Sunday, May 29, 2016

Alice Through the Looking Glass: Top 10 Changes from the Book to the Movie

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016 Film)
versus
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871 Book)
Hi book-lovers and cinephiles,
I wanted to mention the entire audiobook for Through the Looking Glass available on my Youtube channel here. Each chapter is a separate video in the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwfXGniOxBs&list=PLsZjD2a28wVa63pe8MrBvTXaTE5WnJpoD&index=1

Through the Looking Glass is public domain, and the complete text is also available online.  If you’re interested, I read Through The Looking Glass on the Gutenberg Project’s website, here http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm  Also, a reminder that this is not a book review, nor is it a movie review.  It’s a dive into the differences and similarities of the book and the 2016 film. We’ll discuss the setting, a few Easter Eggs the movie included, some major character changes, and overall themes and symbols in both the movie and the book. Finally, you can check out the video edition of this post, here https://youtu.be/5ol4qTVnjVs

Without further ado, let’s jump down the rabbit hole-

1. Looking Glass World versus Wonderland
In the movie, Alice returns to Wonderland. I completely get why the movie did this. For the sake of simplicity and the returning characters, it’s an obvious decision. However, in Lewis Carroll’s books, Wonderland and Looking-Glass World are not the same place. Looking Glass word is divided into squares by a series of little brooks with hedges growing perpendicular to them, to resemble a massive chessboard.  Wonderland has a lot of card playing imagery and Looking-Glass World has chess imagery. Wonderland uses frequent changes in size as a plot device.  Looking glass world uses frequent changes in time and spatial directions. Other than Alice and Dinah (Alice’s cat) none of the characters from Alice in Wonderland carry over to Through the Looking Glass, though some the characters have “mirror-image” counterparts, such as The Mad Hatter and Hatta, Haigher and the March Hare, the Red Queen and The Queen of Hearts.  


2. Looking Glass Room
There’s an iconic illustration of the moment Alice steps through the looking glass and into a  room that is a bizarre reflection of the room she just left. John Tenniel’s original book illustration includes a clock with a face on it. In the book there’s also a chess board with the pieces come alive.  I love that the film included these little Easter eggs from the book. A literal egg they included is Humtpy Dumpty.  He’s a main character in the book. The movie didn’t do that, but I appreciated that they at least did a quick hat tip to him in the film. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are also major characters in the book that have a reduced part in the movie, but one detail about Tweedledum and Tweedledum that the movie kept is that they fight each other with umbrellas after one of their toys gets ruined. And of course, Tweedledee still says “Contrariwise” to everything.


3. Alice
First, let’s talk about Alice’s age, because it’s really different. In the book, Alice is 7 and half. In the movie, it’s not clear exactly how old Alice is, but Mia Wasikowska, the actress who plays Alice, is 26.  I think it’s safe to assume the movie’s version of Alice is at least in her mid-twenties, and she already has a mounting career as a ship captain. A major theme in the book is growing up and the concept of leaving childhood and growing into an adult. The loose plot in the book is centered around a game of chess, in which it’s Alice’s destiny to become a queen. Becoming a queen is kind of a metaphor for growing up or becoming a woman. Despite the age difference between the movie and the book, the overall theme of growing up is still left largely intact.  In the movie, Alice struggles with figuring out what it means to be her own person and how to make tough decisions as an adult. The idea is still there, but I actually think the movie built more context around it.  In the book, very little is mentioned about Alice’s life outside Looking Glass World, but the movie uses Alice’s adventure to save the Hatter as a catalyst for her to face hard choices in her “real” life.


4. Hatter
The movie centers around The Hatter, and everything Alice does is essentially for the goal of reuniting Hatter with his family to make him well again.  A character called Hatta is in the book as a sort of mirror-image of The Mad Hatter from Wonderland.  Hatta is barely in the book at all.  He makes a small appearance in chapter 7, The Lion and Unicorn, where he appears as one of the White King’s messengers. The King says he must have two messengers “to come and go. One to come, and one to go.” As per usual, Hatta is drinking tea in the book. John Tenniel illustrates Hatta as the same character he illustrated for The Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.


