One of the factors that upset people so much about the latest adaptation of The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann, aside from the absurd opinion that it’s inherently unfilmable material, was the thought of “they’re making another version of it??” As surprising as it was to see people actually defending the Robert Redford version of Gatsby, some were going so far as to say the version that no one else could top was the lost 1926 version because only the most hipstercritical would have seen the surviving trailer of it and claim ownership over it. The point is that it’s been adapted several times already, in a variety of media, and probably will continue to be adapted. And this is a good thing.
It’s not only good, it’s normal. It has historical precedent, to be sure. Of course it’s nice to see something completely alien to anything we’ve seen before, but it’s also satisfying and can be interesting to see the wave of adapted musicals from the 1960s, or the early stage adaptations that film began with, from Shakespeare to Biblical stories. It was the decision to use film to visually adapt previously existing stories that was meant to grant it artistic legitimacy, so it’s ironic that now the same practice is cited as having the opposite effect.
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