So, you want to adapt a young adult fantasy novel into a movie? You saw the commercial success of the Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Twilight franchises (combined box office gross: $5.6 billion domestically, roughly $15.5 billion worldwide) and thought you’d snatch a slice of that lucrative pie?
Well, the good news is that in addition to the examples of those three success stories, there are a whole host of negative examples from which to learn. (Included in that host of examples: a movie actually titled The Host, a widely panned Stephenie Meyer adaptation.) It’s just as important to know what not to do as it is to know what techniques to emulate.
In that vein comes Artemis Fowl, released straight to Disney+ last Friday after nearly two decades of developmental difficulties and studio transfers. Based on Eoin Colfer’s 2001 best-selling book of the same name and directed by five-time Oscar nominee Kenneth Branagh, Artemis Fowl might be the most befuddling entry in an oft-befuddling genre.
The movie is bland and confusing, and misunderstands the appeal of the book on a fundamental level. The title might as well be Artemis Foul. But at least the movie offers some lessons, in the tradition of hapless YA adaptations, on how not to convert a popular book to the screen. Here are 10 ways to mess up this kind of movie—and prevent it from following the Potter path in the process.
1. Make the main character generically bland with few discernible character traits.
Humankind is not alone in the world of Artemis Fowl; creatures of legend—fairies, goblins, dwarves, and trolls—exist as well, hiding underground for millennia for fear of being discovered. In the movie, one such fairy kidnaps the father of Artemis Fowl, the eponymous protagonist, and threatens to kill him unless the son delivers the Aculos, described as “the most valuable fairy treasure.” Artemis concocts a plan to recover the device and enlists the help of fairy Holly Short and dwarf Mulch Diggums, who help save his father and deny the villain the Aculos.
That’s standard genre adventure fare, with a standard genre protagonist. Artemis is a smart but lonely boy who finds himself thrust into a magical world, then quickly adapts to and masters his new surroundings to defeat the villain.
Except that’s not what happens in the book. There, Artemis is not a traditional protagonist, but rather a children’s antihero. He’s not a wide-eyed neophyte but an active explorer who discovers the fairy world’s existence all on his own, and who interacts with them not to save his family but to manipulate them to his own selfish ends.
Differences abound between the two characters. Book Artemis is unathletic, as physically incompetent as he is mentally profound; movie Artemis, meanwhile, spends his free time surfing and wields weapons with aplomb. In the book, Artemis’s sick mother is a crucial anchor to his humanity, as he must balance his criminal scheming with caring for her; in the movie, in true Disney fashion, she’s dead, mentioned only once in an early expositional aside.
This is an overarching similarity among poor YA adaptations—removing the protagonist’s book quirks to craft a more generic movie model, such that all these adolescent or teen characters blend together. (Sometimes, the actors even overlap in similar roles; Alex Pettyfer starred in both Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker and I Am Number Four.) Watch Eragon and The Maze Runner and Artemis Fowl all in a row, and it might be hard to remember which character belongs to which franchise.
2. Get rid of those pesky “themes” and complicated moral questions.
In the case of this film, the failure to properly portray Artemis ties directly to the movie’s core issue: a broader misunderstanding of the book’s central themes. Artemis is not supposed to be a character for audiences to cheer for without reservation; Colfer has described his story as “Die Hard with fairies,” but centered on a child-sized Hans Gruber, not John McClane.
Make no mistake: Artemis is the villain of the first book in the series. In the very first scene, he poisons and blackmails a fairy to gain access to her copy of the Book, which essentially acts as the species’ bible. He then translates the Book—a task described as impossible in the movie—and uses his newfound knowledge to kidnap another fairy, Holly, whom he ransoms for a cart full of gold.
His motivation isn’t complicated. He states it clearly, multiple times: He just wants gold, and the accompanying thrill of becoming the first human to swindle fairies out of their precious metal.
Artemis also kidnaps Holly in the film, yet by casting this decision as the only possible first step to rescue his father, the movie removes the moral ambiguities around the character. In book form, he stood out amid a sea of similarly styled main characters because he forced young readers to navigate an unfamiliar archetype and understand shades of gray. And Branagh seemed to understand this appeal; in an interview with Slashfilm, he said that he saw, as did readers, “Artemis gathering a sense of morality across the books.”
