Earthsea ~ Lost in Adaptation

this episode of lost in adaptation is sponsored by audible get one audiobook and unlimited audible original monthly downloads absolutely free by visiting audible.com the dom or texting the dom to 500 500 more on this later hello my beautiful watchers and welcome to lostin adaptation this is a show where i break down the plot characters visuals and overarching themes of film and tv adaptations of books specifically in regards to how accurate they remain to their source material and how effectively they were adapted into a visual medium this particular episode is a continuation of my last video in which i gushed for like 10 straight minutes about how cool ursula kilaguin was and how good her earthy books are then i gave a little backstory about how she was tricked into selling the rights to an earthsea adaptation based on a ton of promises and reassurances the production company was either unable to or never intended to fulfill the result was the legend of ersey tv miniseries later renamed just earthsea that premiered on the sci-fi channel on the 13th of december 2004 it consisted of two one and a half hour episodes each supposedly based on the first and second books in the earthsea series you don't have to watch the first installment to follow this video but if you would like to start at the beginning there's the thing the cliff notes are i'm furious even though i usually try to avoid doing this for the sake of keeping my videos at a reasonable length i think that in order to fully convey to you this tv show's utter failure i'm inclined to provide a synopsis of the books they desecrated if you already know the tale here's the time code to skip ahead to the biscuits for everyone else this will be spoilery but if you just cannot resist listening to it i still recommend experiencing this story for yourself afterwards because even if you know the vague plot they'll still be amazing i'll talk to you about a good place where you can get them in just a minute it's horrible book 1 a wizard of earthsea we begin in ged's childhood at 12 years old he's not called dead yet he still goes by his child name of duny people in earth sea are given temporary juvenile names to hold them over until they come of age kind of like teeth i guess he lives in a small village on the island of gantt with his father who works as a bronze smith after displaying a surprisingly strong aptitude for magic dunny's aunt a local witch teaches him some spells this comes in very handy when a group of foreign raiders attempt to invade their home and dunny uses his new skills to summon a thick fog to blind and confuse the warriors and give the home team villagers a fighting chance of driving them out using google tactics however this spell comes at a cost that is too much for young dunny and he falls into a deep coma fortunately for him an old and powerful wizard by the name of ojain these silent comes to the village upon hearing about dunny's heroic deeds and uses his magic to bring him back to full hit points he helps duny through a rite of passage as he turns 13 and gives him his true name of ged as has been mentioned in episodes past two names hold a lot of power in earthsea and it's especially true for wizards if they know something's true name they can control it or transform it as they see fit and if someone learns theirs it can completely nullify their magic because the consequences of someone you can't trust learning it are so extreme everyone in earthsea has a nickname that they always go by assuming they even know what their true one is you really don't want to carry your driver's license around earth sea no matter how hard that makes it to get a pint one of ged's early abilities was an affinity for using animals two names to get them to hang out with him he's seen chilling with a sparrow hawk so often that becomes his nickname oh giant takes gade on as his apprentice and tries to quell his arrogance and hunger for knowledge and insult patience and wisdom instead this works exactly as well as you would expect it to work on a precocious 13 year old boy who has just found out that he has the power to control the fabric of reality a local witch in training almost succeeds in using his desire for respect and budding teen horniness to manipulate him into learning one of o'gian's master level spells about summoning the dead to pass onto her o giant turns up just in time to stop the lad from completing the spell and summoning a great evil but he was too late to stop him from memorizing it realizing that he can't force ged to be chill if it's not in his nature yet oh giant offers to recommend him to the world's most prestigious magical school on the island of rock it's a hard decision as gate has come to carefro gian but he decides to take the path of more immediate payoff training at the school is hard but ged still excels in his studies there he quickly makes a bff in a slightly older boy named verge and a catty frenemy in a smug rich kid named jasper he also picks up an adorable critter companion called an otak apparently it's sort of like a rat cat hybrid but in a cute way however just as oh giant feared get's pride and arrogance grows like a sickness within him until it nearly spells out his doom one night during an otherwise enjoyable magic party jasper makes one condescending remark to get too many and he lets his bruise ego drag him into attempting a dangerous demonstration of his superior power summoning a spirit from the dead you know the exact thing that ojain managed to stop years before just in the nick of time and informed him in no uncertain terms would have been an unmitigated disaster for him and the world in general shockingly who could possibly have foreseen it the spell goes horribly wrong and is an unmitigated disaster for ged and the world in general a terrifying shadow-like creature from the depths of goodness knows where is summoned into existence and attacks ged tearing at the flesh on his body and face and horrifically scarring him for life only the timely arrival of the school's archmage saves ged from a premature and very sticky end after a lengthy recovery god finds out he's now going to be hunted by this violent mysterious creature for the rest of his life unless he can figure out its true name and use that to stop it after he finishes his studies he accepts a position as the local wizard in a fishing village that would usually be far too small to warrant its own mage but needs protection because it happens to be really close to an island full of [ __ ] dragons [Music] while he's there he makes friends with a local shipwright whose young son suddenly takes ill ged tries to help the lad but his fever is so bad he dies quickly in a last-ditch attempt to save him ged astro projects himself into the land of the dead to try to stop his departing spirit alas he fails and while struggling