Artemis Fowl: A terrible adaptation a long time in the making
The plot of the Artemis Fowl book is fairly simple.
An evil 12-year-old boy genius poisons an alcoholic sprite to discover more about their magical underground world. With that knowledge he kidnaps a fairy police officer (the first female officer in history) and uses her as a ransom for lots of gold to restore his family’s wealth which has been lost since his father disappeared in mysterious circumstances.
There are some slight nuances and twists but by-and-large that is the plot of Eoin Colfer’s novel which was published in 2001 and has spawned a whole universe.
There was immediately talk of a film adaptation and only now, 19 years later, has the film slinked onto the Disney+ streaming service, not even given the credence of a proper theatrical release (although the Covid-19 pandemic is largely to blame).
It is probably for the best: the film is terrible (it’s currently sitting at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Not only is it terrible but it’s also a terrible adaptation of a beloved children’s book that did have the potential to be great fun.
However screenwriters Conor McPherson and Hamish McColl have not just taken liberties with the source material but lost the very essence of it (warning: spoilers ahead).
Artemis in the book is not a nice boy from not a nice a family. The clue is in the Fowl name.
He’s a pale rather sickly schoolboy who spends his hours in front of computer monitors, scheming and avoiding his mentally unwell mother.
The first page of the book’s first chapter:
Sun did not suit Artemis. He did not look well in it. Long hours indoors in front of the monitor had bleached the glow from his skin. He was white as a vampire and almost as testy in the light of day.
He is all brains and no heart: his goal is simply to blackmail lots of gold out of the magical race. The Fowl family motto in the book ‘aurum est potestas’ (Gold is Power) is discarded by the film’s script, as is the entire gold plot.
The arc of the book has Artemis, an extortionist kidnapper let’s not forget, soften during a siege at Fowl Manor and eventually forfeit half the gold in exchange for the abducted fairy (Holly Short, in the film played by Lara McDonnell) curing his mum’s insanity.
In the film? He’s a surfboarding smart alec who is only drawn into the fairy world because his father is kidnapped (his mother is dead before the film begins).
While Artemis Fowl hired Miranda Raison to play Angeline Fowl, her scenes were cut, and there was dialogue added in reshoots to establish her death.
Book Artemis discovers the magical realm by his own research, film Artemis is spoon-fed all the important information by his dad (a wasted Colin Farrell)
Director Kenneth Branagh was asked about the change by SlashFilm:
It was a decision based on a sort of inverse take on what I saw in the books, which was Eoin introducing Artemis gathering a sense of morality across the books. He said that he had him preformed as an 11-year-old Bond villain. It seemed to me that for the audiences who were not familiar with the books, this would be a hard, a hard kind of thing to accept.
In the book Butler is Artemis’ bodyguard and surrogate father figure . A big part of the series is revealing his first name (this doesn’t happen until book 3 in the series.)
The film on the other hand instead reveals his full name from the beginning and he is never referred to as ‘Butler’ (the decision to cast black actor Nonso Anozie may have informed the decision to swerve the ‘Butler’ name almost entirely).
The film is aimed at kids and the darker elements of the book have been discarded.
Gone is the alcoholic sprite who Artemis dupes (although curiously these scenes were shot and featured in an earlier trailer), gone is the ‘blue rinse’ weapon used to destroy all organic life in Fowl Manor, gone is the gruesome injuries suffered by Butler at the hands of a rampaging troll.
The latter point is one of the action centre pieces of the book: Butler, having been healed by the kidnapped fairy, dons a knight’s armour and goes toe-to-toe with the troll.
However in the film the troll simply smashes itself around Fowl Manor before falling from a chandelier.
This could all maybe, maybe have been okay if the film was solid in its own right, but it’s such a mess with a clunky framing device, bad/awful dialogue and cheap CGI.
We never find out who kidnapped Artemis’ dad (presumably saved the for the sequel Disney so desperately craves), the MacGuffin is crowbarred into the plot and the film is all either exposition or action.
Film Artemis is aghast when he discovers his dad may be a criminal but after committing zero crimes himself during the film at the end he proudly declares himself a ‘criminal mastermind’ at the end. Eh?
There’s also a crater-sized plot-hole where a time-freeze is used to detain a troll early in the film (pausing all human life within a bubble), but when a similar device is used on Fowl Manor… the Artemis clan are unaffected.
I am loathe to even mention Judi Dench’s laughable attempt to channel Christian Bale’s Batman performance with her growly, gruff voice.
‘Straight to Disney+ is the new ‘direct to VHS’.
But hey, maybe the kids will love it.
Further reading:
