Re: Kind of disagree - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 21/02/2011 05:27:36 PM
all of the subplots still stand as an AWESOME story even without the fun details that we enjoy.
I think you seriously underestimates the amount of details necessary to make all the subplots interesting and feel unique. Of course, there's the option of changing the story massively, but then it wouldn't WOT, it would be like Legend of the Seeker to the Goodkind books.
There are extremely cinematic scenes in WOT, and they would be impressive, but that doesn't make the core of the series a very suitable story to be told on screen.
We probably don't agree on what constitutes "details". I'm not talking about dresses, little background elements in the worldbuilding and so on. It's whole subplots and 90% of the backstory that just wouldn't work well in a film. It would work well enough at first to cut subplots and characters, but the more the series goes on, the less it would work. It's perfectly reasonable to cut the Elyas subplot, the Morgase subplot and the Berelain subplot early on - they bring too little to the main story in the book they appear in to be included in a simplified storyline for the movies, but by the mid-series, Perrin's storyline would have to be completely rewritten because his books' one would no longer work.
Forget the backstory of the individual Forsaken or intricate histories like that of Rhuidean. The Tower conflict is another that would be very bland unless you include a lot of the details (people already complained Jordan made the politics too simple to be really interesting). In a movie, the Forsaken would be even more reduced to cartoon villains. Exposition is always laborious in movies and you have to keep it to a minimum. A basic rule in writing for the screen is that everything that doesn't drive the movie forward does not belong there (if they're important elements, they need to be reintroduced later, in the movie in which they play out, and it can be ackward - just look how this had to be handled in the HP films, or even in LOTR... you just can't have Aragorn receive his sword in movie 1 only to claim his past in movie 3... WOT has tons more of this elements and characters that only play out much, much later). That would rapidly become a major problem in WOT, where so much is introduced not to drive the story forward immediately, but to play out only much later. After the midseries, Jordan's structure just wouldn't work anymore on screen, there are too many storylines to follow in parallel.
One reason the details are so important in WOT is that RJ's worldbuilding relied heavily on shifting a bit clichés and twisting all too well-known stuff. What room would there be in a movie to make the Aiel feel unique as more than generic desert dwellers and warriors, to make Hawkwing more than just King Arthur under another name, Andor more than a generic Fantasy Kingdom? Not much at all.