Remaking a movie is a tall order, and transitioning a story from another medium to film is even tougher. So it’s no surprise that details frequently get changed to accomodate a new era of filmmaker or the different “beats” associated with a feature-length movie.
It becomes a problem, however, when one of the things cut to accomodate an extra action scene turns out to be vitally important to the plot, leaving the movie with a scene or detail that only makes sense if you’re familiar with the original.
Things like…
7. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Snape’s Patronus Means Nothing
Working on the film adaptation of Harry Potter before the books were finished created the pretty obvious problem of not knowing exactly what to include — a problem exacerbated by the fact that JK Rowling was clearly making it all up as she went along. Nowhere is the issue more apparent than at the climax of The Deathly Hallows Part 2, where everyone in the audience who read the books was crying uncontrollably and everyone who hadn’t was poking them and asking, in a suitably polite movie-theatre whisper, what the hell was going on.
The scene shows Snape revealing, for the first time, his Patronus: a doe. The book had at this point casually explained that love for someone else can alter a person’s patronus — Tonks’ patronus is a wolf, symbolizing her love for Remus Lupin, who is a werewolf. When we see Snape’s Patronus as a doe, we suddenly realize that he was in love with Lily Potter, Harry’s mother — which explains virtually everything he’s done up to this point. Kinda. If you squint.
But in the movie, we never see Tonks’ patronus, or learn in any other way that a Patronus reflects love at all, making this scene ent
irely incomprehensible unless you knew what it meant anyway.
6. There’s Actually an Explanation for the Dog Costume In The Shining
Possibly the most iconic “what the hell?” moments in cinema is the quick shot of a dude in a dog costume in The Shining. In comes out of absolute nowhere, and is never explained — and when you’re dealing with a famously detailed filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick, this seems really out of place. Since he went so far as demand that props be a specific color for black and white movies or that a space toilet have actual working instructions, the idea that he just threw up his hands and said “a dude in a dog costume sure would be weird, eh? Let’s go with that!” doesn’t seem plausible.
And it’s not, because that’s not what happened.
In Stephen King’s original book, the dog costume is carefully explained: His name is Harry, and he’s a sex-slave in a homosexual sadomasochistic relationship. He’s actually brought to one of the hotel’s dance parties and forced to behave like a dog the whole time for the amusement of his “master.” So… now you know that.
5. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: Subspace
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World had a lot of scenes that didn’t really rely on any kind of real-world logic. Most of what we see and enjoy on the screen is based on video game power ups, making it a kind of movie-length inside joke. But one thing that stood out as being different was the bit where Ramona teleports Scott and herself back to her home after their first date. It doesn’t appear to be a reference to any specific video game rules and it’s never explained — just like the earlier scene when Scott somehow knows that Ramona is going to be appearing at his door moments before she rings the doorbell. It’s hinted that there’s something going on that we don’t understand, but it’s never explained.
Unless, of course, you’ve read the comics, where you learn fairly early on that Ramona spends a lot of her professional time working in “Subspace,” which is a weird meta-universe she travels through in order to make her deliveries. A major detail left out of the story is that the particular subspace highway she works in travels directly through Scott’s brain, which is why he sees her in his dreams and a big part of why he’s in love with her. Because this never comes up, the movie actually loses a lot of the complexity and emotional ambiguity that made the comics interesting in the first place.
4. The Departed: Everyone Forgets About Dignam
A kind of subtly forgotten element in The Departed involves Sergeant Dignam, played by Mark Wahlberg. Along with Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) he’s one of the only two people to know that Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is actually an undercover cop and not really a mob enforcer. However, when Dignam is put on suspension and Queenan is killed, Costigan suddenly has no one to turn to, and is forced to face the events of the movie’s climax all–
–wait, what? Dignam isn’t dead, he’s on suspension. They didn’t make him turn his phone off or stop checking Facebook. Costigan could have totally turned to him for help.
Not everyone realizes that even though The Departed is heavily influenced by the dealings of an actual Boston-based crime family, the story itself is a remake of a Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs (so, yeah, it’s not from a book), in which events play out almost exactly the same except Dignam (now named Yip) is killed along with Queenan (Wong), meaning this plot hole doesn’t exist in the original text.
Why the change? Can’t say for sure, but it probably has to do with the fact that an American version of the film needed an ending where Mark Wahlberg shoots someone.
Read on!