Ron Does Stuff

Perhaps the best thing about having a character as popular as Hannibal Lecter is that you get multiple adaptations of work that involve him. Which gives me more stuff to blog about!

This isn’t actually the first time I’m going to watch Red Dragon. I watched it when it first came out in theaters in 2002, in what was then a pretty new movie theater at Greenbelt 3. A pretty new and expensive movie theater back then, especially for someone who didn’t have a job yet. And this was the time when theaters started making you get out of movie theaters after each screening when before they’d let you stay in for as long as you like. That’s how I ended up watching The Fellowship of the Ring 10 times.

But now, I’m watching this at home and after reading the book, so I wonder how differently I’d react to this one. Did the novelty of the theater and my youth at the time made me think better of this film than it deserved? Would me having read the book drastically lower my opinion of it? Let’s see!

The first thing that strikes me about the movie is that the opening scene at the symphony is something that wasn’t even touched upon in the original book. Was this something written specifically for the movie? Or is this a tidbit revealed further down the line in the other books? Either way, it gives viewers a more detailed look at that meeting than the book ever does.

The title credits also are a stark departure from The Silence of the Lambs, or at least what I remember of it, since I think I’ve only watched it once. It’s got a much more lurid and sensationalist feel to it, although I guess that it’s justifiable given how big of a role tabloid journalism plays in this story.

Red Dragon is also a noisier film. Again, this is just from what little I can recall from The Silence of the Lambs film. It’s like this movie is afraid the audience might miss what’s scary or unsettling about the events that it has to give them a musical cue.

The movie also has the unfortunate task of having to make the actors that make an appearance in The Silence of the Lambs look younger because all of this happens before that and…well, it’s not all successful and this was years before de-aging technology.

They do try to replicate that Hannibal-Clarice chemistry between Hannibal and Will and I can kinda see it! Is it as good as what Bryan Fuller came up with in the show though? Maybe not, but Brett Ratner made this film so you can’t exactly expect him to have the skills to pull it off.

I also understand why they’ve made it look like it’s Hannibal’s idea to have Will look at the families as if they’re “alive” via the videotapes. By the time this came out, Hannibal pretty much already had an outsize reputation that far eclipsed the actual role he played in the book, so the production understandably had to move things around.

The acting throughout feels pretty good, so I do feel bad that as the movie progresses it becomes clear that while it’s a pretty close adaptation of the novel, it’s a very bland interpretation that doesn’t bring anything new to the story. And that doesn’t mean dramatically changing the plot! It’s just injecting some of the director’s perspective into it, kinda like how Jonathan Demme shot The Silence of the Lambs to emphasize how Clarice was viewed by the men in her life or how Mary Harron interpreted American Psycho‘s indictment of the ’80s American male.

And at the end of the day, that’s really the biggest fault of this movie and this adaptation. It’s not bad. It’s just…okay. Unfortunately, okay isn’t going to be good enough especially when it’s got such an esteemed film that paved the way for it.