5. The Red Queen
In the film, the main villain is the Red Queen.  Based on the movie trailers, I thought  Time was going to be the villain of the movie.. That was a bit of a bait and switch. To be honest, I didn’t love the Red Queen in this movie. All the  events that led to the Red Queen becoming bent on revenge were shown, but despite showing us her motivations, it still seemed poorly explained and insufficient. I also didn’t buy her sudden change of heart after the White Queen’s apology at the very end. It’s like, you burned down a village, stole human beings and forced them to live as ants for years but now all of a sudden you’re cool? I don’t buy it.  In the books, The Red Queen isn’t really a villain, but she is something of an antagonist.  She’s like a caricature of a Victorian nanny.  She is overbearing and often makes trite assertions like “Speak when you’re spoken to!” She’s mostly silly and full of nonsense.


6. Time
I was happy to see the movie center their plot so much around time, because the concept of time is a significant theme in book.  Looking-Glass world plays around quite a bit with time and space.  For example, when Alice meets the White Queen, she boasts of (and demonstrates) her ability to remember future events before they happen. For example, she yells in pain before getting a cut on her finger, because she knows it’s going to happen.
However, there is definitely no time travel in the books.  The movie made time travel possible and made time a character. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Time was one of my favorite things about the movie. I thought he had some of the best lines. In the book, time does not move backward toward a final point of origin (like when the movie’s Alice when back to see what happened to the Queen and the Hatter’s family)  Instead, characters move forward while the order of events moves backward. The White Queen illustrates this principle by explaining that the King’s Messenger will first be put in jail, and then have a trial, and then commit a crime. All of the characters, the White Queen included, “remember” both the past and the future. They have knowledge of events before they happen


7. Fate
The concept of fate was very similar in both the book and the movie, and to be honest I was happy the movie didn’t change this, or else I think the time travel plot would have been far too convoluted. Sacah Baron Cohen’s character Time expresses fatalism when he insists that Alice cannot change the past.  Alice of course doesn’t listen, but realizes Time is right when she saves the young Red Queen from hitting her head on the clock, only to watch the Red Queen slip the next second and hit her head on a stone. It’s essentially the belief that what is meant to be will find a way to happen.
In the book, because characters have knowledge of events before they happen, which reinforces this fatalism. Alice is destined to become a queen as she goes along the chess game. The concept of free will is pretty tenuous in Looking Glass World.  For example, just before Alice starts the chess game sher gets distracted by elephants that look like bees.  She wants to go look at them but realizes she can’t because she needs to get on the train to start the game of chess.


8. Time period (Steampunks and Trains)
I love that the movie  kept the same time period as the book. The book was originally published in 1871, and I think the year the movie showed on the screen once Alice arrived back in London was 1875.  The book uses trains as a symbol for the unstoppable, forward movement of events. Even though time is mixed up in the book, the characters continue to move forward in the chess game  as a metaphor for Alice’s eventual passage into adulthood.  Alice rides a train to begin the game of chess  and Tweedledum and Tweedledee show Alice the Red King, who is asleep and  snoring like a train engine. Tweedledee tells Alice that the Red King is dreaming about her, and if he stops dreaming, she will vanish. The Red King is a little bit like Time is in the movie.  It’s presumed that rather than Alice dreaming up this world, the world actually the Red King’s dream and Alice is just part of his dream (This upsets Alice quite a bit.) The Red King is forced to wake up at the end when Alice grabs the Red Queen, thereby putting the Red King, and releasing Alice from his dream.   Anyway, the reason the Red King sounds like a train is because the events in his dream are unstoppable, like a moving train.  I loved that the movie kept a steampunk kind of vibe for Time himself and his castle. In the movie, Time was even using a railroad handcar to get around the past to find Alice, which I thought was nice touch.


9. Plot
One difference I wanted to mention is that the movie actually had a more concise plotline than the book did.  The overall plot in a nutshell is Alice is trying to save Hatter who seems to be dying, and she tries to do that by using the chronosphere to go back in time and save his family. The book is much more nebulous.  There’s the game of chess that Alice is playing on a giant chessboard, but the story as a whole is more like a series of different episodes that are loosely connected.  Alice meets different characters who come in and out of the story, and she’s trying to become a queen, but that goal often falls to the way in the conversations and encounters she has with a slew of different characters.


10. Poetry


Through the Looking Glass has poetry interspersed throughout the book.  Jabberwocky is the most famous poem, it’s filled with nonsense words that sound like realistic speech patterns, and actually the word chortle, which is a real word in the dictionary that means to laugh or chuckle in glee, originates from the Jabberwocky. It became so widely used. Anyway, in the book the different characters Alice meets in the episodic way mentioned earlier, where she’s walking along and meets this character, and then that one, and so on and so on, the characters often recite poetry to her, and she doesn’t necessarily enjoy the poetry.  Her attitude is kind of like, okay, nice poem. Can you show me the way out of here? I loved that they played off of this in the movie.  Time recites a brief poem to Alice, which I actually thought made Time rather endearing.  I think it was the moment when he recited that poem that I was like, wait, ARE you supposed to the a villain in this movie?  

Those are my top ten changes from the book to the movie. Let me know down below if you've read the book or plan to see the movie!

Monday, May 9, 2016

Comic Book v. Movie - Captain America Civil War

Hey Everyone!
It's finally here! Captain America Civil War is out in theaters.  The movie is based off of a series of comics entitled Civil War (not Captain America Civil War) that came out from 2006 - 2007 as a 7 volume series. Both the comics and the movie are about tension caused by  government-led superhero regulations. Two factions emerge, one headed by Captain America (anti-regulation) and the other headed by Iron Man (pro-regulation).  Keep reading for my TOP 10 changes between the book and the movie.


You can also check out my video on the same topic here:

Careful for spoilers if you don't want to know what happens in the movie or the comics. 

1. Why the Public Demands Regulation in the First Place

It’s the same reason in both the comics and the movie. Civilians are done being collateral damage in superhero wars. The incident that causes the boiling point just happens differently.
In the comics, there’s a group of young superheroes called the New Warriors (essentially teenage wanna-be Avengers). New Warriors:Avengers::X-Force:X-Men Anyway (Do you remember these things from English class? Anyway...)The New Warriors have a reality TV show, and in an attempt to boost their ratings they film themselves going after a group of recently escaped supervillains.  The New Warriors get in way over their heads and things blow up, literally.  

The New Warriors make the newbie mistake of being unaware of their surroundings and where they are taking their fight. One of New Warriors fights Nitro near a park where a lot of children are playing.  The villain Nitro (unfortunately for the new warriors) has the superpower of being a human bomb, and he blows up. Over 600 civilians die, including a lot of children.  On the comics this is the incident (known as the Stamford incident) that causes public anger towards superhumans to boil over.    

In the movie, it’s new Avenger Scarlet Witch who accidentally kills a large number of civilians. She, along with other Avengers, is trying to stop Crossbones from stealing a biological weapon from a lab in Nigeria. Crossbones commits suicide with a bomb; Wanda tries to displace the blast into the sky but it devastates a nearby building, killing a large number of Nigerian humanitarian workers.


2. Overall Cast Reduction

In the movie, there are 16 superheros/supervillains. In the comics, there are 278 across all 7 volumes.  This isn't a complaint about the movie. The comic series was meant to be a mash up of tons of MCU comic characters, which for a movie just isn’t reasonable.  The movie did introduce some new characters, like Black Panther, Spiderman, arguable Thunderblot, but the movie obviously can’t introduce over 200 new characters. I appreciated the movie taking the time to do character development, it was already a little full.



