Post#1671 » by Ill News » Wed Feb 9, 2022 8:24 am
Last weekend, I finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and holy crap what a fantastic book. I read it in two days, I just couldn't put it down. One of the best books I've ever read, and I don't think I'll read a better book this year (I've made a Goodreads pledge to read 25 books this year, btw lol).
Because of that, I started watching the HBO adaptation, and it's been a disappointment. It's not bad, but there are simply some changes I don't like or agree with, particularly removing much of the mystery in the Prophet's character and changing his backstory. I also don't like that they're not emphasizing the importance of Arthur Leander (who is miscast, imo; Gael Garcia Bernal doesn't exude "big movie star" charisma even though he's a great actor) especially since he's the fulcrum of all the events and characters. Also, the Traveling Symphony just come off as pretentious hipsters--which they kinda are in the book, except the series fails to make them endearing for me.
It made some good changes though like changing the Jeevan and Frank storyline, but I really wish they just remained faithful to the book. I'm only 7 episodes in and it feels like an aimless, disjointed mess, like what is it really trying to say? I felt that they made all these changes to make it more "timely" given that we're in the middle of a pandemic, but I fail to see why closely following the book wouldn't have achieved the same result. Sometimes, it's best to not just screw around much with the source material, especially when the source material is already close to perfect.