Fandom Snowflake Challenge: Day 12

[rogueslayer452]

Day Twelve: In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, tv series or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a character in a book, comic or maybe even your own fiction!

I could do an entire post ranting about how much they screwed up Annihilation (oh boy, did they ever) and how I would redo pretty much everything, casting included, to be a proper adaptation that it rightfully deserves, but for now I will say that I've been kind of envisioning Florence Faivre as The Biologist, since seeing her in The Expanse and her appearance in Agents of SHIELD I can definitely see her really pulling off that kind of a role. Also Sonoya Mizuno could also be good, too, ironic since she was briefly in that film and seemed to have been a good Biologist except she wasn't, dammit. Missed opportunity, especially since the Biologist is supposed to be of Asian descent and they completely whitewashed the role in the movie, which pisses me the fuck off (among other things they got wrong, like totally assassinating her character completely), just ugh. But yeah, either one of them would be my dreamcast for the Biologist.

I think that Anya Taylor-Joy would've made for a great Sabrina Spellman in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, she just has that kind of appeal and would've worked better than who they got, whose acting underwhelms and kind of irks me. Perhaps it would've been too much of a typecast, considering she did The Witch, but eh, whatever.

I'm still bitter that Lewis Tan was not Danny Rand for Iron Fist. Can you just imagine him and Jessica Henwick, the kind of power they would have together? In a perfect world.....

I know that they've already cast the actors, and I'm sure that they'll be good in the roles just based on the images and small little behind-the-scenes clips I've seen (if/when the drama will come out), but I have to say that for the live-action Heaven Official's Blessing, for a while there I personally envisioned Song Jiyang as Xie Lian and Wang Haoxuan as Hua Cheng, purely for self-indulgent reasons of wanting to see more of those two together since it would fill that XueXiao hole in my heart. But y'know, that's just me. I'm sure I'll fall in love with the actors chosen for the roles since I've gotten used to seeing their faces in costume and loving them already.


Now there are definitely some things that I would recast but I have absolutely no idea which actor I would replace them with. For example, I think Dune (2021) had mostly the perfect cast line-up except for Paul, but I really have no idea who could portray that kind of a role. Perhaps it's my utter indifference to the actor, I don't know. Also, I loved the Good Omens book, but I cannot watch the miniseries because the casting for Crowley and Aziraphale is just all wrong, in my eyes. I don't know who I would cast for those characters though, like I just have my own personal imagination versions of those characters and those two actors just don't fulfill it, imho.

Comments

[rogueslayer452.livejournal.com]

As a stand-alone I guess it could work fine, but as an adaptation it was downright horrible. And as someone who has read and adores those books, I take great offense to the fact that the director went into this knowing he had no desire of doing a faithful adaptation of the story anyway and just got the rights for the ~aesthetic reasons instead of, oh I don't know, creating his own story with the same aesthetics and simply saying he was inspired by the book (which apparently he only read once, and didn't even read the rest of the books iirc) and not disrespecting the story beautiful message the author was trying to tell. Yes, visually it was stunning, but that's about it, really.

(As you can see, I have very strong opinions on this, I'm usually more lenient when it comes to adaptations and knowing that I can treat them and the source material as separate entities, but this is an exception because those books resonated deep with me and it's such a waste when directors/studios favor aesthetics over story, and completely missing the point of the message the source material was trying to make.)

Hopefully one day we'll get an actual faithful adaptation of Annihilation, and the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy, with proper casting.

Anna Taylor-Joy as Sabrina would have been so neat. I feel like she could have got to the darker parts of that character much better.

Oh, absolutely, she has the range. The actress they got....not so much.

[elizalavelle.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I get really frustrated when someone adapts something and it's clear they wanted to tell their own story and just used the "adaptation" as a way to get a green light on production. I really liked the experience of reading those books and the way the story was revealed. The movie didn't touch on that feeling at all I don't think except for the score in the end which gave that sense of something being not right. That's the part of the film that left the biggest impression on me.

Maybe someone will pick up the Southern Reach series as a TV adaptation. It might lend itself to a few limited seasons in order to build the story.