back to the land of the living he comes face to face with his new shadow apparently meeting in the domain of the departed gives it a permanent gps fix on geared so he decides he's going to have to leave tan and go on the run rather than leave them high and dry with the dragon situation he makes the rather baller move to travel to the nearby island and defeat them before departing in an epic battle he kills several lesser dragons and ends up in a battle of wits with an elder fortunately he's done some research and knows its true name so it is forced to obey one command from him the dragon tries to sway his purpose by tempting him with knowledge of the true name of his shadow which it might actually know because dragons are sick crazy ancient and noble in earth sea but ged resists and makes him swear to leave these surrounding villages alone there is much rejoicing he then spends a good while being chased around the known world by his shadow which has somehow not only learned how to kill people and inhabit their bodies to use as rotting flesh puppets called gerbith but also gets true names so the paul bugger can't even use magic against it when it ambushes him ged ends up losing his political attack in one of the saddest creature deaths i've ever read in a book and wasting a bit of time looking for a deus ex mac in a magical item that will end his problems but turns out to be a pipe dream eventually beaten broken exhausted and desperate he limps back to our giant for help and protection oh giant nurses him back to health then sagely advises him that despite his fear his best option is to stop being the hunted and become the hunter to turn and face his shadow and actively try to defeat it in combat instead of running away ged takes this to heart and has a confrontation with the creature on the open sea it ends in a stalemate but the shadow is clearly super thrown by the change in the status quo and starts trying to avoid ged for the time being not content with this as he knows he will never be truly free while this thing lives the wizard continues the hunt and ends up crossing paths with his old school buddy vetch who is living in his hometown with his kid's sister vetch insists on joining him for the final confrontation however he might have found it somewhat anticlimactic in the end as ged finally realizes what his shadow is and what its true name must be he recognizes the being as a manifestation of the darkness within his own heart brought to life by his arrogant use of magic beyond his control all the anger and fear and ego he must accept is a part of himself before he can overcome it he names the creature ged and it merges with him accepted and now under control and a happy ged returns to vici's home with him declaring himself whole again and free this book alone was enough to make a lifelong fan of leguin out of me i went over a lot of the virtues of her world and writing in the last video but i do want to reiterate how much i enjoyed it while this book does follow the recognizable structure and superficial plot elements of an epic adventure i don't think i've ever come across such a introspective high fantasy story before the world is incredible and unique and interesting and scary and exciting but so are the people living in it and it turns out it can be just as engaging if what's at stake sometimes is just them the prominent coming-of-age theme was i think really skillfully combined with the taoist philosophy that the gwynn likes so much like the importance of balance in oneself and the world one lives in the acceptance of one's flaws message might have been a little on the nose though because it came wrapped up in a pretty sick plot twist i didn't mind book two the tombs of atuan this story takes place on the isle of atuan ruled by a totalitarian empire that's a big deal locally but despite what they would have people believe is significantly less powerful than its neighbor states it's headed by someone known as the god king who's referenced occasionally throughout the story but doesn't directly feature in it the empire's religion is based around worshiping an ominous group of gods known as the nameless ones who supposedly live in the titular tombs an almost unfathomably massive underground labyrinth filled with hidden doors dungeon chambers and nasty looking altars and junk only women and occasionally eunuchs are allowed anywhere near the labyrinth if they don't want to be murdered for it and taking sources of light inside is strictly forbidden the inner chambers are off limits to everyone except aha the first ever head priestess of the cult practitioners believe that aha is reincarnated over and over again so she can keep filling the same job role for all eternity as a result every time an old priestess dies they search the nation for a girl who was born the same day then forcefully confiscated from her parents to be raised and indoctrinated into their cult telling her that even though she can't remember it she is aha a young girl born with the name tana is the current generation's aha the book starts with her at age six being put through the initiation ceremony that apparently involves her former identity being eaten by the nameless ones it's symbolic but also not like the catholic bread and wine thing she is forced to self-identify as aha for most of the book but to avoid the potential confusion of switching back and forth between her names i'm going to do the same thing i did with dunny sparrowhawk ged and just pick one to stick with tonight becomes so brainwashed almost all of her memories of her previous life with her family eventually vanish though via the one person in her life who treats her with any love and compassion her eunuch servant mannan she does learn that her mother tried to save her from being taken by pretending that tanar had smallpox she's taught to believe the blatantly revisionist history of her country religion and the god king and learns about the prominent role and artifact that's hidden deep inside the labyrinth somewhere played in it she's also warned that scary dark-skinned wizards from beyond the sea occasionally come looking for it only to die in the labyrinth tina doesn't have a great life as unsurprisingly being constantly told that she is the eaten one who has nothing left inside her beyond her duties as high priestess isn't exactly healthy for her psychological state to make things worse she comes to realize that despite what her cult claims her position of high priestess is that of a politically powerless figurehead because over the centuries the god kings not wanting to share their rule had reduced her order's role in anything outside of the labyrinth to the absolute bare minimum worse still one of her main duties is to decide exactly how to execute political prisoners that the god king sends her the wontonness comes up she has three men locked in a cell in the labyrinth to slowly and agonizingly starved to death in the pitch black the cruelty of this decision despite being required of her and made on the spur of the moment while going through some pretty heavy stuff haunts her for the rest of her life the meat of the story comes when tana is newly 15 and a 30-something ged infiltrates the labyrinth in search of the fabled magic item she discovers him and traps him in there unable to free himself as it appears that his magic is heavily suppressed inside the tombs for a few days she brainstorms ways of murdering him but a combination of curiosity and high dissatisfaction with her life leads her to instead take him captive once hunger dehydration and disorientation have weakened him so much he can't resist this is where we see just how much get has evolved due to his experiences in the first book and the many years in between he shows no particular anger or resentment being held prisoner by a teen girl instead talking to her patiently about magic the rest of the world outside of her tiny slice of it and a more accurate account of her nation's history she eventually confides in him that she's come to realize that the nameless ones are a religious fantasy that they are either dead or they simply don't exist and her whole purpose in life is a lie ged responds that it's actually much much worse than that the nameless ones exist but they're certainly not gods they're malevolent soul-hungry demons that surround them in this labyrinth and he's been using almost all of his magic to hide from them or hold them back since he got there he also relates to her an event from the last book that took place during his nautical battle with his shadow that resulted in him coming into possession of what seemed to be half of a large old ring he later found out that it was half of what could be a super important and powerful artifact and he learned that the treasure inside the labyrinth was probably the other half he also somehow knows and uses tana's original name which is something of a paradigm shift for her and she grows so disillusioned with her religion and close to get she starts to actively work to keep him safe from the other members of the cult and the government circumstances eventually force her to choose what to do with him as an act of trust he shares his true name with her and reveals that he has found the other half of the artifact furthermore he believes it's fate that she have it as it turned out to be a bracelet for a slender woman's wrist not a ring so he presents it to her after restoring it all this drives sunan to decide to release him and help him escape the labyrinth this book's saddest moment is when ged has to kill mannan in self-defense as the poor brainwashed eunuch thinks that he's trying to kidnap his ward but they don't have time to process his death because the tombs begin to collapse around them get is able to hold off the wrath rather than nameless ones until they make it out safely but it brings down the whole labyrinth and the temple above killing most of the top cult leaders tina now really thinking of herself as to know not aha travels with ged to the coast where his boat is hidden she's understandably frightened of being so clueless in the outside world and feels unworthy of future happiness because of the guilt of everything that's happened she reaches her breaking point when she discovers that gay never intended to keep her as a companion indefinitely and would be dropping off at a nearby major city feeling tricked and used by the wizard tina has the urge to blame ged for uprooting her and destroying her old life as aha and even contemplates killing him fortunately she realizes with little more prompting than a gentle patient stare that she is merely scared of finally being free and doesn't shank him after all gaird makes a compromise with her they will just visit the coastal cities to show that the cult has fallen then he will take her to his old master oh gian so that tanar will find the kindness and thoughtful silence she needs to find herself tanara is comforted by this and looks forward to rediscovering her personal identity on her own terms that was the main theme that really stuck with me regarding this book identity again it wasn't subtle tana literally has to decide who she is before she can start living her life coming of age was once again a big feature and it was a nice change to read a novel about that starring a teen girl protagonist that in absolutely no way revolved around a romantic plot i also got to give props to le guin for her takedown of the ill effects of blind faith to a religion and the importance of questioning the role assigned to you by said religion or any other part of society it was interesting to see an older ged through the eyes of someone like tana and witnessing him be more of an obi wan than the anakin he was in his own book right once again i find myself perched on the edge of the precipice that is the miniseries terrified to take the plunge as mentioned last time the screenplay was written by gavin scott who to be fair worked on the emmy nominated mists of avalon but was also one of the people responsible for small soldiers so inconsistent quality at best it was directed by robert lieberman who's known for well not much to be honest he's directed a bunch of episodes for various different shows and allegedly over 2 000 tv commercials it starred sean ashmore kristin krook danny glover isabella rossolini and sebastian roche my beautiful watchers even before getting into the sins of adaptation this series is a travesty everything about it screams cheap just so so cheap all of it the cardboard looking set the playstation 2 level cgi the renaissance fair costumes the inexplicable modern makeup i can honestly say that i've seen comedic porn parodies with equal or better production value to this the directing is it would be a little harsh to say that it's bad but it's painfully unimaginative even though it was clearly shot on location it is so limited in its choices of shot compositions and framing you feel like you're watching one of those old sitcoms that was filled on a cramped set in front of a live studio audience the dialogue is at best unnatural sounding and at worst horrifically cringe inducing so it's hard to say which is more frustrating listening to the bad actors or listening to the actors far too good for the appalling script apparently no one regardless of acting chops gave a hoot about choosing a consistent accent for any particular location in earth sea everyone just uses their own so you end up with scottish fathers with canadian sons and a single solitary italian surrounded by americans in a community that was supposedly all raised in the same building since childhood i'll say this and only this for the series if it weren't for the fact that it's a perversion of an amazing set of