Oh boy. That’s a very long story! Brace yourself.For starters, and completely subjectively, I don’t think it captures the spirit of the books in any way whatsoever. Every goddamn character in the TV series is completely off for me (maybe apart from Jacques and Mr. Poe - I love their portrayal!), the main characters casting choice is a disaster (ESPECIALLY Count Olaf), and on top of all of that - the extensive use of CGI completely ruins the mood. That being said, it has to be emphasized that it’s my subjective opinion. I’ll go into detail below.The reason why I prefer the movie version is that, despite its plot inaccuracies, the visual and musical aspects of it, as well as character portrayals, were much closer to what I pictured while reading the books. The movie was very theatrical and artificial in its form, which for me played well with the fact that the plot is set in an unknown time and space frame and has a lot to do with actors, disguises and spies. With CGI, it loses its historical ambugity altogether because the net is cast too wide; they combined not only the 19th century, but also the whole 20th century and a bit of the 21st. The film aimed mostly at the 19th + up to the 40s of the 20th century, I think. That’s 80 years worth of history less! The range is then wide, but not too wide to lose sense of what the aesthetic should be. If you try to add too many ingredients to the cake mix, you end up with a tasteless pulp. Another very important advantage of the 2004 adaptation for me is that the film, unlike the TV series, resigned from interpreting the book very literally. While in most cases it’s a general advantage of the TV series format (as you can cover more things in greater detail than in the case of film adaptation), I believe that here it played against the production value. “A Series of Unfortunate Events” are books written in a very peculiar style, and a lot of the mood bulilding happens in Snicket’s narration which… kinda… can’t be translated visually. The film tried to deal with it by building certain mood and throwing in some additional scenes to emphasize the absurdity present in Snicket’s style. The TV series, on the other hand, decided to go with the original text and render it 1:1 which turned out not absurd, but grotesque (I mean, all these scenes with Sunny munching metal things, for example. For me in the book Sunny serving as a portable can opener was an exaggeration for the sake of the writing style consistency and general absurd mood. It doesn’t have to be THAT literal in the adaptation because it gets weird, especially if the baby’s CGI for the 70% of her screen time.)I remember reading that during the production of the 2004 movie Daniel Handler was at first meant to be one of the co-producers, and later has been removed from the process for unknown reasons. He was very bitter about it. All this time I thought it was shitty of the production studio to do such a thing to the author of the books. When the TV series was out, I learned that Handler was again invited to co-produce it, and I was glad that he finally has a chance to oversee the adaptation of his creation. But then it turned out that the episode he wrote 100% by himself (”The Wide Window”) was the worst in terms of audience reception out of all the 1st season, and that he was later asked to be less involved (or not at all invovled) in the creative process for seasons 2 and the upcoming 3. And I thought to myself: there must be a reason for that, if that happened twice despite Netflix’s good intentions in letting him co-produce the 1st season. Being a great book writer doesn’t mean that he’s a great script writer as well. Maybe he just doesn’t know how do scriptwriting, which in my opinion was very visible in “The Wide Window”. That’s another reason why I prefer the film over the TV series, despite the fact that Handler himself was at first involved in producing Netflix’s adaptation.There’s also Count Olaf Problem which is very important to me, as I like him the best out of all the characters. Although Carrey went in a little bit different direction than the book version of Olaf, I still think that he was MUCH better than Harris. Sure, Carrey was more fun than scary and he did not pass any opportunity to do his signature Jim Carrey Face Expressions TM, he was still Count Olaf that could be fierce and dangerous if he wanted. Harris, on the other hand, is mostly pathetic, and is neither funny nor scary. Starting from his “wide” range of face expressions that literally covers about 2 moods: smug and angry (probably because of the amount of make up he has on), through his small body size and giant head - again, the SFX (I always pictured Olaf as very tall and lanky), ending with his acting skills that are completely unfit for the needs of this character. He doesn’t evoke fear or laugh, and when I hear the intro song: “Look away”, I always think to myself: yeah, I’ll gladly look away because Olaf is so terrible I can’t stand it… But again, that’s just my opinion!Putting all of this aside, I must admit that I really liked “Ersatz Elevator” - it was the first episode that I accepted and liked 100%, it closely followed the book but didn’t turn grotesque, and I liked what they did to Jerome and Esme (although I pictured Esme completely different.) I also really like the fact that they decided to pursue VFD plot a bit more - it was fun discovering the clues, bits and pieces in the books, but it would be a shame if they did the same to the TV series, it’s a different medium. Therefore, throwing in a couple of VFD threads is brilliant!That concludes my mini rant about it. You asked, I delivered, but I could go on about it for hours :D
