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Despite being an acclaimed graphic novel– and one of the first to establish the genre in the critical mainstream - The Sandman has long been considered rather unfilmable. Yet Netflix seems to have pleased fans and critics alike with its 10-part adaptation.
The fantasy series arrives just ahead of HBO’s Game of
Thrones prequel and Amazon’s epic retell of The Lord of The Rings
and on this evidence appears to have a hit – and a franchise with legs - to
compete.
In the simplest terms, The Sandman, follows the
story of Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), informally referred to as Dream, the
Lord of the Dreaming, and one of seven immortal beings known as the Endless who
are each tasked with watching over aspects of reality. Their stories,
told in a format not unlike modern Greco-Roman myths, created a comic that
displayed a depth and maturity not normally associated with the genre.
Various failed attempts at adaptation have wandered through
development hell since the comic series was completed in 1996 (the first in the
series released in 1989) including an aborted 1991 movie at Warner Bros (whose
DC division published the books).
While equally lauded and ‘unfilmable’ graphic novel classic
Watchmen has been made (by Zack Snyder into a 2009 feature that deserves to be
more positively reappraised and the recent HBO TV series) none of the attempts
to get The Sandman off the ground worked “in large part due to the
series’ lack of easily characterized protagonists and antagonists,” observes
NBC. “The structure of the stories themselves also presents a challenge.”
The novel’s story ‘24 Hours,’ for example, is defined as
much by the way the graphics are laid out — 24 pages, one per hour — as it is
by the plot.
But author Neil Gaiman’s involvement seems to have been the
key to Netflix’s artistic success. Apparently this is the first time he has
been invited to be a key part of the creative team.
“Sandman needs time,” Gaiman tells the BBC. "If
somebody had ever tried to make a movie of Game of Thrones, that
wouldn't have worked either. You need space for a big story. You need time to
care about characters. In Sandman season one, we had 340 speaking parts in
those first 10 episodes. That's an awful lot of people to get to know and we've
only just begun. We have adapted, so far, 400 pages out of 3,000.”
Gaiman is co-credited with writing the series premiere.
“Having him on board granted the series’ writers license to translate to the
screen as they saw fit,” says NBC.
The show's co-showrunner is Allan Heinberg who co-produces
with David Goyer and Gaiman. “The only way to do this is to do it faithfully
and to do it with the author'”, Heinberg told IndieWire.
So the team went back to the beginning: Gaiman’s story
itself. And not the visuals of the original comic either, but the author’s
text, which he put together before an artist had drawn a single panel.
“In terms of my prep, one of the things that Allan provided
me with, which was gold, was the original comic book scripts from Neil Gaiman,”
VFX supervisor Ian Markiewicz tells Den of Geek.
“Not the comic books, not the drawn panels, but the scripts he wrote for the
artists [where] he described what he was trying to get at.”
Other than the comic books, the major touchpoint for the
creators were the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Gaiman explained to IndieWire, “There’s both a realism and a
solidity and a willingness to walk away from realism in Powell and Pressburger,
if you look at a film like A Matter of Life And Death, the way that they
would do practical effects. And in this CGI world it’s very easy to look at
‘Sandman’ and go, ‘Oh, this stuff is all CGI.’ You would be amazed at how much
of it is not CGI.”
The result is that though there are certain moments in the
series which look as though they’ve been lifted directly from the comic panels
(because several “absolutely” have), The Sandman series
manages to feel like something altogether different.
“I thought that [starting with] Neil’s notes was the perfect
way for us to think about adapting the show,” Markiewicz continues. “Because
sometimes the comic book panel is very comic book-y, and it has that wild,
quirky, zany quality, which I don’t think the show has all of that much.”
Mirroring the episodic nature of the comic itself, each
installment of the Netflix series is self-contained, shifting between time
periods, settings, and genres even as it tells a cohesive larger
story. Much of the show’s surreal dream states are rendered with skewed
aspect ratios – a feature that seems distracting to some viewers
The result is a show that is “startingly faithful to the
comic in tone and visuals but which alters it just enough to build a consistent
linear narrative around which digressions can orbit.”
“With lush visuals and beautifully intricate sets, there are
moments that feel as though they were explicitly lifted from the pages of the
original comic,” finds Den of Geek as well as episodes that deftly blend the stories of multiple issues into
something completely new.
“It had to be amazing, no matter what we did,” Jon Gary
Steele, production designer for The Sandman, tells the magazine. “Everyone
felt that energy and that excitement. We were trying to keep it as cool as the
graphic novel—stunning, sexy, and beautiful.’”
“One of the big challenges on this show is just every
episode [is different],” VFX supervisor Ian Markiewicz adds. “Each episode has
new main players, it has new locations, it has new bit characters, and new
additional background. It’s set at a different time [with] a new
wardrobe.”
Critics seem content – though voice concern that later
series (this first ten-ep run could extend to another 10 series) might be
watered down creatively.
The Guardian puts its success down to two key decisions: “the casting is spectacular” and
the standalone structure of the episodic storytelling.
One episode set in a diner and another set in the same pub
at hundred-year intervals “really show what you can do with one story and one
character and one hour of ingenuity, and give the whole series more of an
anthology feel than an endless story where someone does hand gestures a lot and
magic comes out,” says Joel Golby
The Atlantic’s review is glass half full. Here, David Sims, finds the pacing a slow burn “letting things unfold with the care of a monthly comic rather than the punchiness of weekly TV. It makes for some very high highs—and a few languorous lows.”
He finds an ambiguity to the main protagonist which means
audiences need to be patient, especially at first.
“So much of The Sandman’s arc is about the
audience coming to understand Dream as he also comes to understand himself. But
it relies on the viewer’s patience to stick with him through that process.”
Sims adds, “Where the series cannot hope to compare to the
comics is in its visuals; although the CGI in The Sandman is
lavish and ever present, it can’t render a dreamworld in as impressionistic a
style as an illustrated comic can.”
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