3. Thor
Thor is a character that plays a fairly important role in the comics but is cut out of the movie. The movie could have included Thor easily enough since he is an established character. In the comics, Thor fights on Ironman's side. At this point in the comic story, Thor was presumed dead, so everyone was surprised to see him show up. Thor isn't really operating of his own volition. He seems to be controlled by SHIELD. It's unclear how much insight or consciousness Thor possessed at the time. Possibly none. SHIELD brings out Thor during the first major battle in the Civil War, and he makes the first kill. He kills Goliath. Goliath's dead is a turning point for some of the superhumans. They begin to question the war and if they want to continue to support the side they chose.

4. The Fantastic Four
The Fantastic Four is another example of characters who were left out of the movie but could have been included easily enough, because the Fantastic Four standalone film just came out in 2015. The Fantastic Four are notable in the comics, because the split up.  Originally the whole team is on Team Ironman, but Johnny and Susan leave to try and find Captain America.

5. Spiderman
This is the first example of a character arc where I thought the movie and the comic would somewhat align, but they didn't.  In the comics, Spiderman initially sides with Iron Man, but once Spider man learns that all superhumans who do not agree to register are imprisoned indefinitely, Spiderman quits the pro-registration side and joins Captain America's underground movement.


In the movie, Spiderman is on team Iron Man the whole time.  I was actually expecting him to switch over to team Cap.  He's also younger in the movie, a little more impressionable like he's still trying to master his superpowers.

6. Regulation v. Registration

AKA regulating versus unmasking....  In both the comics and the movie, the superhumans are going to be regulated.The Registration Act of the comics (which forces heroes and villains to unmask and surrender to the government) is renamed as The Sokovia Accords in the movie. Remember the city of Sokovia, the one Ultron ripped the city off the ground and into into the sky  to duplicate the effect of a meteor? Yeah, that Sokovia.

In the comics, unmasking heroes and revealing their true identity is a big deal. Especially to Perter Parker, who'd worked hard to conceal his identity. So it's a big deal in the comics when Iron Man convinces Spider Man to reveal his identity as Peter Parker.  Rather than focusing on unmasking heroes, the Sokovia Accords wants to regulate the Avengers so they can't operate unilaterally, basically the Avengers would become accountable to the public. The Sokovia Accords is focused on the Avengers while The Registration Act is for all superhumans (this goes back #2, the overall scope of the civil war)

5. Tony Stark / Iron Man
I thought both the movie and the comics did a good job of presenting Iron Man's perspective.  I went into reading Civil War (and watching civil war) thinking I would be Team cap all the way.   At the end of the comics, I was still team cap, but I respected Tony Stark and understood the guilt he felt for all the destruction that happened from initiatives he had funded.

At the end of the movie, I was no longer team cap (we'll get into that a little later) but my allegiance shifted to Team Ironman). Some things the movie added to Iron Man's story line that I really like was his concern for War Machine and funding his prosthetic. I thought including that friendship added depth to his character. And including the back story with the death of his parents. I also thought Robert Downey Jr's acting was incredible, he really sold the emotion he character was going through.

In the comics, Ironman comes off as more of a jerk. In the battle where Thor killed Goliath, that battle starts because Tony Stark has one of his own plants blown up to lure Captain America's team into attempting a rescue effort. Sure enough, Cap's team falls for the bait, but by the time they realize there aren't any civilians around the plant and this must be a trap, it's too late. At this point, Goliath is killed and it seems like Tony Stark is in over his head. The war snowballed beyond his control.

