The August calendar was stacked with movie releases that ranged from excellent to less successful to outright terrible. Among them were several literary adaptations, which also range from excellent to…not great. Here’s a brief recap of a few literary adaptations that came out in August.
But first, in case you missed it, my favorite adaptation of the month Late Fame was discussed here.
The Samurai and the Prisoner
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner hit select theaters in early August. It’s an adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 novel Kokurojo. The Samurai and the Prisoner is Kurosawa’s most ambitious project yet, featuring extensive set design, a larger cast of characters, and more dense source material than his backlog of suspenseful thrillers, which includes Cure (1997), Serpent’s Path (1998), Pulse (2001), and Cloud (2024). The movie benefits from his experience in building intrigue and tension, as well as his clear admiration for samurai movies. Some scenes are so clearly an homage to the Kurosawa who came before him, they felt like a colorized version of the beloved black and white films from the 1950s.
In what is clearly a modern production, Kurosawa builds a textured and complete world that maintains the feeling of a story set in the 1500s. As always, the sound is layered and stacked, bringing the story beyond the screen. You feel like you’re in the room with them—feeling the cold of the chains in a prison cell, shuffling your feet on dirt floors, dipping your pen in ink as you search for a killer.
Kurosawa uses the almost three hour runtime and the four season framework to explore the samurai themes of karma and mercy, the tension between believing in advancing to paradise and retreating to hell. He pulls the audience into these themes and the central mystery slowly, with heavy dialogue. The first notes of music don’t hit until deep into the first third of the movie, and even then the notes rise with restraint. The entire production is Shakespearean with its whispered words, its tragic characters, and its conflicted hero.
This movie won’t be for everyone, but it is not trying to be. This is for fans of Shakespeare, lovers of samurai and westerns. At its core, it’s a saga that drags the films of old fully into the present. I loved every minute of it.
The End of Oak Street
Bear with me here. The End of Oak Street isn’t actually a literary adaptation—it’s a wholly original story written, produced, and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) about a family in a suburban neighborhood that gets transported from the 80s to a time where dinosaurs roamed the earth. One of the leads, Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway in her fourth movie of the year) is an aspiring novelist who ultimately writes a book about the events of the movie. For the purposes of this list, we’re counting this as a connection to literary adaptations.
The End of Oak Street is the perfect summer movie. It’s just shy of 90 minutes with great effects, great action, and some decent laughs. Anne Hathaway delivers her best performance of the year as Denise, the aforementioned aspiring author who is unhappy in her marriage to Greg (Ewan McGregor, doing a terrible American accent) and wholly committed to saving her kids during the time-travel-dinosaur situation (to her detriment, really).
The dialogue is second to the action, but that’s okay, as the film is focused on big action, big sound, and big reactions. And it delivers on those fronts. In order to succeed, the film really just needed semi-beliavable performances, good effects, and enough interesting action to keep the story moving forward. The dinosaurs look great, the action is engrossing, and the cast lives up to the story. Of course, investment in the action is partially driven by the presence of a very good dog named Starbuck who is frequently in danger, pre-dinosaurs and once the dinosaurs show up, and the tension is aided by the simmering low levels of suburban discontent that are almost as unsettling and scary as the dinosaurs themselves. My only wish is that it had stuck the landing and accepted the consequences of the story.
The End of Oak Street is still in theaters and will likely be available on HBO later this fall. However, it’s certainly worth a trip to the theaters to see this with a crowd.
The Dog Stars
On the other end of the spectrum is Ridley Scott’s 30th feature film, The Dog Stars, which is not worth traveling to the theater for. The Dog Stars stars Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Weapons, the upcoming Whalefall), Margaret Qualley (The Substance), and Guy Pearce (Memento, The Brutalist). The film is (loosely) based on the 2012 novel of the same name by Peter Heller. The book is a slow, meditative exploration of life in a post-apocalyptic world caused by the onset of a flu-like pandemic that ravages the world’s population.
The movie starts in the same vein. It opens on at least twenty full minutes of acoustic songs over sweeping aerial photography of beautiful Italian landscapes (meant to be rural Colorado) mixed with shots of Elordi’s Hig and his faithful dog Jasper. The first third of the movie is almost exclusively Hig and his dog flying around northern Colorado, collecting supplies, re-visiting a site of grief, and contemplating escaping this life. The rules of this desolate existence are seemingly established in these shots. Hig’s silent exploration is juxtaposed by the appearance of his survival partner (unclear how they got connected) Bangley (Brolin). Bangley is a grizzled ex-marine who is focused on eliminating threats, less nostalgic for the world that was lost. As Hig points out, he almost seems to thrive in the violence of the new world. Eventually, Hig connects with Cima (Qualley) and her father Pops (Pearce), which really just leads to more shots of Elordi ripping out trees and sipping coffee in the wilderness. If your movie is already ambling along and feeling dry, adding Margaret Qualley an hour into it isn’t going to solve the problem. Adding Allison Jainey in a character role, on the other hand… that’s when the movie picks up a little bit of speed.
I went into this movie thinking about adaptations and what makes them successful. I landed on two ways an adaptation of a book can succeed, (1) by making readers of the book feel satisfied in the interpretation of the story, and (2) by making moviegoers interested in reading the book after seeing the movie. There’s a moment towards the end of The Dog Stars that had me especially interested in reading the book. After the movie, I learned that that portion of the story was completely fabricated for the movie with no real reason for doing so. The movie also adds some unnecessary racial implications regarding the tribes of the survivors that the main cast has to defend against. I don’t know where that leaves this as an adaptation, but ultimately it left me feeling unsatisfied and unimpressed, despite the beautiful photography and, frankly inspired, use of Hozier.
