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1. We Need To Talk About Jeremy Irons

Let’s start with this guy. General Vladimir Korchnoi, aka CIA asset MARBLE, excellently played by Jeremy Irons in the film and subject of the major change from the source material, which is the third act and ending. 

Although before we get to that third act, let’s go back in time - how different was the then-in-development film from the original book while Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher were circling it? Quite markedly so.

When Fox exec Emma Watts optioned the book in 2013, she shifted the story from modern-day Russia to 1970s Budapest, nominally to give it a more "timeless" feel [THR]

A draft dated September 2015 - presumably written by Eric Warren Singer - is just a ‘red sparrow script’ Google away if you want to read it. My feeling about it, having read it a couple months after finishing Palace of Treason, was of frustration: it was basically a parody of the source material that leans way closer to Fifty Shades than anything else. By moving the action to the Cold War it rips out the appealing (to me, anyway) current-day geopolitical aspect of the books, thereby losing its distinctive edge. Say what you will, but the Red Sparrow in cinemas right now may be the first major studio film to actually tackle the current Russia situation, and while some may scoff at the caricaturistic portrayal of the Russian ‘villains’ and the country in general in both the original books and the film, in my honest opinion it’s all deserved and, given today’s goings on, quite frankly needed. Shame they cut Putin, but more on him later.

Back to that draft - the action is moved to 1976 and it mostly switches between Moscow and Athens. The general central drive - will Dominika (Rooney Mara, assuming Fincher was circling this iteration) find out the identity of MARBLE from Nate Nash (guesses for who would have worked opposite Rooney please) - is the same. The Sparrow School is relegated to an almost off-hand third-act reveal by MARBLE to Nate (yes, he is fooled by her for this long), there’s no ballet, no shenanigans with a drunken U.S. Senator/senator’s chief of staff. But the reason I bring it up is the key decision Singer makes - to reveal Korchnoi as MARBLE at the very start.

This situation almost perfectly illustrates the difference between books and films as mediums of storytelling. In the book, like with the 2015 draft, Korchnoi and Nate (Joel Edgerton) share a good number of scenes - they’ve almost got a father-son relationship - but we don’t know MARBLE is Korchnoi. In the film, you’d have to reveal the identity to have all of this. Singer took this one way - revealing Korchnoi as the mole and the drive being ‘will he get caught by Dominika’, Justin Haythe (whom Francis Lawrence brought on board to re-adapt the book) took another. Which leads to the third act and the much-hyped ‘ending you’ll never see coming’.

In the final film, as we know, Korchnoi reveals himself to Dominika and suggests she turn him in and she continue his work as a mole for the CIA. Except that it doesn’t matter to her, as her overall plan is to frame her uncle, Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) as MARBLE, which is the ‘twist’. 

What happens in the original book? Korchnoi is the one who gets killed at the end. Similarly to the film, he wants Dominika to carry on his work, but he himself wants to resettle in the U.S., he has gotten sick of Russia completely. So he and Nate’s CIA superiors devise the plan to have Dominika turn him in. While at the same time, the stuff with Mary Louise Parker’s Stephanie Boucher (who is a Senator here) is happening in Washington DC, the concern being the possibility of her discovering and feeding back the identity of MARBLE first. And the relationship between Dominika and Marta (Thekla Reuten) in the second act (taking place in Helsinki, not Budapest) is a lot more friendly, her death leading her to reach out to Nate to get recruited by the CIA.

Ultimately, what the film did here was a lot better, not only because it added a satisfying revenge arc against Vanya, but also because Korchnoi getting killed wouldn’t be at all earned given his lack of shared screentime with Nate and the CIA bosses, as well as Dominika herself. Korchnoi’s death is what drives Dominika to work as MARBLE’s successor proper in the book sequels. Which leads us to:

2. What Happens Next? 

What effect does this change have in terms of the story told in the sequels, if they get adapted?

By the end of the film, the SVR has two CIA assets - Korchnoi and Dominika, with the latter not being 100% sold on the whole idea. Her whole objective was to survive and get back at her uncle. In the second half of the original book, Korchnoi is essentially Dominika’s boss and a mentor, so a film version of Palace of Treason would be wise to expand on that relationship, especially as she knows he is the real mole. He could warm her up to the idea of working for the CIA and eventually toppling the whole regime.