Yet for the adaptation, Artemis went, in Branagh’s telling, “on a journey which might be the opposite to the books.” Why? Perhaps it was easier to tell a more familiar story, with a more familiar hero type. (Hilariously, Artemis describes himself as a “criminal mastermind” at the end of the movie, despite not committing most of the crimes he did in the book.) Or perhaps Disney was reluctant to sully its squeaky-clean, family-friendly reputation.
Either way, Artemis Fowl immediately joins such theme-squandering examples as the Ender’s Game movie, which sacrificed much of the book’s empathetic message in search of a kinetic space romp, and the Golden Compass movie, which removed much of the book’s religious criticism for fear of offending viewers.
3. Change all the side characters’ most prominent characteristics.
Artemis isn’t the only character who experiences drastic changes in the book-to-film conversion. Holly Short, the series’ most prominent member of the fairy world, sees her story simplified, too. In the books, Holly is the first female officer in her underground police unit, and as such must battle against engendered sexism and prove herself as both a capable officer in her own right and a worthy representative for all aspiring female recruits.
In the movie, conversely, Holly is wholly motivated by her dead father—a character never mentioned in the books. At the same time, the glass ceiling subplot is removed because Branagh built an egalitarian police force, led by Judi Dench as the gender-swapped police captain. Normally, gender-swapping characters is a perfectly reasonable adaptive choice; here, it undercuts a key element of Holly’s complicated character. She’s also described in the books with “nut-brown skin,” but presents as white in the movie.
Elsewhere, dwarf criminal Mulch Diggums, played by Josh Gad, is a riotously fun sidekick, but for some reason, Branagh’s version turns him into a “giant dwarf” obsessed with his size. Suffice it to say, neither of these traits—physical or mental—comes from the book, and seemingly exist in the movie for the sake of a single Gad punch line.
4. Force the characters into a friendship instead of letting their relationship develop organically over time.
Holly ends the first book with a “big ball of hatred” directed Artemis’s way, thinking that the next time she saw him, she’d greet him “with a big gun and a smile.” This reaction makes sense; she’d been kidnapped and held for ransom, and would no doubt feel bitterly toward her captor. It takes multiple books and plenty of side-by-side adventuring for the two to forge a grudging respect, then a genuine friendship.
In the movie, conversely, they develop trust after a single conversation because their fathers—one wildly different from his book series portrayal, one invented for the movie—were allies. It certainly seems easier to just tell the audience that two characters are friends, instead of actually showing that progression over time.
5. Ignore the plot that’s proved to please audiences, and craft your own instead! Bonus points if you can smash together scenes from later books in the series to confuse matters further.
So, the Aculos? The crucial MacGuffin central to fairy society, with unexplained yet seemingly unlimited power? Yeah, that doesn’t exist in the books. It’d be like if Peter Jackson had invented the One Ring for Frodo to carry, instead of taking it from J.R.R. Tolkien’s world.
Overall, the movie splices together parts of the first book (like Holly’s abduction and multiple battles with a troll), parts of the second book (like the father’s kidnapping and Artemis’s chat with a psychiatrist), and other newly invented parts, all to create a new confusing timeline.
Artemis Fowl is far from the first YA adaptation to experiment with strict story fidelity. On one end, successful franchises have tended to split their final book into two movies; on the other, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events combined the plots of three books into one supersized movie, while Alex Rider combined the first book’s story with the fourth book’s love interest for no explicable reason.
Yet that decision was perhaps most glaring in Artemis Fowl, both because that sensation of jumping around jumbled the various character motivations in addition to the plots and because the book plot should have worked perfectly well as a movie without any meddling. Audiences adore Die Hard, and audiences adore magic, and audiences adore heist stories—all of which combine to form the first book.
6. Don’t explain any of the magic/wonder.
The fairy world in Artemis Fowl features a fascinating mix of magic and technology. The first book, for instance, explains how one type of magic previously performed by a team of warlocks was transferred to lithium batteries as fairy society adapted to modern times. And the creatures’ magic is tied to nature—especially as the series continues, the books carry a strong environmental message—and born from Irish myth, giving it a unique flavor amid the magical YA landscape.
