sunworshipper

J-LawForever

Great vids. Thanks for posting them.

Violent Delights

Oh cool, those should be interesting.

Jen's Herald

this film is becoming more and more interesting to me, tbh. should i read the novel before this film comes out? or wait til after?

TPF1138

Hmmmm...

Obviously it's very much up to yourself, but I might recommend reading the novel AFTER you've seen the movie.

I have some issues with the book, but I like the the writing (over-dense though it might be in places), and I think there's a solid plot in evidence, and a compelling central figure in Dominika. There could be a very good movie in there. All the same, I'm expecting considerable licence to be taken in adapting it to the screen - in certain aspects it's absolutely necessary - so you might find it more enjoyable to map out the differences between the two in hindsight.

Just a suggestion.

Violent Delights

I'll do that, then. If I like the film enough, that is.

but I didn't like the SLP book, so who knows

TPF1138

Of course.


I actually missed the marriage struggles of the parents that were so important in the book, and the father's anger management issues... at first. Ultimately though, Russell was drawing the narrative more into line with his own worldview and experiences, even while retaining the basics of the plot, and I'm always in favour of that. It makes for a more vital, and in this case at least, personal picture.

sunworshipper

Given the current state of the world, I hope that Fox is prepared for Russian hackers messing around with Red Sparrow. The novel was pretty critical of the Russian government and Putin. I heard an early draft was way different but it looks like that was tossed out. I can't see this film getting released in Russian theaters without being watered down.

FYI, Russia was very good to Passengers. It made a lot more money there than in the U.K.

TPF1138

This is a legitimate concern, but Putin, tyrant though he might be, is not Kim Jong Un. He doesn't have the same kind of superficial, childish ego (you know, like the current US President). Hacking a movie studio so, is unlikely to be seen as worthwhile to him.

Still, it is a concern.



Yeah, Eric Warren Singer's draft refitted the story into a seventies, cold war setting. A tact perhaps conceived to avoid any Interview style political fallout. Though it might well just be a product of the writer not finding a modern setting credible. Ultimately it was tossed out I suspect, because it wasn't very good.

ScriptShadow reviewed it a few weeks back, but I managed to get a hold of a copy for myself (PM me and if you're curious to read it). While it's not terrible, which is to say it's perfectly competent, and I can appreciate the attempts made to streamline the book's many plot threads, and deal with some of its issues, it's just not compelling. In the end it's guilty of the capitol crime of being boring.

To break it down though:

Act one’s pretty solid. Introduces the main players with economy and definition, while managing to construct a compelling action sequence early on that knows how to ratchet up the tension without blowing its wad.

Singer also strips away the grotesque caricature’s Matthew’s applied to the Russians, without diminishing their menace, and displays a far greater respect for Dominika as a human being, beyond simple admiration for her physical attributes and talents, even if he ultimately (and frustratingly) sidelines her.

Honestly, I was starting to think this was yet another half-witted review by ScriptShadow, and that we had perhaps been denied a properly good spy flick. Then I got into act two…



It’s debatable as to why Singer made the decision to excise the Sparrow School training. Was he concerned at how easily depictions of exploitation (particularly of the sexual variety) run the risk of seeming exploitative themselves (a trap the book falls into), or was it simply an adherence to that old screenwriter’s axiom which states that flashbacks should be avoided, that movies should exist in the present tense? I doubt it was about ratings, since much can be implied without the need to be graphic. In fact, a later scene in a hotel room makes this an even more unlikely motivator. Whatever his thinking though, the decision robs Dominika’s character arc of much of its heft and impetus, reducing her to a KGB operative who gets her head turned by a boy. A feeling that’s exasperated by the decision to have she and Nate posing as co-eds in Athens during the development of their love affair. Indeed, the whole 70’s Greek student anarchist milieu the script locates them in, is a big ole yawn. The result of all this is an effective handing over of the story to Nate. As the Russian mole’s erstwhile handler and the focal point of Moscow Centre’s attentions, it’s he whom we end up identifying with and focusing on. Without the Sparrow School indignities, and her struggle to find respect and evade abuse, our sympathies for Dom are rendered remote, and our understanding of her defection as a grab for personal agency, blunted. The real crime is that Dom could easily be the most interesting character in the picture. If only because her story is not one we’ve been told before.

Also, frankly, the movie’s called ‘Red Sparrow’. That demands that Sparrow School and everything it stands for, and all that it’s associated with, be given some degree of focus. Vestiges of that arc remain, subtly lacing Dominka’s motivations, but our understanding of it needs to be more acute. Perhaps the school itself is not necessary, but it must be hammered home far more ferociously what is expected of our heroine, and how she is viewed and treated within her service. Perhaps they could make a perfectly good spy flick out of this material without that focus, but they’d be forfeiting what makes Red Sparrow unique.