8. Bucky Barenes the Winter Soldier
Bucky is not in the comics. In a surprising turn of events, I ended up liking Bucky! So as expected, Bucky goes on some rampages. He bombs Vienna where the Sokovia accords are being signed into law, which kills King T'Chaka, Black Panther's Father. Security footage implicated Bucky, which tips Cap to go hunting for him. Cap learns that Helmut Zemo is actually responsible for the for the bombing, because he has brainwashed Bucky and can control him. Bucky's brain control is activated by certain Russian words.

At the end of the movie Bucky volunteers to go back into hypersleep for basically the benefit of society until a cure can be found to reverse his brainwashing, I thought that was really noble of him to volunteer.  It's kind of like, gee Cap, why couldn't you have just done that in the first place, gotten your friend into hypersleep for his own stafey/the safey of the entire world? Anyway, I was impressed that Bucky had some insight to his own condition.

9. Captain America's motivation for heading up the resistance.

In both the comics and the movie, part of Cap's motivation is that he's intrinsically opposed to the Registration Act/Sokovia Accords.  He believes superhumans should not be told when they can and cannot intervene, and in the comics he is also too put off by the idea of having to arrest other superhumans simply because they don't want to register.



In the movies, much like Iron Man, I think Captain America is also motivated by feelings of guilt.  Tony Stark feels guilt over the damage his technologies have caused, while Captain America feels intense guilt over what happened to Bucky Barnes.  Bucky, of  course, used to be Captain America's best friend and crime-fighting partner until one fateful day when they went up against Zemo, who kidnapped and brainwashed Bucky.  I think Captain America's guilt over not being able to protect Bucky is so extreme that seems to be his unwavering motivation throughout the movie.

In the comics, there is none of the Bucky business.  Cap is more forced into his position because of violence used against him. Commander Hill has SHIELD attack Captain America as soon as he doesn't agree to spearhead efforts for the registration. Cap is attacked and nearly imprisoned the second he showed any dissent, which effectively forced him to go underground.
When Tony Stark setup the trap where he exploded one of his own plants to try to lure Captian America's team into a rescue effort, Captain America is further estranged from Iron Man and the pro-registration efforts, forcing him further into opposition.

#10 Captain America's overall character arc

This whole post has been sploiler-y so far, but this takes spoilers to a new level. If there's anyone still around who hasn't seen the movie and would like some surprises, this is your final warning to click away...


Still here? Great! ERRMGERD WOW, that was really different, and not what I was expecting. In addition to spiderman's character arc, I also thought the movie would take Captain America's character to a similar place, but they did NOT.

Cap abdicated in the movie because he didn't want anything to do with Stark. He didn't want to fight him anymore. In both the movie ant hte comic there's a final spic fight between Cap and Ironman, and Cap effectively wins in both.  BUT in the comic, Cap beat Tony Stark to almost within an inch of his life, is tackled by rescue workers, and at this point Cap has a moment of realization.  He looks around him and sees how much destruction the war has caused, in terms of civilian and superhuman causalities and injuries.  The city is wrecked. At this point, Cap kind of comes to see Tony's point, superhumans can crush those beneath them, and one another.  Cap is devastated by the destruction the war (which he had a large part of) has caused.  He unmasks and turns himself in.

Cap does get his stiff broken in the comic.  So on both accounts he's without a shield.


In the follow-up comic to Civil War, entitled "The Death of Captain America." Brig shocker, Captain America dies. He's assassinated while being taken to his arraignment at the federal courthouse. I actually thought the movie might do something similar. I thought it was possible that Cap might die at the end of the movie. I didn't think he'd die forever, just in a comic-booky way where he's back in a few episodes. But I did for sure think the movie would still have that epiphany or character growth moment where Captain America fully realizes the harm the Civil War has caused for both civillians and superhumans and the emotional weight of that overwhelms him. That never happened.

 Infinity War is coming up, and how Tony Stark will ever work with Steve Rogers ever again I have no idea.  I don't even know how Stark and Rogers could stand to be in the same room. We'll See.

So those were my top change changes from Captain America Civil War and the original source material.
Thanks for reading!