This part of the story is scarcely explained, though, as Branagh rushes through the plot to meet an 89-minute run time (not counting end credits). This lack of attention to world-building can’t help but confuse new viewers while disappointing longtime fans.
7. Force Judi Dench to dress in an elf costume and bitterly recite the most Irish line possible.
OK, maybe this one is just an Artemis Fowl problem.
8. Change almost everything about the ending.
This is a tried-and-true trick for many YA adaptations, from Alex Rider and Eragon to The Giver and even outrageously successful movies, like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. (See: the Voldemort confetti.) Creators figure that climaxes that work on the page don’t contain enough action and add their own CGI spectacles to liven up the proceedings, even if the tangible result of their changes are greater mess rather than added excitement.
Artemis Fowl is no different. The book climaxes with the “coup de grace” to Artemis’s grand criminal conspiracy, which involves feints and double bluffs and receives plenty of clever foreshadowing throughout the story. The movie instead climaxes with an explosion that seems certain to kill Artemis—yet amid all the chaos and difficult-to-track action, somehow, he escapes destruction. It’s unclear how and it’s unclear why, but it happens. And isn’t that fun?
9. Set up a sequel that won’t ever exist.
After that improbable survival, the movie ends with Artemis calling Opal Koboi, the faceless villain who had abducted his father, and warning he’d take her down; triumphant music soaring, he climbs aboard a helicopter with Mulch and his father, Holly flying alongside, and motors off into the sunset. It’s that kind of movie, unwilling to let a single clichéd rock go unturned.
Artemis also likely motors off into the great void of unfulfilled sequel promises, however. The Golden Compass teased a sequel that never came. Ditto Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters and Eragon and Alex Rider and so many more. The Divergent series, most galling of all, planned four movies but produced only three before stopping short of the conclusion.
The future of the Artemis Fowl Cinematic Universe is still to be determined, but if the early reception—a Rotten Tomatoes score of 10 percent from critics and 23 percent from audiences, as of Sunday night—is any indication, Artemis’s onscreen battle with Opal will remain forever unexplored ...
10. All other options exhausted, maybe hope for a TV series instead.
… Or, at least it will in movie form. In the current content era, no franchise is truly ever done for good, and from this perspective, Artemis Fowl’s release isn’t the only notable YA fantasy development at Disney+. Last month, Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson series, announced that the streaming service was developing a TV adaptation of his beloved books. Most importantly, he stressed that he and his wife would be “involved in every aspect of the show.”
That enthusiasm represents quite the change from his reaction to the movies based on his books. Riordan infamously urged fans to avoid the “vapid” films. “No group of students deserves to be subjected to that sort of mind-numbing punishment. The movies’ educational value is exactly zero,” he wrote, adding, “I would rather have my teeth pulled with no anesthesia” and clarifying, “And please, don’t call them my movies. They are in no way mine.”
Riordan’s isn’t the only series with a chance at a better life as a TV show than film. Other aforementioned movie misses have found new life on the small screen. The new Alex Rider show has an 83 percent fresh rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, versus the earlier movie’s 35 percent score. Ratings for HBO’s His Dark Materials and Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events also greatly outstrip those for the film counterparts.
YA Adaptations, Movie vs. TV Show
Given the movie’s troubled production, the Artemis Fowl series may never spawn another story on screen. But done right, the books would be worth a try, tracing a young thief’s maturation and a pioneering magical being’s push for respect, plus the budding, complicated friendship that forms between the pair after they meet in inopportune circumstances. That the series’ first story, a cleanly plotted caper with equal battles of wits and brawn, could yield such a misguided misfire of a movie is a sign that Artemis might be better suited for a TV show instead.
It would be impossible to make a less compelling Artemis story, anyway. And maybe whoever came along next would learn from these 10 lessons and stay faithful to the original tale, instead of twisting the character and inventing adventures to fit the story into the large and unfortunate pile of failed YA adaptations.
