Bump.
So I’m over 3 years late to the party on this one but I finally just got around to watching this ‘new’ Stand adaptation and I want to jot down some thoughts while it’s fresh in my mind. I see from the meagre 3 pages this thread was able to muster at the time the show went out that it wasn’t well-received on here, and I’m writing this at a time when anyone reading has likely already forgotten anything about the series.
Little background: The Stand is one of my favourite novels of all time (and a top 3 King book alongside IT and 11/22/63), I most recently re-read it last month - hence watching the 2020 series immediately after - and I love the 1994 miniseries. My love of both heavily affected my opinion of the new series.
Right, on with it. I’m gonna organise this from bad to good.
The terrible:
1 Las Vegas. I have no idea what they were thinking with this ridiculous portrayal of Flagg’s domain. In the novel and the 1994 miniseries, the whole idea of Vegas/Flagg is that it is an attractive proposition for those who value order and pragmatism. That’s why Glen surmises that Flagg will likely attract a lot of engineers and scientists, people who like systems and rules. In the 1994 series one of the first things we see in Vegas is people cleaning up the streets of the filth left behind by the ‘old world’. In the novel, anyone caught doing drugs is crucified and it’s mentioned that nobody feels safe drinking anything stronger than a beer.
In this new series, Vegas is basically a hedonistic anarchy, which is the OPPOSITE of King’s original vision. Everyone’s either drunk or having sex all the time and we get multiple scenes of huge orgies, people staggering around hammered, smashing glass bottles everywhere, and Flagg just watching it all. In the big execution scene of Larry and ‘Ray’ (don’t get me started), Flagg bellows out to his minions: “We are heading towards a golden future” - how so?? Everyone’s either shitfaced, fighting or fucking, we see literally nothing else. Kind of a shallow ‘golden future’, no? You could have done all that in the ‘old world’. There’s no reconstruction of order, no working together towards any common goal, no hatred of weakness, indolence or slovenliness. It’s the opposite of the fascism King was implying in his novel.
Take as an example that ridiculous scene in the courtroom where Glen is shot (different to the novel). On the one hand I get the idea behind it – a summary execution in a courtroom is a good image of the collapse of civilisation. But everyone involved other than Larry, Glen and ‘Ray’ are, again, shitface drunk and/or behaving like wild animals. The judge (‘Rat Woman’ – don’t get me started) and the ‘prosecutor’ (Lloyd) are cartoonish. It was a very silly handling of what should have been a powerful scene. It’s Glen’s big moment, his ‘stand’. The character deserved better. Being shot in a jail cell with Flagg present in the 1994 miniseries had far more power. Everything about the Vegas scenes is underwhelming. Hell, after Glen’s been shot, Larry and ‘Ray’ (seriously, don’t get me started) get chained to an oven in the casino kitchen while gender-bending Native American ‘Ray’ justifies her replacing my beloved Ralph by blubbering to Larry about her fear of pain. Real progressive, film-makers. If you’re really gonna mangle the characters then at least have some balls and make Larry sob to the woman instead.
2. The Trashcan Man (both the character and the portrayal). Mercifully he is barely in the show, but when he is, he ruins every scene. This is a dreadful, dreadful conception of the character. Gone is any of the nuance of the original character, the dazed and confused loner whose own foggy nature is a frightening mystery to himself. The gullible and panicky abused child in an adult pyromaniac’s body who gets horribly terrorized and brutalized by the world (and, later, The Kid). This God-awful portrayal by Ezra Miller, who has Trash jerking off to fire and dry-humping a nuclear warhead, is dumb beyond words, and made me almost glad that Miller’s career in Hollywood is likely over now (seriously, look up the weirdo’s rap sheet on his wiki page).
The bad
1. Lloyd Henried (the character, not the portrayal). As with Trash, what were the film-makers thinking? Who on the writing staff read the novel and thought “Yep, the essence of this character is a ‘comic’ larger-than-life Vegas parody”? In the novel, Flagg chooses Lloyd because he senses that he’s a man who will be loyal, first and foremost, and that he has within him the capacity for intelligence if given just the right blend of carrot and stick. Lloyd grows under Flagg’s wing, he accesses skillsets he had dormant within him. This reawakening of him explains his devotion to Flagg. But this new portrayal? Why on earth would Flagg choose someone like this idiot, who – in contrast to the novel - actually becomes more and more stupid and goofy and arrogant and disrespectful as the series goes on?
(sidebar – my favourite single-scene character from any King book is Lloyd’s lawyer who walks him through why he’s facing execution in a few weeks. I really wish either the 1994 series or this one had taken 5 minutes to show that great scene. I also think King missed a trick in the novel by not having him show up in Vegas later on as Lloyd’s right hand man).
