The main character fights VAMPIRES.
Ok. Who thinks that Mutant Cannibals are better than Vampires? Who makes that call? Who in the depths of their ignorance thinks, "Man, Vampires are stupid. I need to change the story so that Will Smith fights Mutant Cannibal things instead."
WHO THINKS THAT?
Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman have writing credits for the film. So apparently one of them decided that vampires suck. The only explanation I could find was on the wikipedia page where it says, "While the infected become vampires in the novel, the film depicts them as "dark seekers" (Neville's term for them) who consume living flesh, with a design inspired by the concept of their adrenal glands being open all the time."
Bri-fucking-illiant.
Hollywood as a collective entity needs to have its "rewrite" liscense revoked. Beowulf fathers a dragon-baby? Fine, ok. But when they take stories containing vampires and replace the vampires with mutant cannibal whatever-the-fucks? They've shown that they are incapable of making sensible decisions.
37 comments:
/agree
Vampires are possibly the most kick ass antagonists around. Oftentimes they even make for kick ass protagonists (i.e. Underworld, Blade, Vampire Hunter D). I would much prefer they take a book that doesn't contain vampires and add them in some way.
... I've got a problem with this rant..
becuase it forces me to defend Akiva Goldsman.. which I do not like. I mean.. it HURTS to contemplate it.
You want to talk about Will "Aw Hell Naw" Smith? Sure. You want to crack on it for any number of reasons.. sure.
But Legend isn't your classic vampire. EPSECIALLY not after following the adaptation pedigree through Omega Man. They're vampires, but they're also ghouls, and cultists, and mutants. They're ALL of these things, and not exclusively one. They aren't Dracula, they aren't 30 Days of Night vamps, they aren't Underworld or Blade or anything like that.. they're post-apoc science abominations.
You're right and wrong.
Source
In the original novel:
"Instead of asking the reader to accept a supernatural explanation for vampire phenomena, the author strives to offer scientific basis for such symptoms as aversion to garlic, craving of fresh blood, and resistance to bullets but vulnerability to stakes and sunlight. The aversion to mirrors and crosses is classified as psychological. Neville hypothesizes that he is immune to the bacteria because he was bitten by a vampire bat when he was stationed in Panama."
So, sure, there are reasons given for why they act like vampires but for all intents and purposes? They're vampires. Aversion to Garlic, death by stakes and sunlight, drink blood, etc.? They're vampires. We can quibble about specific aspects of vampiric powers but it adheres to the rudimentary vampire characteristics. Hell, Spike and Angel couldn't turn into bats or mist (in Buffy vs. Dracula Spike explains that Dracula uses "gypsy trickery" to do his shapechanging / magic) but they were still "vampires" in the academic sense.
Last Man on Earth? Vampires
Omega Man? "violent, light-sensitive albino mutan"
That's kinda my point, though Jay.
Buffy went out of it's way to dismiss quibbles of it's audience. Becuase the question was going to be raised somewhere.
We're holding onto the same side of a larger argument, but treating it differently.
this weekend I got into a shouting match with Alex Dayton here at the house. Alex is fond of the tiny-subgenres : There's science fiction and then there's science-fantasy. That kinda thing. I despise it. I think it's narrow, and leads to stratification, stagnancy and a lack of ability to discuss material without falling back to those phrases. Similar to saying something is or is not truly metal, becuase it doesn't conform to a certain structure.
We both agree that the creatures are vampires. WE disagree on what they should be called. You think that they should be called vampires. I don't think that's necessary, and judging by people like Alex, that doing so actually distracts from the work.
Matheson's vampires are mutants, yes? Infected and altered. And cannibals, in that they are human (were in Nevile's eyes)and feed on humans.
So... where's the problem? Seems to me the problem you're railing at is that they
"Aren't Vampires"... which while you agree with me, you seem to fall squarely into the sub-sub-sub genre folks camp.
In what way are the creatures in Will Smith "I Am Legend" vampires?
J, we determined a couple of years back that zombies are the new fad in horror stories. It's a no-brainer why they have to show up in everything now. Even if it's at the expense of vampires.
Considering we've not seen it? I dunno, nor do you.
This is my entire point.
You're leaping on the movie for claiming that they are mutant cannibals.
Which apperently doesn't fit your image of a vampire.
But the Matheson vampires ARE mutant cannibals.
You have a specific image of what a vampire is, so specific that a mutant cannibal doesn't fit that, without any context for either.
Even though Mutant Cannibals actually reflects the original text, becuase it doesn't have the name vampire, and it doesn't fit your concpetion OF vampire, you're up in arms.
To spin it back at you, how are the original creatures not mutant cannibals?
Oxford English Dictionary: vampire (n)
1. A preternatural being of a malignant nature (in the original and usual form of the belief, a reanimated corpse), supposed to seek nourishment, or do harm, by sucking the blood of sleeping persons; a man or woman abnormally endowed with similar habits.
Vampires are not cannibals.
1. a person who eats human flesh, esp. for magical or religious purposes, as among certain tribal peoples.
2. any animal that eats its own kind.
A human who eats a human is a cannibal. A cat who eats a cat is a cannibal. A vampire who eats vampires is a cannibal.
A vampire who eats humans? Not a cannibal.
It's a no-brainer why they have to show up in everything now.
I see what you did there.
Really?
so a vampire cannot be human?
so.. then... the creatures in the book, can't be vampires.
For that matter, they're not preternatural, either...
So your problem isn't with the movie, but the book.
Vampires aren't human.