books it might at least have been a fun watch because of how earnestly it tries and how consistently it utterly fails yeah even my compliments are insults here this really is irredeemable this is earth sea genuinely trying to be serious this is earthy genuinely trying to be scary this is earth c genuinely trying to be sad and this is earth c genuinely trying to be dramatic [Music] i'm sorry i actually have to swing back to the cgi again because look at this garbage just just look at it this came out three years after the fellowship of the ring speaking of no one's officially admitted to it but i'd personally say it was fairly obvious that trying to capitalize on the success of those movies is by far the leading reason this show was made the 2000s were somewhat inundated with half-hearted fantasy pretenders like that so yeah pretty safe to say that i'd recommend the original stories over the show and i'd recommend experiencing them via this video sponsor audible audible is an online repository of audiobooks it is in fact the largest repository of audiobooks in the world amongst their many many titles is the complete unabridged earthsea cycle narrated by rob ingles one of my personal favorites and famous for also recording the hobbit and lord of the rings audiobooks you can listen to the first of le guin's amazing tales this very day and you can do it for free because with the absolutely commitment free 30-day trial they offer you get a complimentary credit that can be exchanged for any audio book on the app regardless of its price if you decide not to stick with it that's absolutely fine you even get to keep the audiobook you downloaded but if you do decide to continue you get a new credit every month guaranteeing you a steady stream of good listening material to get started just follow the link in the video description to go to www.audible.com or you can text the dom to 500 500. right now let's talk adaptation [Music] there's a recognizable amount of god's origin and long harrowing struggle with his shadow in the tv show's plot now when i say that i mean it's kind of like if someone did a stick figure recreation of the last supper yes you can see what it is but you know engaged being the son of a blacksmith who really doesn't get him using magic to thwart a raid on his village getting made apprentice to a giant and being slightly disappointed by the man's relaxed and groovy attitude towards power nearly summoning a big bad into the world prompting o'gian to send him to school following through on the ill-fated summoning being chased all over by the gebbeth in messed up human form crawling back to odayan deciding to face the shadow instead of fleeing it and eventually realizing they have the same name and becoming one again keep in mind that everything i just said should have an asterisk attached to it and we will go over that in the next section every once in a while what was a very poignant line in the book sneaks into the show but due to its total inability to keep to the tone and themes of the book said lines have lost almost all meaning likewise there are some story details here and there that are technically from the book but they are presented in enough of a different context that they lack any of the deeper meaning that they had originally the fact that you can't enter the magic school unless you give the doorkeeper your true name the danger of transforming oneself into an animal for too long and the cautionary tale of the wizard who spent so much time in bear form he eventually really became one and ended up killing his son and forcing people to put him down like the animal he then was a veteran get exchanging two names as a sign of ultimate trust and friendship ged eventually fleeing to ogine in the form of a hulk and admitting he is returning the same fool who left him admittedly if you look hard enough there are some scenes that play out almost word for word and seem to be in keeping with the context of the book but after having my heart broken over and over again by the rest of the show these little loyalties kind of just serve to depress me more they show that at least one person on the team must have actually read and understood the books but still let the rest of it become such a garbage fire regarding the disconnected b plot formerly known as book 2 they maintain some aspects of the location some names of the characters and the fact that there's a labyrinth involved that tanar has to memorize the navigation of that's uh yeah that's about it [Music] girl let's start with le guin's personal least favourite aspect to the hella whitewashing le guin was the daughter of an anthropologist who specialized in native american culture and she took a lot of influence from his work in her novels ged is constantly described as having dark reddish brown or copper coloured skin in fact it's noted that the rather small and insignificant nation that tanaan comes from is the only place known for having pale skinned humans put bluntly on earth sea white people are the minority well actually to be even more blunt on earth white people are the minority but le guin seems to be one of the only fantasy writers that remembers that this makes it all the more upsetting that the cast of this miniseries looks like the audience of a uh a concert starring uh crud i shouldn't have tried to make a music reference i have no idea what i'm talking about bands with mostly right audiences dave matthews band [Music] moving on from le guin's top pick of worst adaptation related decisions to one of my own we need to talk about the issues with their decision to adapt two books now you might be thinking surely not dom you stylish anglo angel two books two episodes it would be really hard to screw that up well what can i say they've found a way despite as i mentioned in the preceding episode the books being non-continuous sequels i.e their plots function as linked but ultimately standalone stories and not a telling of a single long story the show winners still decided to combine them into a single plot that just happened to span two episodes now the practice of combining multiple books into a single movie dates as far back as adaptations go it's not in of itself necessarily a bad thing if done with careful planning it can be a very useful tool in helping to overcome the fundamental differences between the two mediums of storytelling now that said i can not overstate how badly they linked these two stories together in this case the only connecting events for ninety percent of the entire series is one moment when the actions of white ged have a result for tanaa and the same villain occasionally popping in and out of both plots not only do the two leads not come face to face with the villain until the climax they don't even meet each other until then that is later than they would have met if they hadn't tried to combine them at all and it simply told one story and then the other like in the books let me rephrase that for extra dramatic effect the writers did such a bad job the events of the story are less connected than when they were set at least a decade apart of course even insulting the show's ability to merge a wizard of earth sea and the tombs of a two-in is giving it too much credit because that implies they included way more of the second book than they did as you might have guessed from the similarities segment if they had been individual adaptations episode 2 would almost certainly have been designated in name only they introduced an overarching villain to this newly combined story king tigeth who is kinda supposed to be the god king we never met in person in the book but really isn't he's the least imaginative paint by numbers generic evil king you could possibly envision spending most of these series doing generic evil king stuff like laughing maniacally executing henchmen for failure attempting to conquer the world for no overt political reason besides wanting to own it and foolishly trying to tap into powers beyond his can his goal is to get the nameless ones to make him immortal that might sound like i'm simplifying but i swear to you that is the beginning and end of his character's motivation for the entire three hours he's kicking about white ged and tana now share some sort of magical connection where they see each other in dreams and visions during times of stress they also share a snog at the end and i know the character isn't 15 anymore but ew come on guys to be fair ged and to now do get together eventually but it's in the second to last book of the series when they're both past middle age they're figuratively completely different people in his quest to be generically evil tigers declares war on and besieges rogue and the wizards who live there this would have been something of a suicidal move in the books as roke is protected by an ancient magic that summons gale force winds to drive away anything that might pose a threat to the island however all they seem to be able to muster in the mini-series are some little fireballs that they didn't have the budget to make hit anything so they just sort of explode around people being a minor inconvenience no book character that went through the adaptation process came out recognizable on the other end with the one possible exception of oh gian who is simply heinously underutilized and has his name mispronounced even though that was like one of the only things the writers actually consulted le guin on who are you my name is ogian the great wizard even if i restricted myself to just judging what's little of the plot was book accurate there are still a ton of issues with the adaptation of ged for starters there's no age progression in the series this clearly 25 year old character is assuming the actions of a 12 year old without any perceivable attempt to adjust them to fit a more mature character as you can guess this changes him from seeming like a tragic figure who was granted too much power too young let it go to his head got in way over said head and ended up carrying a reminder of his young hubris for the rest of his life to coming off as kind of an insufferable douchebag a petulant ungrateful whiner who wants to show off to everyone and gets in adolescent pissing contests with other adult men oh and regarding his injuries this um sorry we're going to have to zoom in a bit a little more a little more okay there this kitten scratch is supposed to be the face disfiguring scars inflicted on him by a physical manifestation of his folly avatar the last airbender movie eat your heart out what i'm about to describe next has got to be one of the most pointless and bizarre changes in the history of adaptations it's so weird i am still scratching my head days after seeing it they switched his true name and his nickname his true name is now sparrowhawk and the name that everyone knows him by is ged i mean not to put too fine a point on it but sparrowhawk isn't even a name they get other people's names the right way around so they knew what they were doing here just why guys why what was the point why why another pretty high contender for the done dirtiest award is vetch who was a muscular black teenager in the book do i even need to say more actually yes yes i do the race thing is bad enough but did they have to turn him into three hours of fat jokes it's just so constant he's a larger gentleman so he must be unabashedly obsessed with food all the time it's funny why aren't you laughing at the fat jokes white veggie's little sister is aged up to adulthood so they could write in a scene where she ends up giving white ged a sensual massage in the bath and imply that some of tygath's men came very close to assaulting her sexualizing female characters who were originally minors is now officially a habit of this adaptation gross jasper is upgraded from just being an upper-class wanker who gets off and talking down to ged to full-fledged traitor to his people a story arc that ends of him getting lobotomized for his crimes by the archmage off-screen between episodes incidentally you can easily tell that jasper is straight up evil now because he's wearing an ascot man screw that ascot ged's father is a very minor character in the books he treats his son like garbage so when a giant offers get an apprenticeship it's very unsurprisingly lad never looks back in the series well he's actually rather fascinating from an adaptation perspective because they clearly put significant effort into fleshing out his character yet somehow ended up with no more character than they started with i think the best way to describe him now is he's a less subtle version of uncle owen from star wars he's not necessarily a bad person but 99.9 of his dialogue consists of being on whitegate's case for wanting a life of adventure and significance instead of being content with his small town lifestyle it's extremely two-dimensional it certainly doesn't help that the actor plays up his glaswegian accent to the point of being almost unintelligible also can we all just take a second to appreciate his acting choices in the scene where white gear goes over a cliff [Music] i'm not really getting the whale of grief and agony of a father who just saw his son die right before his eyes from this as much as i'm hearing the disappointment of a guy who really wanted his favorite sandwich but has just been informed that subway is out of herb and cheese bread the dragons oh gods that cgi it's just so bad sorry the dragon's name is changed from yavar to ombar for no discernible reason and he's less deeply cunning and intimidating in the way that only ancient unbelievably powerful beings can be and more just kind of a sassy [ __ ] and disappointingly he's also much smaller now geared slowly realizing that what he thought was