I watched Bullet Train and Spiderhead after having read the books
And I have notes.
Hi everyone! Hope you’re gently settling into 2023. I’m back to writing in my big fuzzy ball chair, and also celebrating the recent launch of Joy Revolution’s first book, Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute, which hit the indie bestseller list right out of the gate. Hooray!
As promised, here’s my thoughts on two book-to-film adaptations.
The Bullet Train adaptation is about interpolating a story.
The Spiderhead adaptation is about wrapping an aesthetic around a story’s concept, ie. Marvelization.
⚠︎ SPOILERS AHEAD! ⚠︎
Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka: both better and worse as a film
THE BOOK: I loved it. It’s hardboiled in that off-kilter Japanese way, where tough homicidal criminals will contemplatively wax on about life’s little mysteries in their off-duty hours. There’s a whole ensemble of them, all looking for the same bag full of money hidden somewhere on a speeding shinkansen.
Yes, a lost bag of money is a tired, simplistic plot device. But in general, I think simpler is better. A simple plot gives the our assassins plenty of narrative room to philosophize and pontificate on everything from the real meaning behind Thomas the Tank Engine to the fundamental question of why humans kill. It allows the book these wonderful Pulp Fiction or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World vibes.
Think of a simple plot as a like a big, uncluttered space to play in. As a writer, a simple plot also lets me think more about the how of a story and less about the what. I believe a story is good not because what it’s about, but because of the special way the author tells it. It’s easier for a designer to make a clever and evocative chair, because a chair is simple. It’s harder to design a clever and evocative computer chipset, because that’s insanely complex. Storymaking is similar.
Isaka’s book, as hugely fun as it is, has a major flaw: it has no ending. The climax is strangely summed up in just a few pages, and then the book just kinda stops. It made me wonder about Japanese grammar syntax, which tends to put punchlines in the middle of sentences (not at the end like in English), and its cultural effect. Like, the Japanese national anthem doesn’t end with a bang—it swells, then peters out. Japanese fireworks have not grand finales, but grand milieux.
THE MOVIE brilliantly fixes the book’s lack of a climax. It extends the book’s last chapter into an entirely new Act 3 that’s wild and completely satisfying. It feels seamless, like something the author would’ve written, so kudos to the filmmakers for paying such close attention to the spirit of the book.
The rest of the movie, however, misses much of the rest of the book’s quirky, philosophical character, and chooses to focus more on fight sequences. I think that’s a film thing, to prefer the visceral over the intellectual, leaving less room for thoughtful dialogue. You can count the number of witty action movies on one hand.
Film tends to flatten as well. Bullet Train’s book villain—which is one of the creepiest, most nihilistic characters I’ve ever read—is sadly smooshed into an uninteresting cardboard cutout. And let’s not get into Hollywood’s old habit of putting movies in Asia without any actual Asians. Yes, there are a few Asian characters in this movie, but they have been stripped of hero status, recast as bit players, and boiled down to largely stock stereotype—any characters with personality are played by non-Asians, who basically treat Japan as a private ethnic playground to romp around in. Hardly a surprise, but oh well!
Speaking of flatting in film, up next is an extreme example.
Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders: far better than the film (titled “Spiderhead”)
THE BOOK: Escape from Spiderhead, a short story from George Saunders’ short story collection, Tenth of December, is about imprisoned criminals who let experimenters manipulate their emotions with drugs in exchange for better living conditions.
Again, the what of this story—its social and political concept—is simple. You get it right away. This leaves plenty of room for Saunders (my hero!) to do what he does best: write hilariously lopsided dialogue, paint pathos with that dry brush of his, and blur the line between the everyday and the surreal. At one point, the criminals’ tormentor (who also creepily wants to be the prisoners’ best friend) goes on a CVS run to get aspirin after a near overdose of a fear drug. The Saunderian universe, in other words, might as well exist just down the street. His stories are like watching Office Space through a cracked lens. His mundane aesthetic—drab break rooms, employee one-on-ones—never fails to make me notice the banality of the various evils in the real world around me.
And his ending will break your heart, even as you know it is inevitable.
THE MOVIE, by contrast, is a fancy cinematic spectacle. It takes place not in boring suburbia, but on a panoramic fjord. Not in a nameless business park, but in a cantilevered brutalist masterpiece that could be an Avengers base. Everything in the facility is a sleek, neo-mid-century modernist dream. Everything chirps and swooshes with high-tech elan. And the bad guy is played by Chris Helmsworth. Yes. Thor, but in glasses.
What the movie does is this: it takes Saunders’ extreme vision of the prison industrial complex, rinses it clean, flattens it down, and paints it one color.
We all know this isn’t new with film. I’m guessing we’re the type of nerds who whine that The book was way better. What’s new here is the Marvelization of story. By using an Avengers-like setting, and casting an actual Avenger in a main role, the filmmakers are infusing a non-Marvel story with atomized Marvel particles to give it that on-brand Marvel feel: low-stakes, glib, casually violent, predictable. The Gray Man, a tedious nonstop chase scene of movie, was the first experiment in Marvelization done in a spy movie style. You get the sense that any genre can be Marvelized, and I’m sure we’ll see more of it, because it works. It reminds me of Disneyfication, which people complained about in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s (until they got used to it).
As much as Marvelization works, I hate it. It takes all the teeth out of a story. It reduces nuance to simple good vs. evil. Happy endings are guaranteed. In Marvel movies, and Marvelized movies, nothing really matters. There is no suspense. There’s not even dramatic irony among the characters, who are generally so supremely confident (and again, glib) that they have no reason to doubt their ultimate victory. What Marvel movies excel at is giving viewers the cozy feeling of being right. This is why Marvelization works—it’s comfort food. When people scroll through Netflix after a long day, the last thing they want is something that will challenge their world view. I get that.
It’s not that the Marvel style is the storytelling equivalent of a deep-fried Twinkie on Lit Crit With Guy Fieri. It’s that the style was applied to something that didn’t need it, like a stucco gun in the wrong hands, most likely for wider commercial appeal and therefore profit. It makes Spiderhead the film the complete antithesis of George Saunders’ work, which excels at making me feel unsettled and questioning. Now, as a writer, I’m thrilled that Saunders got an adaptation made. I hope the Marvel trick works and he makes lots of money from it; I hope it raises his already stratospheric profile. His Tenth of December anthology makes a cameo early on in the film. That all said, though, it’s my dream to get a few drinks in him and hear what he really thought of the movie. I hope he found the whole experience funny and bizarre. I do.
But that’s only because I know that George Saunders the artist will far outlast any memory of that one thing Thor was in a while back on Netflix. It’s already falling off their feed. Meanwhile, the book is still on the shelf.
Thanks for reading! See you soon.
—Dave