The first time was on November 3, 2003. At that time I just made a few quick remarks about the movie after seeing it for the first time on DVD.

The second time was on March 18, 2004, and at that time I compared the movie to the novel, after finishing the book.

Both reviews are listed below, the second, more comprehensive one on top, and there's even some reader feedback below that.

Red Dragon was the first of the Hannibal Lecter novels (even though he's barely in in book), but the third of the Hannibal Lecter movies to be made starring Anthony Hopkins. The consistency between them? Both the book and the movie are the worst of the three, though the book suffers since it was written in the early 80s, while the movie didn't come about until 2002. At the time the book was written, it was probably ground breaking and shocking in its brutal violence and depiction of a psychotic serial killer. By the time I read the book and the time the movie came out, the once novel events in the book were no longer shocking or unusual, not after movies like Natural Born Killers, Seven, Silence of the Lambs, etc.  A reviewer reading Red Dragon in the 80s, or even the early 90s, would have a far different reaction than I had reading it in 2003. Through no fault of his own (other than that he writes at glacial speed) Harris' Red Dragon has gone from cutting edge to old hat, as the decades have passed.

March 18, 2004

Red Dragon, published in 1981, introduced Hannibal Lecter.  It was somewhat popular, and spawned Manhunter, a movie that no one saw or remembers at this point.  However as you probably know, Thomas Harris' next novel was Silence of the Lambs, and it was just a bit more successful. In that book Clarice Starling was introduced, and Hannibal took a much larger role than he had in Red Dragon.  The movie made of Silence is one of the best horror/suspense films ever, and won best film and director, as well as best actor for Jodie Foster and best actor for Anthony Hopkins.  Hannibal followed up as the third book in the sort of trilogy, and was made into a film as well, but one that most fans of Silence were less than thrilled by.

I've long been a fan of the Silence movie, but hadn't read the novel until a couple of years ago, before Hannibal became a film. I purposely avoided reading that novel until after the movie, since I didn't want any spoilers. I heard how different the movie was from the book, since they considered a literal interpretation of the book to be unfilmable. Too gory, too sprawling, and with an ending that no fan of Silence could stomach.

I didn't find Silence the book to be much different than the movie.  A few minor bits, but the plot was essentially identical, though somewhat condensed, as all movies are, screenplays being considerably shorter than novels.  I was surprised at the dialogue though, since it seemed like at least 90% of it was taken word for word from the book.  It worked better in the movie, with Hopkins' and Foster's delivery, but hey, they didn't get those academy awards for nothing.

I wrote about it almost exactly two years ago, after I first read Silence the novel, so I'm not going to go into that discussion again now.  Especially since it's been over two years since I read the novel, and my memories of the differences aren't that fresh.  Here's a quick self quote.

Silence of the Lambs, the movie, was remarkably faithful to the book.  Dozens of lines of dialogue were directly lifted from the book; many of the best ones, in fact.  The screenplay was also expertly adapted, since virtually every change in the movie was an improvement on what was in the book, and things that were glossed over in the movie were things that the book described in more detail than we really needed to know.  The description of Hannibal's room in the asylum was dumb in the book, with bars and some sort of nylon screen keeping him back from it.  I couldn't visualize it; I imagined like a giant pantyhose sort of material blocking him off.  The Shamo pool plexiglass in the movie was much more effective and logical.

I also discussed Red Dragon the movie, in a past blog, last November 3rd.  Scroll down past the other movie reviews; it's the last thing on the page. To summarize quickly, I said that Red Dragon was a pretty mediocre movie, with a rather conventional serial killer/cop hunt plot, that all of the killings and weird stuff take place off screen, before the movie begins, and that it never really felt suspenseful or tense, since I never had any doubt that the good guys would win.  That was long before I read the novel, and now that I have, I can't help but compare and contrast the Red Dragon novel to the movie. My favorite is the book, but I wasn't real impressed with either work.

The main character in Red Dragon is the FBI serial killer expert, Will Graham. I'll call him Graham here, though he's more often called "Will" in the book. I found this distracting on a number of occasions, since every time a sentence began with "Will thought over his next action..." or something like that, I'd take "Will" as the capitalized version of "will," the verb, and start to try to make sense of the sentence that way, before realizing it was the guy's name, not a verb. It did teach me something though -- to never make a main character's name a common word in the English language.

The movie plot is pretty much identical to the book, with some minor changes.  They increased Hannibal's presence greatly, (apparently the original movie of the book, Manhunter, was more faithful since Hannibal Lecter wasn't famous and such a great character due to Hopkins' performance in Silence yet.) and made the FBI guy a lot less competent or interesting.  The serial killer was virtually identical, though the movie had far fewer flashbacks to his horrible "training a future serial killer" childhood, so you had less idea of why he was the way he was.  This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, since his childhood abuse and psychological torture at the hands of gramma were quite horrible, but very cliche and stereotypical to my modern, jaded ears.  It's entirely possible that 23 years ago, when the novel was published, it was shocking and original, but after two decades of serial killer movies, books, gruesome Internet sites, molestation and torture constantly in the news, and sex abuse horror TV shows like Law and Order:SUV, there's virtually nothing new or shocking in childhood abuse stories.  We've heard it all, we know it turns them into monsters and mentally ill adults, and there are serial killers all over now.

It wasn't a bad story or a boring story, it just felt predictable, and the childhood abuse and subsequent psychosis was very text book and not especially original.  It think it would have worked better if we'd gotten less detail about it.  Instead of detailing practically everything awful that granny ever did to the little Tooth Fairy, we could have just had some hints and whispers and then when we saw what he'd become as an adult, we could have used our imaginations.  I liked that we didn't get so much of the childhood of Jamie Gumm/Buffalo Bill in Silence, and just got a bit of the horrible things baby Lecter endured in Hannibal.  More of a personal preference than a strong criticism.

On the other hand, I thought we needed more info about the crimes and the motivations of the mad man in Red Dragon.  There was no first hand summary of them ever, even though the Tooth Fairy had them on video to watch later (and once did while the blind girlfriend was sucking him off, in a scene that was written in very restrained style, when I thought he should have really gone for it and wallowed in the freakisness). We just heard about the bodies from police reports, from Graham's thoughts, and some of Hannibal's suppositions about why the killer might be doing what he was doing, and what joys he might get out of it.

The biggest change from book to movie, in Red Dragon, was how they showed Hannibal.  He's hardly in the book at all, and only actually on screen once, when Graham pays him one quick and unpleasant visit in the mental hospital. After that he's only referred to at a distance, when they find the note from the Tooth Fairy rolled up in his TP. He also sends Graham a couple of letters, mostly to taunt him and fuck with him.  In the movie they bumped up Hannibal's presence greatly, basically making it much more like Silence of the Lambs, where Clarice visits Hannibal several times and gets advice from that allows her to stumble into the murderer just in time.

In Red Dragon the book, Graham does it almost entirely on his own, and Hannibal is irrelevant, or even an obstacle and a dangerous enemy, rather than a guiding mentor. This didn't really work for me in the movie, since I couldn't see why Hannibal was being such a dick.  It seemed to go against his basic "civil is as civil does" character, since Graham was always polite to him. However in the book Graham is much ruder and shorter with Hannibal, basically telling Lecter to fuck off and rot in his cell when Lecter tries to bargain.  The power is with Graham, rather than with Lecter (as it is in Silence when Clarice has to ask him for help), and Graham is rude, and we all know how Lecter feels about rudeness.  So his trying to get Graham killed by feeding the Tooth Fairy info about Graham's home address makes perfect sense, especially since Graham is setting himself up as a target for the Tooth Fairy, to try and draw him out before he picks another family and murders at the next full moon.

I'm not going to spend much time on the plot, but basically the Tooth Fairy is a serial killer who has cleaned out two families, mom, dad, kids, and pets, and then performed some sort of ritual with the bodies; dragging them around their homes before putting them back into bed.  He also molests and mutilates the adult females, breaks every mirror in their homes and places glass shards where they'll reflect in the victim's dead eye sockets, wears weird prosthetic teeth, and more. Neither family killing is described in the book; just the aftermath, and part of Graham's genius is that he can re-enact them in his head and figure out just what happened and why and how. 

Graham's special talent is extreme empathy; he can put himself entirely in the place of a serial killer, enabling him to get inside their sick brains better than anyone else.  Graham is basically a sociopath, since he doesn't really feel emotions or guilt or a conscience.  He's just somehow channeled that into doing good work and catching evil men, rather than being one himself.  He doesn't feel guilt or disgust at being able to completely understand and emphasize with the murderers, though he is aware that he should feel bad about it. He's aware of his emotionless condition in the book, and worries about it a lot.

He might be like that in the movie, but there's never anything that makes that at all clear or obvious, and overall he's much less intellectually competent in the movie than in the book.  However, he's more physically strong and durable in the movie, and wins a fight that he loses in the book, when it's his wife who saves the day in a much less satisfying conclusion.

In the movie the capture of Hannibal is stupid; Graham already knows him, and is working with him to get advice and assistance on criminal profiling in the hunt for the serial killer. He only begins to suspect Hannibal when some new info comes out that he thinks Hannibal should have deciphered already, and then sees a cook book on the Doctor's desk with a recipe for sweetbreads noted.  Those are thymus glands, though not usually human, and the last murder victim to turn up had those cut out.  They struggle, Hannibal cuts him up but Graham shoots him several times, though obviously Hannibal survived those wounds to be tried for murders and institutionalized for life since he's insane.

In the book Graham is much more active and intelligent in his discovery that Hannibal is the killer, and does it more through sleuth work.  He's not working with Hannibal prior to that, he's never met him before he interviews him as a doctor who once treated one of the recent victims.  He also hardly interacts with him in the book; visiting him just once, and a rather acrimonious meeting it is.  They argue, Graham is not civil, and that kicks Hannibal into action to try and get Graham killed.  That much is identical in the movie, since Hannibal gets a letter from the Tooth Fairy, and starts a brief secret correspondence with him, placing classified ads with letter keys to pass a secret message.  And he passes him Graham's home address, which Hannibal obtained with some very clever social engineering.

Reading the book let me know why the Hannibal conversation was so much less snappy in the Red Dragon movie than it was in the Silence of the Lambs movie. Harris got better at writing it, and he only wrote one short scenes of it in Red Dragon.  The second encounter, when Hannibal is walking around in a gym, was entirely created for the film, and as such isn't true canon Hannibal Lecter.

Other than the much-boosted role for Hannibal in the Red Dragon film, the rest of the movie is much the same. After seeing the films, I thought that some of the ridiculous plot twists and especially the blind girlfriend were things the screen writers added on.  But no, she's there in the book also, and no, she doesn't seem at all believable then either. She's way too convenient; it's like Harris wanted some way to give the serial killer a love interest.  Someone to humanize him and give him some hope of overcoming his madness, someone to have some weird sex with, someone the Tooth Fairy won't be freaked out by since he's convinced everyone is staring at his cleft palate scar.  Someone the reader can worry for as she unknowingly steps into peril, someone who can be in his house and not see how weird it is, or how weird his enormous back tattoo is, and who will believe a dead body is him, just because it's got a messy face from a shotgun blast.

There's nothing illogical or cheating about her, but she seems way too convenient.  A walking, talking, pecan pie-cutting, cock-sucking deus ex machina that I never bought for one minute.

There was also a change in the ending, but only in the means, not the end. