The Adaptation Complaints #3 - Brought To You By Cadre Cola

Here is an example of taking the source material and putting it in the blender until most of the original story is no longer there, and yet it somehow still works in the sense that the movie is somewhat a guilty pleasure of mine even though I don't feel guilty liking the movie. Of course, I am talking about The Running Man, the 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his pseudonym Richard Bachman that became the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. They do share some of the basic plot details about a character named Ben Richards who enters a game show in a dystopian future. The circumstances behind why they're in the game in the first place along with what exactly the rules and format of it are. It is difficult to really call them the same story yet they are both fun and entertaining in their own right so lets just go into why they are so different.

The most obvious comparison I could make is in the character of Ben Richards himself. In the novel, he is an unemployed married man with a child who is having a hard time finding work due to being blacklisted, leaving his wife to work as a prostitute to provide money to support the family as well as get medicine for their daughter, who has a really bad illness which means that the medicine they need is rather costly. This does lead him to have to resort to applying for The Running Man game show in order to support his family even if it ends up costing his life, which is almost a certainty due to the nature of the game in this version. As for the movie, it's a fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger film during the time where his was doing movies like Commando and Predator, so they turned him into a military man who in the beginning of the film, refuses to shoot at civilians so he ends up being arrested and sent to prison for the deed. He ends up escaping only to end up being captured by the cops who give him to the network who puts him in the Running Man game against his will. So completely different characters these two are yet they do fit the way the story is told in each of their versions.

Let's get into The Running Man itself, moreso how the game works in each version of the story. Starting with the novel, the contestant is declared an enemy of the state and has to survive alone in the world for 30 days while trying to hide himself from being spotted by the public, who get paid for telling the network where the contestant is, along with avoiding the hunters, the hitmen of the show. And the grand prize for making it all the way through the 30 days is 1 billion dollars. I almost forgot about how Richards has to send tapes to the network as messages in order to keep getting paid for his time surviving. As for the movie, it is more like a show where there are four different sections that the runner has to go through with each section having its own hunter that the runner has to get past. For the most part, the contestants in this version are usually criminals or at least criminals in the eyes of the government. In each scenario though, there is always some sort of conspiracy that goes into the game that prevents the contestants from actually winning or allowing any sort of message that either the government or the network approves. I think that the shit that Killian does to get Richards to do what he wants, especially the reveal at the end, is more messed up than in the movie which might have been due to the director, who was a replacement that Schwarzenegger thought ruined the movie and lost a lot of the commentary from the source material. And that director was Paul Michael Glaser, who played the original Starsky on TV, yet as a director made such classics such as The Cutting Edge and Kazaam so you know that this was probably his best work.

I could go on about all the differences between the two versions of The Running Man, which in itself could make up a decent 10 to 15 page essay, yet I don't want to get into spoilers for either version so this is where I'll leave it for today. Hopefully, I'll work on this series a lot more yet I hope I don't spread myself too thin with all the topics I plan on covering. If you think that I didn't cover enough with this one, mention it in the comments and I'll try and improve the content of this blog in general as well, since any criticism is more than appreciated.