a massive tower was actually his neck was one of the coolest things in the book the nameless ones have a backstory now having tried to take over the world in ancient times the ring bracelet that ged was looking for in book 2 is now a magic amulet that was used to defeat them they don't really explain how or anything else about it it's just okay let's not pretend to be naive it's the ring they changed it from a ring to an amulet to try to hide the fact that they were making its role in the story more like the ring of power it's worth noting that it's never spelled out exactly what form the name of swans exist in or why they had to stay in the tombs in the book their completely unseen but very present nature was part of what made them so scary for that reason it's not only depressing that they decided that squeaky gremlins were the way to go visually it also subtracted from their mystique when the show decided to represent the ancient barrier between their world and ours with no representation it's a literal big door wood is apparently more than sufficient to keep this ancient evil at bay however eclipsing every other character regarding being done dirty even white ged is tana and to explain just how done dirty she was i have to explain everything that was changed around her as well for starters the murderous cult she was a part of is now a vaguely christian allegorical order of mostly kind-hearted nuns who take in orphans out of the goodness of their heart and exist to keep the nameless ones that they know full well are evil demons inside their underground prison the position of head priestess is now passed down by a combination of the former one designating her successor and i kid you not a written priestess exam which is marked and graded this feels so out of keeping with the iron age fantasyland she lives in it almost gives off the flintstones vibes tina herself is now a 20-something trusting optimistic sister of no particular standing within the order who is so doe-eyed and good-natured you wonder how she makes it through the average day she's so innocent and naive when she's eventually framed for poisoning her boss it doesn't occur to her to suggest that the woman she was just promoted over and who is right at that very moment pushing for an immediate harsh punishment might be worth looking into as an alternative suspect please remember that this is someone who had three men executed via starvation in the book btw said framing involved the real villain hiding a copy of how to poison people for dummies under her bed and then pretending to discover it this is a good example of the amount of nuance that was put into her new storyline fyi she's only the second most unrealistically naive person in this the first being a minor character who actually did the poisoning she was tricked into it because she was told that it was secret medicine she couldn't tell the recipient about and this was a adult woman there's not really that much else to say about tana's new character despite a decent amount of screen time her role in her half of the story is extremely passive i cannot think of a single decision that she made for herself and stuck to in the entire mini-series the person who actually does anything even remotely interesting in her storyline is her power hungry rival princess cossel well kossel is the name of the book character she shares the name of but they have nothing in common so i mostly thought of her as cersei light cersei light is in bed with king tiger both figuratively and literally she evidently covets the position of high priestess and wants in on harnessing the power of the nameless ones to this end she tricks the before mentioned most gullible person in the world into slowly killing the girl boss under the assumption that she'll be the chosen successor in a plot twist so unsurprising i think i actually felt myself aging as they tried to build up suspense before the big reveal sister sunshine and rainbows is picked instead cersei light then murders her witless helper and frames tana to get her out of the way alas mother rossolini isn't immune to being as infuriatingly gullible as the rest of the cast so she buys it all hook lime and sinker until it's far too late locking tana up in jail just outside the labyrinth where she finally meets white ged okay swinging back around to some of those astrixes i mentioned in the unchanged section the raid on gets village is just wow as much as i hate this show i still feel vicariously embarrassed for everyone and everything involved in this scene up to and including the larp adventure village it was filmed in the army of foreigners is now a football team's worth of people get covering the entire area with fog is now just blowing fog in their faces and the villagers driving them off with their superior knowledge of the surrounding area to employ hit and run tactics becomes running off loudly shouting that the raiders should follow them before eventually stopping at a cliff and allowing their pursuers to charge over the edge like lemmings because apparently they thought their victims instructions to chase after them were quite reasonable and not in any way suspicious then to cap it off instead of ged being overwhelmed with channeling that much magic through his unprepared child's body a straggler crashes into him despite the smoke having dissipated by then and he drowns in the sea don't worry he gets better oh jion rocks up and casts resurrection on him and do remember the laughable ease of which people can be brought back to life in this series it will come into play later the formless yet malevolent shadow of the book is represented by some leftover test footage from the van helsing movie that came out the same year then when it takes on a human body it becomes chatty as hell despite the creature barely ever speaking in the book and even then only mimicking the big reveal at the end that the shadow has actually been a part of get all along is utterly devoid of the gravitas it had in the book for three reasons one they felt that they had to spell out that this was what was happening instead of letting the very obvious subtext speak for itself two fusing gives white ged superpowers which implies the part of him that was missing this whole time was his hulk strength and three which is admittedly the only one i really needed to mention because it renders everything else moot they changed it so the shadow was a nameless one who managed to escape its prison when whiteged's ill-fated spell weakened the door for some reason it's not a part of getting this version this entire twist is a contradiction that doesn't make any sense in the new story the misconception that the gibbeth was a nameless one might have stemmed from a throwaway line in the books about them both being creatures of darkness but i think even that semi-explanation gives these screenwriters too much credit and they throw in an early love interest to prove that white get has the not gays cold-hearted son of a [ __ ] was apparently going to leave her without saying goodbye and frustratingly she's understanding instead of inclined to kick him in the nuts and joy of joys they include one of my personal most despised tropes the plot convenient vague prophecy in this case it's a tenuous reason for tigers to give a [ __ ] about white ged one thing le guin has admitted she might have dropped the ball on when writing a wizard of earth sea was the utter lack of significant female characters making the rogue school of magic coed is something she might have approved of if they'd bothered to ask her the archmage actually gave up his whole ass life to save get in the book expending all of his power to drive off the shadow and stabilize his wounded student interestingly as the wizards of earth see know for a fact that there is an afterlife and are quite self-sacrificing most of the school took a fairly pragmatic view on the logic of an old man dying so a young man will live and didn't give get a hard time over it i think it's safe to say that i'm losing my god's damn mind here so i'm going to try to go over the new series original story that they decided was better than what happened in the tombs of a turn as quickly as possible so i can put this wretched series behind me and move on with my life when white geard finally turns around and tries to fight his shadow instead of fleeing from it he decides that the best way to go about this is to attempt to drown themselves together in a river but utterly fails in this attempt the gebbeth then tries to frame whiteged for murder by taking his form in white vetch's town white vet helps violently capture his old friend but realizes the truth just in time and decides to try to help white ged even after his sister bad touches him in the bath white ked and white vet go back to rogue only to discover it's been conquered by tigers because jasper sold them out but it turns out that jasper is actually the archmage in disguise as he faked his death and took his petraeus form the old geezer figures out that in order for the plot to wrap up white gear needs to go to atawan to get the magic item of magicness they try to break in but fail and get gets locked up next to tanar who gives him a lecture on the importance of having faith which is somewhat infuriating considering how much shade her book throws on blind obedience to religion they kind of escape but not really because they chat in herself for so long guards come for her tygarth kills cersei light because the writers ran out of uses for her and forces tanard who take him into the labyrinth white ged confronts him gets his ass kicked because he can't use magic in the labyrinth so runs away like sir robin the brave meanwhile white vetch goes on ahead and is killed by the gebus who was waiting for them at the door to the other nameless one's prison at this point i swear i felt the exact moment when the writers realized they had no idea how to end this [ __ ] show but were out of time and needed to wrap this [ __ ] up tygarth is caught off guard by white ged's new superpowers but because our hero just stands there like an idiot afterwards he has all the time in the world to get back up and take tanar hostage whitegate convinces her to use her priestess magic to do what tigeth wants and let the nameless ones out and suddenly the movie becomes an indiana jones rip-off and the thing the villain wanted all along ends up killing him after the discount army of darkness flies off to end the world gate announces that he and tana both have half of the amulet that was mentioned at the start of the movie and they combine it to insta kill all of the nameless ones yeah it turns out tygath had no plan here he apparently thought that if he let the humanity-ending demons of death and destruction out and ask them nicely for immortality they would give it to him he had no magic protection no leverage nothing to bribe them with he was just hoping they worked on the honor system and would feel like they owed him a solid also you may have noted that our main man whiteged unleashed the apocalypse in order to save one person now to be fair he was pretty sure he had a reset button so nope still a terrible terrible terrible thing to do i'm not trying to be cold towards lana lang here i'm just saying that was a bit of a gamble and maybe it shouldn't have been plan a anyway white geared cast resurrect on white vetch all the extras the tv series mostly forgot about until now share a montage where they pretend that the shadow that fell over the world was there for more than a minute and a half creepy kiss of the aged up 15 year old the end nearly done so very nearly done i'm doing this for my queen le guin now as i believe i've made clear pretty much all of book 2 is absent in the series so as i included a synopsis in the start there's no need to go over every last thing again and i'll mostly be concentrating on the comparatively more present book one there were multiple really hard c journeys in the book where ships had to battle through raging storms though lord help me i probably wouldn't want to see what horrifyingly bad special effects they would have tried to use if they'd included this same thing for the several lesser dragons that get fought to the death in the thrilling conflict of might and magic before facing off against the elder in any other adaptation i would love to see it but no one needs to see this for any longer than is necessary a young woman named ceret pops up in a wizard of earth sea twice first when young ged was bored training under ogine and again when he was on his quest to find a way to escape his shadow she was the apprentice of a witch and because apparently witches are not on the same level as wizards she was constantly trying to manipulate ged into stealing spells for her or unlocking powers that she couldn't access on her own her second appearance is many years later and part of a segment in the middle of the book that involved getting tricked into taking shelter from his pursuer in a secluded fortress and the big bad evil guy living there trying to use seret to manipulate him into interacting with a nasty demon that was currently imprisoned inside an orb ged manages to resist temptation and brute powers his way out of the castle with ceret though she is killed as they try to flee weirdly unless i'm mistaken i don't think this demon in a pokeball comes back in later books like i initially assumed so this chapter is left feeling like a story that didn't happen like if a cell door had dropped the ring in mount doom then went for a drink of elrond as is it feels a little disconnected from the rest of the book and only advances general world building which don't get me wrong isn't nothing but it's certainly the kind of