Luther Arkwright: the big finish audio version
Just finished listening to this 3 disk set from Big Finish. I picked up their excellent (though somewhat unsuccessful I’d guess) series of 2000ad audio adaptions a year or two ago and have been quite interested in picking up this since. Seeing as I’m going to lack money for the rest of the year I decided I’d pick up a few bits and pieces like this before it became unavailable (as has happened to the Judge Dredd ones now according to their website).
Was it worth it? Yes with a ‘but’. The cd is nicely packaged and is well-produced with the sound effects being used sparingly. The casting is perfectly fine with a few minor exceptions - the main one actually being the placing of David Tennant (of Doctor Who fame) as Luther. Its not that there is anything wrong with his performance - its just that when you are playing a world-hopping superbeing with psychic powers and your best known for, well, playing a world-hopping superbeing with psychic powers the overlap (in my mind at least) between the two robbed the drama of its impact. I kept expecting to hear ‘exterminate!’ at any minute and the similarity between the two charachters meant that I was never able to get over that. Other than that my complaints were minor - mainly being that I didn’t ‘hear’ some charachters that way in my head. The inevitable problem with any transfer from page to audio/screen I guess.
As an adaption it works surpisingly well keeping the vast bulk of the comics plot (in fact the only thing that I remember being lost is the plot involving the American journalist which is hardly a major point) and oddly enough, though in line with my other complaints - I actually felt the kept too much of the original story. By this, I’m refering to the fact that in some cases they incorporated the dialogue as it was from the book. The same happens with the transferring of most of the storys scenes to the audio version. The end result of this I found was a sense of ’seen this before’ which in some ways I had. If you compare the ‘Luther Arkwright’ adaptation to say, any of the ‘Judge Dredd’ ones - where they created whole new plots with familiar charachters, the feeling is that they stuck too closely to the original material. Granted, this is a bit of ‘armchair directing’ on my part - unlike Judge Dredd where there is a vast number of plot types to choose from (as an example one features Dredd on trial, other is a comedy ‘this is your life’ style episode) Luther Arkwright has only had two major appearences in his own series. I suppose in the end what I can say about the disks is that they work more like a ‘transcription’ from one medium to another rather than an adaptation - somewhat like the Johnny Depp version of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ - so much like the original that you wonder why you bothered watching (or in this case listening to) it.
Still though, if your a Luther Arkwright fan you will probably find a fair bit to enjoy in this and if your looking for something a bit different to listen to the comics on audio that Big Finish offer are not a bad place to start.