I'm just done reading Red Square (started Havana Bay yesterday) and the incompatibility between the movie universe / book universe seem even bigger to me now (still haven't checked out Gorky Park novel).
I cannot understand why they deliberately sacrificed Pribluda at the end of Gorky Park (when Osborne kills him in the shoot-out)... basically that made impossible a faithful Havana Bay sequel (when the story revolves around Pribluda being found dead in the bay itself), not even considering how Pribluda helped Arkady out of the psychiatric facility in Polar Star (via flashback). Perhaps Cruz Smith even took advantage of that, to stunt any other adaptation.
And also: Arkady's wife leaves him in Gorky Park (novel)? Irina was blind in one eye? Shocking to learn these things online.
But what really bothered me is how Arkady's "contrast" with his father (in the 1983 version) only goes so far as characterizing him as sloppy (unshaved, chalk on his jacket, sliver of food on his lip), when -- considering the stuff he goes through (Red Square, Polar Star) -- that only seems related to the contingency (a trawler ship in not really the best place on earth to be dapper and classy). The father-son struggle runs a lot deeper and it's quite a shame how they "dealt" with it (or didn't at all).
There are hints of Arkady's mother suicide in Red Square and how he resents his father, and I can only suppose the whole thing was developed fully in the first novel, still: such fundamental element to the character's weight was left behind in the movie.
As I said before I think Hurt did a fantastic job portraying Renko (and knowing his acting style he probably read the novel and took all these elements in "subtle" consideration for his performance), but given the material it still kinda comes off as a mostly aesthetic role -- I wish the movie hadn't been so one dimensional in regards of Arkady's depths as character.
Once again, it's a 2h+ crime thriller thing, and considering Cruz Smith peculiar way to mix styles (novel-like here, some lyrical descriptions there, crime, suspence, a little romance), the full dose would have seriously taken hours.
Reading Red Square -- I realized that one was almost impossible to make into a movie (perhaps a TV series) without actually mutilating it.
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clark_gillies
8 years ago
Yes, clearly Smith was so dissatisfied with the movie that he completely ignored it in terms of what happened to the characters in the movie, and somewhat made them key to the story line in his future books in order to ignore it (after his death, Van Lustbader took over from Robert Ludlum for writing the Jason Bourne books, and has now written 6 or 7 over the last decade, and in his books he has started using major elements of the Matt Damon movie version as influence/history of the character and story line in his books).
Agree, the books do have some really dark aspects of the characters that the movie seems to sugar coat over somewhat.
Renko and his relationship with his father seems to take up 1/5th of the book roughly 2/3rd of the way through the book..... while since I read it, but from what I recall the book and movie are both fairly accurate up to just before the Stockholm scene which is just about the end of the movie (while its about half way through the book) and (not wanting to spoil anything) they do leave out a really good part of the book (which could have been used for a 2nd movie!).
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