As mentioned previously, a lot of the close relationship between Korchnoi and Nate (as well as the interactions between him and Nate’s CIA bosses) has been cut in favour of only a couple of hints in the film - Nate describes MARBLE as ‘a friend’ with ‘everything to lose’, not to mention the notion of Nate being the only CIA person MARBLE will speak to. This can be easily re-instated in the sequel. All that means is, it’s a bit of a shame if the sequel doesn’t get made because there’s a lot more to do with Irons’ character that hasn’t yet been done.

There’s also this guy we need to discuss:

“There’s two big things. One is I don’t view it as a political film – I love the human story of it. The other idea was that as soon as you have an actor portraying somebody that’s very well known within the world, I think it starts to feel like a very different kind of movie and suddenly it would be very distracting… It would just feel like a different kind of film and I wasn’t interested in that. I was just interested in the human characters within the story. It starts to feel political and I just don’t see the movie as a political film.” [Francis Lawrence to RadioTimes]

In fairness, it’s fairly easy to cut Vladimir Putin from Red Sparrow as he’s just a glorified cameo there (and of course, as many pointed out, you could have Vanya as a stand-in). You can even argue that it’s also not too difficult to cut him from Palace of Treason (although he does play a fairly sizeable part in the third act of that). But with The Kremlin’s Candidate, without getting into too many story details, the question definitely will need to be addressed as he does play a pretty major supporting villain role in this. In terms of my personal feelings on this - it’s understandable yet a shame that they kind-of ‘chickened out’ by not featuring him. A lot of the ‘why’ of why Russia is the way it is today - and in the film/books’ story - is due to him. And as I said previously, the way modern-day Russia is treated and portrayed in the film isn’t just deserved, it’s needed. At the very least, maybe do it the way Beau Willimon did on House of Cards...

3. Why The Sequels Deserve To Get Made 

What’s the point of talking about all the above if Palace of Treason and The Kremlin’s Candidate don’t get made? The film is in an odd position - a $69 million hard-R thriller that’s not like your usual franchise title. Critics are split right down the middle. It’s currently tracking to open between $15-$19 million. Hey, at least it doesn’t have an F CinemaScore! Long story short, it seems it may make solid numbers at the box office and won’t lose money when all is said and done, but likely not necessarily what is usually considered enough to warrant a sequel. Maybe Netflix can pick them up from Fox, if they’re so set on buying up mid-budget studio films the studios don’t feel confident in the box office prospects of, even after the marketing campaign has started?

But let’s talk creative reasons: more specifically, how the sequels actually - even in book form - address some of the criticisms people had of Red Sparrow. Firstly, the sequel books are more crowdpleasing - both focusing on more straightforward central missions (with a whole lot more collaboration between Dominika and Nate) with higher stakes and more Bond-esque globetrotting - yes, the middle act of the third book is great China co-production bait... Simply put, they lend themselves a whole lot better to being major studio films than the first, which is probably the trickiest to adapt. What also helps is that many who have read the books, myself included, to consider the sequels to be better than the first. And Ciaran Hinds will finally get to play a good villain after the debacle that was Justice League.

There’s also a way decreased emphasis on the ‘sex’ part of it - Dominika’s not a Sparrow anymore - minor spoiler but the sequels chart her career in the SVR. She’s got her own Sparrows to take care of (whom she treats a lot better than she has been treated by her superiors). Her story as a Sparrow in this first film, if anything, is ultimately an origin. Because it’s all behind her, she resents being who she was turned into, and she manages to rise above that. There has been at least one review remarking that (paraphrasing here) ‘it would have been more interesting if Dominika was a proper agent or ran a spy agency’ - this is tackled directly in the sequels. With the number of critics feeling that the film’s use of sexual violence isn’t right given the current cultural moment, it’s likely people will respond more positively in that regard. So all in all it’ll probably be closer to the now in prep Black Widow film or Atomic Blonde with a slice of real-world shenanigans and without giving up on the intensity.