Thread:Mesektet/@comment-3581997-20160615160106/@comment-3581997-20180113143027

Generally it is a smart attitude to keep to at-least the spirit of the source material. Even changing the script seemingly for the better can make things worse, not only because it might not work but because it might work too well and then the audience is jarred at the tonal shift.

Like Twilight, horrible book, horrible movie series, but the last movie decides to give the audience the big apocalyptic battle the books were building up to. But being they still have to keep true to the author's intent this great battle is made worse when we find out is was all a dream. Every viewer and critic I have seen says that making the ending better, made it worse when they had to come-back down to Myer's original story.

Watchman of-course had a major re-working of the ending to give the audience a more or less happy ending. I emphasize more or less. Though there is a dissidence there as Zack Synder was taking the entire thing with operatic awe and wonder and Alan Moore wrote the damn thing specifically to be unpleasant and too gritty for it's own good. It was a parody of where too overly dramatic comics could/were going and how that would feel if you took golden-age heroes and had them change with it, without any-rewrites and following real-world logic. The movie played the fight-scenes as cool instead of subtly horrifying, they changed The New Frontiersman from trashy gossip rag to serious journalism. They edited out a lot of Rorschach's unpleasant and offensive character beats like his casual homophobia and chauvinism.

The different between how those two work out is who is changing them. The directors of Twilight were work for hire, they had no attachment to the book and didn't want to offend anyone so kept it an accurate translation until the very end when they tried to make it better, but they were on such different wave-lengths that when the story needs to return to normal it is jarring to the audience, like serving a McDonalds with an after dinner mint on a silver platter - Your effort has objectively made it better, but seeing it side by side with inexpensive shite only makes the substance of the meal seem that much empty. Watchman on the other hand had both writers come from completely differnet places, Synder filmed Watchman and he is a big subscriber to Randian Objectivism (let the better more talented people run society without oversight) and Moore was, aside from a left-of center liberal (keep things fair but controlled), also just using the story as an exaggeration, not a operatic story-piece. But why it works there is Snyder didn't change things half-way through he wanted to re-work the entire thing and as result the tone feels more consistent and Synder's change works for him - it was integrated into the new version, not just pasted in at the end.

Generally when story endings are changed you can use those two comparisons to figure out when it is a good or bad idea to keep or change a story in adaptation. It is likely Devilman's anime story-board were not fans of the orginal but rather work for hire, so a solid tranfer from page to screen was the best way to go with no investment in the story.