digression that i would expect to be left out of a competent adaptation as well as this one finally swinging back around to how freaking easy it is to phoenix down a dead person in the show this particular plot convenience helped rob us of one of the most intense and atmospheric parts of the book as i touched upon the plot synopsis the only feasible if highly inadvisable option to magically revive someone who has just passed away is to send your soul chasing after them into the afterlife and trying to bring them back off your style when ged does this for the child he couldn't save we get to look at the place the people of earthsea go when they die the dry land a realm of shadow and dust of eternal night where these stars are fixed in the sky and nothing changes the entrance is a low stone wall at the top of a valley that separates the worlds of the living and the dead i mentioned in the last video that neil gaiman was a fan of leguin and you can see the influence she had on him in books like stardust it apparently really sucks to exist in the dry land as you eventually lose your sense of self in the never changing nothingness and wander aimlessly for centuries even former lovers pass each other in silence spoiler warning for later books but one of them is about fixing the afterlife these stories are wild anyway it's much much harder to go back up the slope than down it so when ged follows the boy a little too far before he can force himself to acknowledge the heart rendering truth that he can't save him he has to climb back up to life's step by agonizing step and leguin makes you feel the exhaustion with him this made it all the more terrible when he finally got back to the top and found his shadow waiting for him on the other side of the wall that was actually a trick that leguin successfully pulled on me several times she was really good at building up to situations in a way that convinced me they couldn't possibly get any worse than bam shadow demon we're spared the crushing sadness of god finding the cold body of his beloved otaku in the snow after they got separated in a chase which is nice i guess but good lord what sort of incompetent screenwriter turns down the chance to include that sort of trauma in their story it's low hanging emotional reaction fruit you dummies we lose a lot of small world building stuff here and there like minor characters and the time that gets spent in his assigned village learning how to build and enchant boats again these are the kind of things that i wouldn't have been surprised to see cut out of any adaptation not just a terrible one final thoughts even if you don't count the preceding video i did regarding earth c this is still the longest episode of lost adaptation i've done in a long long time but trust me i still picked my battles here this could easily have been twice as long if i tried to cover everything offensively bad in this mini-series i've seen adaptations that failed because they lacked the necessary budget to do justice to their books i've seen adaptations that were ruined by a lack of filmmaking competence i've seen adaptations that veer away from their source material because the makers had their own vision and valued it higher than the authors and i've seen adaptations that were clearly a soulless attempt to make a quick buck by slapping a famous book title on any old crap and hoping the fanbase would fall for it i genuinely think that the legends of earthsea is the perfect storm of all of the above there must have been some pretty serious budget cuts somewhere along the process for it to come out looking this bad the writing was terrible the directing was dull and i think their treatment of le guin pretty much proves that no one involved gave a damn about her books what few parts of the original story are included are so warped it gives off the pretty consistent vibe of them believing that they knew more about what people would enjoy than she did and while they might have known a little more about tv shows than her they clearly couldn't hold a candle to her for story writing it's so so frustrating to see as le guin described it a generic mcmagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence when you know that they had the blueprints for something unique and brilliant right in front of them it's worth noting that a low-res version of rc was uploaded to youtube in its entirety two years ago and no one has cared enough about it to issue a takedown yet that is some next level lack of shits to give from the copyright holders and there you have it my beautiful watchers the earthsea miniseries the new low bar of lost in adaptation i will leave you with one glimmer of optimism though earth sea is getting another chance a new tv show produced by oscar-nominated producer jennifer fox is in the works i'm sad that le guin didn't live to see it but for the sake of her legacy i'm going to be hoping with every fiber of my being that third time's the charm because she and ged deserve better thank you for joining me my beautiful watchers if you enjoyed my righteous fury over these books miss treatment be sure to give the like button the old clickaroo and if you're new here consider subscribing so you can stick around for similar content though i'm sure it will be a less painful experience or around next time just kidding it's twilight turn back the page to a foggle page before time began from house le guin there came a queen with no choice but to stan her pen was mightier than the sword by every account one could record she totally wrecked at the hugo awards ursula k le guin master grand with a dexterous hand and words hotter than fire the tales she told so deft and bold they could not help but inspire from the tongue of every poet but her name was sung with the highest regard even earned the praise of orson's got caught and that guy's a dick much love and appreciation to my patrons of honor shelby haute sam cuccinata and atel spurdloff and special thanks to this video's co-producer kate robinson be sure to check out her channel for more of that sweet sweet youtube content oh giant takes gideon in as an apprentice oh john takes ged on as his apprentice oh john takes get on as what is my mind oh john takes get in as his imprint oh john takes get on get god get in good gosh darn it if i remember i'm going to delete this bit so you don't see it if you're seeing it means i forgot

Channel: Dominic Noble

Views: 304,519

Rating: 4.9400964 out of 5

Keywords: Lost in Adaptation, The Dom, Dom Noble, Book Review, Episode, Book to film, What's the difference, Pages to screen, Book vs film, the earthsea cycle, the legend of earthsea, Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Ged, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mini Series, sci fi channel

Id: _mfnVK9RdZk

Length: 48min 42sec (2922 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020