On top of all that, is the decision to have Nate be unaware that Dom is a potential spook. The probing, knowing-but-not-knowing, spy vs spy flavour of their courtship is the novel’s strongest aspect, but here it’s abandoned for a much more prosaic, and frankly familiar, honey-trap-turned-spies-in-love trope. I get the thinking. Dom and Nate’s courtship needs to be in closer narrative proximity to the main ‘Korhnoi’ plot, even as it demands a degree of isolation from it, if it’s going to work within a movie structure. Having her sent specifically to target Nate ups the stakes over the more nebulous, spy-fishing, assignment they’re both given in the novel. That approach obviously makes the probing of the book untenable (Nate’s a definite target here for Dom, not a potential), but Singer’s solution feels tired. It could have worked, even given the familiarity of the tropes, if he’d ever managed to get any blood pumping through it, but he just doesn’t.



The third act doesn’t do much to alleviate any of these issues either, with its headlong careening into stock spy movie clichés and predictable plot turns. If it might seem to have more spark, that’s only by contrast to the dullness of act two. It’s a spark that fizzles at any rate.

To Singer’s credit, his development of the Korchnoi plot is solid. He overcooks the 'bromance' between Korch and Nate, but overall he does a good job of paring down what’s in the novel without losing its essence. If only he could have managed that elsewhere. But then the Korchnoi stuff is the least sticky of the book’s many story strands.



This is all moot though in the end, since Singer’s version likely bears no resemblance - or very VERY little resemblance (I do wonder if they’ve kept the younger Ivanovich Egorov) - to the one they’re currently shooting in Budapest. One that takes in Dominika’s ballet dancer past, doesn’t set foot in Greece, isn't set in the seventies, and seems not to have taken the same liberties with the book’s cast of characters (or has at least taken very different liberties). With luck it’s also a version which has managed to streamline the novel’s plot, without dulling its edge, and hopefully injected an extra few trace amounts of adrenaline at the same time. That’s a version that would fit comfortably inside Francis Lawrence’s wheelhouse, and result in a perfectly entertaining, successful studio picture I'd warrant.

sunworshipper

From your descriptions, it sounds like something that makes no sense for a film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Joel Edgerton wtth the main goal is to entertain and sell tickets. Jennifer is a movie star, Joel is not. If anything, the script should expand her role, not his. We want to see Dominika resolve her own moral crisis and take agency, not be saved or redeemed by love.

Also, it's a cop-out to set every spy story in the Cold War. It like wanting to set every war story in WWII with clearly agreed upon white and black hats. Lazy. Although setting it in Greece when the military junta fell is unusual. But the CIA's involvment with the junta is probably best told in a different film.

J-LawForever

I thought about doing the same. But might wait.

I know I saw SLP a bunch of times and then read the book. Almost totally different. With the exception of the names and football. Almost a totally different thing.

I heard someone say in the book Jen's character has a fight in her underwear cause she was sleeping. and I guess some attacks her and fights. So whether that makes it in who knows.

I am certainly interested in this. But I am with any Jen project.

TPF1138

Singer's draft predates Lawrence's attachment, and it would seem the initial intent was to put the focus on Nash, and cast an 'A' list actor in that role, with the next hottie in line filling out the Dominika part. Lawrence's involvement though, ensures the production puts the focus back on the sparrow.



I'd argue this is ultimately the case with the novel. The relationship with Nash is real enough, but her choices are her own. In Singer's screenplay though, it's about saving Nash, in the novel it's about saving herself... and sticking it to those that ****ed with her. The movie needs to emphasise that as much as possible.



Part of me wonders whether Singer really bought the urgency and substance of US/Russian spy ops and mole hunts at the time he was drafting his script. I at least suspect he didn't think audiences would buy into it. We know they will now, of course, but it might not have seemed so when Singer was writing.

Maybe though, as we've surmised, the seventies setting was about avoiding political fallout. Either way, you're right. Cold War spies can very easily read as hackneyed, which it does here.

The modern setting is far more interesting.



Well that's true enough.

Singer never really engages with the politics in Greece in any event, beyond the basics of why Nate's there, and ultimately the setting ends up feeling mundane.



She's naked actually. Some I think, have assumed the movie will have her dressed in underwear instead. Personally, I'm not convinced the scene will even make it into the movie.

There’s several instances where the book contrives to humiliate or degrade Dominika in sexual terms. The intention is to engender an ever-increasing drive for her to rebel against the SVR hierarchy. The scene in question represents her fighting back, and refusing to take this degradation lying down, as it were. She’s nude because this is yet another occasion where she’s being used and humiliated. She fights because she refuses to submit to that humiliation.

Unfortunately, her nudity applies a layer of prurient interest to the action, which undermines the intent. Matthews does this too often throughout the novel in fact, placing too much emphasis on Dominika’s sexual appeal and letting his own sexism filter into a story that is, at its core, about a Woman wresting back her agency from an oppressive and abusive system.

My hope is that the movie downplays (or better handles) the former aspect, and accents the latter. In the final analysis though, a good spy flick will suffice.

Violent Delights

Joely, cool.

mlkj13

Yep!

J-LawForever

Okay, thank, Tony. I don't know much about this book. So it'll be interesting to see it on screen. Not knowing a lot. As where I read the script for Passengers a few times and mostly knew what to expect.

Would you say this would be like a female Jason Bourne movie?

Just hope this doesn't cause too much trouble in Russia.