2. Don’t get me started on the box-ticking. What exactly is the point of turning Ralph Brentner into a Native American woman (who has basically no function in the film other than to cry about her fear of pain and then get silently drowned) if the series is simultaneously going to completely leave out strong female characters who were actually in the damn book to start with (Sue Stern, Lucy Swan)?? You could have kept Ralph, included Sue Stern (make her Native if you absolutely have to), and the same boxes would have been ticked. As much as I love Brad Dourif Junior’s portrayal of the ‘Rat Woman’…why change it from the Rat Man?
3. Omitting the entire episode of Tom finding Stu in the “valley of death”, nursing him to health with Nick’s help, and their journey back to the Free Zone. This was unforgiveable. The actor who plays Tom Cullen was criminally underused, because he was fantastic. In 2020 I imagine it was VERY hard for film-makers to decide how to write a character such as Tom. The 1994 miniseries bandied around the fact that he’s a “retard” (their word, not mine), but you can’t do that kind of thing in a show written in an age that turns men into Native American women, and I think they found a perfect way to portray a potentially problematic character. The Stand is especially heavy with the usual Stephen King tropes (Magical Black Lady, White Saviour, Retard With A Heart of Gold, Mystical Child Who Senses Things, Damaged Woman Saved By Good Man’s Penetration, I Am More Than My Disability, and last but never least with King - Salt of the Earth Bumpkin – although in this new series they’ve heavily debumpkined Stu Redman, possibly for the same reason they 86ed poor old loveable yokel Ralph), and I really think that having done all the hard work of creating this tasteful new Tom character, they totally wasted him. He is on screen so little that there is simply no emotional charge to his big goodbye to Nick before he goes West to spy, as there was in the 1994 series (such a beautiful little touch, Rob Lowe taking the tag off Tom’s new jacket and Tom saying he always forgets things like that). We never get to see his friendship with Nick grow. There’s no tenderness to the relationship.
Speaking of leaving out important scenes, I think it was a mistake to have Judge Farris (now a woman, don’t get me sta…oh wait, I covered that) be killed off-camera. While a relatively minor episode in the story, it still matters because it’s the first time things don’t go right for Flagg, and we see his subsequent loss of composure. It’s an important moment and they should have shown it.
4. Nick Andros. What the hell happened to him?? He got blown up and then was never mentioned again. You went to all that trouble in the first half of the series to whack people over the head with the Nick-as-Jesus imagery only to then forget the whole “sacrifice and resurrection” part. Very disappointing. Nick is basically a minor character in this series.
5. Whoopi Goldberg and Whatshisface Flaggskaard (not gonna attempt to spell his name) as Mother Abagail and Flagg. Neither performance can hold a candle to Ruby Dee or Jamie Sheridan. Flagg here has zero charisma or menace, he spends the whole film either mumbling or shouting, there is none of the playful manic humour Sheridan brought to the role. And Goldberg is just…kind of there. She speaks her lines like a perfectly healthy and slightly bored 70-odd year old. There is no magic to her character, you’re not drawn to her in any way. Just as Flagg inspires no awe (maybe that’s why everyone’s always drunk over there), Abagail evokes no sense of wonder.
The so-so
1. Nadine Cross (the character, not the portrayal, which is suprisingly good). I think that people who haven’t read the book would have been VERY confused by the relationship between Nadine and Harold in this series. Harold (I’ll come to him soon) begins the story as a relatively sweet and innocent boy who has a seed of ‘evil’ in him, which is born of loneliness and rejection; a seed that could have been weeded out with kinder breaks and a bit more courage on his part. Harold serves as the inverse of Larry (remember that Larry greatly admires Harold before he meets him, because he led their party to Boulder). Harold is a nice kid with a bit of bad in him and Larry is a selfish piece of shit with a bit of good in him. Both of their fates turn upon how they react to being rejected by a woman they are obsessed with (Harold with Fran, Larry with Nadine). Larry becomes good as the novel goes on and Harold becomes bad.
But there’s a central problem at the heart of the Harold-Nadine partnership: what would make this intelligent boy who has shown a capacity for great kindness, and who still wrestles with the good in himself right up to the very end, be willing to do such an awful, evil thing as sacrifice all those innocent people with the bomb he makes? In both the novel and the 1994 series, King answers this dilemma with profound insight into the human condition: Harold gets to do Laura San Giacomo up the arse for a month. But in this new series, Harold and Nadine don’t even live together. Flagg promises Harold anything he wants with Nadine, minus the only type of sex deemed valid by Christians and demons alike, and yet he spends most of the time being nagged by her. It’s a very muddled bit of writing and if I hadn’t read the book I’d have had no idea why these 2 were doing any of this together.