The creatures in the book are not human.
Ergo you suck.
The creatures in the book are TOTALLY human.
They are infected humans who have undegone an transformation brought on by a virus. They are humans who have been, stay with me now, mutated, as the case were.
Mutated in such a way that they like to feed upon well.. humans. Which would make them cannibals, you see.
Unless in the transformation they lost their humanity.
When discussing vampires we have to bring religion into it. So it's possible that in the mutation their souls were lost.
So they would no longer be human beings.
We should make a movie about a semantics vampire, who survives by feeding on semantic arguments created by his not being a vampire in the classic sense.
His name will be "Arucard". That way even his name sparks semantic arguments regarding transliteration.
Because "Arucard" is not "Dracula" backwards unless you're a god-damned gook.
Interesting(?) notes about Dracula/Alucard:
According to Castlevania, Dracula is rendered in Japanese syllabary as "do ra kyu ra", the reverse of which is "ra kyu ra do". Alucard is "a ru ka a do"; reversed as "do a ka ru a" (The 'a' following 'ka' is a result of an R which would be unpronounced in a British English reading).
Anyone, and I mean anyone who spells Alucard as Arucard, Arukard, or anything other than Alucard in Roman characters does so out of ignorance, because the spelling is dependant on the reversal of the word Dracula as written in Roman characters, and should a translator not realize that, then they'll probably make a mistake in spelling when attempting to transliterate the word from Japanese.
As a (further) aside, translators not "getting it" is a fairly pervasive problem, which is why I think translators of video games should know things about mythology and folklore, since nearly 100% of shit that shows up in video games is pulled from it.
[/rant]
According to Castlevania, Dracula is rendered in Japanese syllabary as "do ra kyu ra", the reverse of which is "ra kyu ra do". Alucard is "a ru ka a do"; reversed as "do a ka ru a" (The 'a' following 'ka' is a result of an R which would be unpronounced in a British English reading).
Wonderful.
Kind of interesting...
Wikipedia's 'Arucard' page.
How could a translator not "get it"? Part of being a translator, I would think, would be to "get it" or to invest one's self in the process required to "get it".
"How could a translator not "get it"? Part of being a translator, I would think, would be to "get it" or to invest one's self in the process required to "get it"."
J, are you fully invested in your job? Do you think a translator cares if he/she is halfassing it?
Disinterest or laziness seems like a likely candidate for most of the issues. Another, though, is that it can be very difficult to tell what English equivalent should be used for a name written in Japanese, and in some cases, the correct answer and the various incorrect answers are all equally permissible if the original text is all that is considered. Kali, a Hindu goddess, makes an appearance in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow(?), but they call her "Curly" in the game. Certainly a person dedicated to getting the translation right would have probably done some research to differentiate between a diety and a member of the 3 Stooges, but Curly and Kali look exactly the same in Japanese, so the mistake is at least understandable assuming the translator doesn't know about Kali.
WHY must we bring religion into it?
This is the type of thing I'm talking about. The ONLY reason to bring religion into it is beucase you know you've lost, and you can't admit it.
And now look what you've done. You've sparked Adam off on his translational diatribes.
Well... damnit... if this thread doesn't end with all of us frothing about unrelated personal quibbles, then I don't know what SHOULD happen.
J, are you fully invested in your job? Do you think a translator cares if he/she is halfassing it?
My job includes photoshopping pictures of rakes and making ass-ugly websites in an attempt to please three people who never agree on anything.
Their job is translating the text from video games and anime.
So, yeah, I don't know why they are not fully invested in their job.
To cite an example of the sometimes unclear process of translating names, the character Bleu from Breath of Fire is "d(e)i i su" in Japanese. It should be prounounced in such a way as to rhyme with "geese" (the final u is an unvoiced vowel, and the (e) indicates that the character for "de" is used, but there is a small "i" next to it, which overrules the (e) and makes the sound "di"), but I don't think it's obvious what spelling should be used, because it's not clear what the name is meant to refer to (probably why they just called her "Bleu"). Later games change her name to "Deis", which is probably about right, given her proximity to godhood and the closeness in spelling to Deus, and the fact that the Japanese name is technically spelled Deisu (sort of, see above), but I think Dis is also probable, as the Disir (singular Dis) were female divinities from Norse mythology. I personally think Dis is correct, but I can't blame Capcom for settling on Deis. I'm sure there are times when there's no clear answer, and no time to deliberate.
because it's not clear what the name is meant to refer to
Do phones not exist within the realm in which games are developed? Can they not call the writer and say "what does this name refer to" in whatever moon-language the creator speaks?
Communication has, I think, gotten better between creators and translators, but it's obviously not perfect, and I don't know why exactly that is (though I would assume demanding schedules are a major factor). Of course, even if a translator were to pick up the phone and call a writer, there's still a chance for miscommunication. Consider calling your logic professor and asking her whether she meant for a thing to be called a Curl or a Coeurl.
And don't blame Jay for the translation diatribe, because this is clearly a tirade.
NOW DAMNIT! THIS is MY issue. Tirades and Diatribes and Hullaballoos!
ALL THE SAME!
YOU! ON MY LIST!
THE HULLABALLOO LIST!
RIGHT THERE!
UNDER VAMPIRES - Religion or No?
And you're NOT getting off, either!
Be it curl or coeurl or cuuuuuuuuuuuuerrl it sure as fuck isn't a tilde.
All my arrows turn to question marks!! All my worksheet make no sense!
You all pigs. Stupid, stupid pigs.
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