2. Stu and Fran’s decision to leave the Free Zone. In the novel it’s implied they do it because they’ve become outsiders in Boulder; a kooky link to the old ‘magical’ Free Zone that is quickly dying and being replaced by a regular society, as the events of the big ‘Stand’ pass away into legend and fewer and fewer people even know who Nick, Larry and Abagail were outside of the stories. In this series, Stu and Frannie come to the realization that humanity is just going to start doing the same dumb shit all over again (I don’t know if the film-makers intended this but it amused me that this revelation plays out over a montage of people line-dancing) and they leave the Free Zone for the far more mundane reason of being afraid of crime. I dunno, it just bugged me a bit. I wish they’d explored more the idea of heroic actions fading away into myth and the heroes becoming just regular people again, as the novel does.
3. King’s ‘specially written final episode’. Meh. I know it’s always gnawed at King that Frannie never got to make her own stand, and I guess this is one way of correcting that, but it still felt out of place. And I imagine Child Mother Abagail was VERY confusing if you’re not deep into King’s overall universe (there are a tonne of references to other King stories in this coda, from IT to 1922 to Dolores Claiborne to In The Tall Grass to The Dark Tower, and if you don’t know them, this coda raises more questions than it answers in my opinion).
The good
1. Basically almost all the other main characters. Stu, Fran, Glen, Joe, Dayna and so on. I also loved that they included the character of Rita Blakemore, in a superb performance by Heather Graham, and the decision to switch the scene of Larry going through the Lincoln Tunnel to going through the sewer was a good one. That was a brilliant scene. I also enjoyed seeing that very minor character (who is in the novel) who survives the plague and who’s decided to head to Yankee Stadium and tease one out on home plate. I actually think King missed another trick in the novel by not having a chapter devoted to inspirational people like this guy. We got a chapter of vignettes showing how people died of non-flu causes after the initial run of the virus, and it’s very grim reading. I would have liked a mirror chapter on people just having the time of their lives in a mostly dead world. Rocking out naked in the Oval Office, whacking golf balls out of the Statue of Liberty’s crown, shooting hoops at Madison Square Garden, checking out the rockets at NASA, rummaging through the CIA archives, that kind of thing. But I digress.
The excellent
1. Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder: the 2 MVPs of the series. Owen Teague as Harold in particular handled the material very well. I felt appropriate amounts of sympathy, empathy, admiration and revulsion for him throughout. Captain Trips was supposed to be Harold’s big adventure, the event whereby the girl who wouldn’t have him if he were the last man on earth finds herself (for a while) with the last man on earth. And the tragedy of the Harold Lauders of the world is that people like him always end up small and alone. The circumstances never matter, it’s the way they’re wired. Becoming ‘Hawk’ is a nice idea but it never ends up that way for them. I thought that Owen Teague stole every scene he was in. Well done that man.
2. Weirdly enough for such a (mostly) poorly-written adaptation, I thought some of the original lines that are not in the book were very good. “Guys like him don’t stop following orders just because the orders stop making sense” (the general in charge of Project Blue, speaking about the guy sent to kill Stu). “Up and running is what got us here. I think it’s high time we tried down and standing still” (Glen – though I loved the delivery of that line as much as the line itself). “This world has never been interested in anything I have to offer” (Nick). “Nadine and Mommy Nadine are 2 different people” (Joe, and his whispered delivery of this line to Larry actually chilled me). These and other lines like it suggest to me that this series was caught between two conflicting goals – to be a faithful adaptation of King’s book, but also to be its own thing.
3. The use of songs. They were all, with one exception, really well chosen and I was introduced to some interesting artists because of it. The one disappointment happens during the beautifully filmed montage of Larry, Stu, Glen, Ray and Kojak heading West. I was looking forward to seeing how they did that (in the 1994 series it’s magnificent), and visually it didn’t disappoint. But for the music they selected a dreary Radiohead b-side from the OK Computer sessions. Why?? I mean lyrically it fit but musically it somewhat lacked the majesty the scenery demanded. When I'm watching 4 people heading across America for a showdown with ultimate evil I neither need nor want Thom Yorke warbling away in the background.
Conclusion: despite all the negatives I’ve written above, I did on the whole enjoy it a lot. It won’t replace the 1994 series in my affections, but I grew up with that and it’s a very important series to me, so it was never likely to happen. And I do think that, despite the much longer run-time, this new version somehow covers less ground and has much less characterisation than the earlier one (the same thing happened with the recent 2-part IT remake, which was an hour longer but still much less rich in its characterisation than the 1990 version). But for what it is and what it offers, I think it's a worthy series and I'll be watching it again in a month or so after the initial impressions have settled a bit
So them’s my thoughts. Dunno if anyone will read this, or indeed if anyone even remembers anything about the show enough to relate to anything I’ve written, but my suggestion is to perhaps give it another try if you weren’t impressed the first time. I think it does have a lot to offer, flaws and all.
Topic: The Stand (Read 9609 times)
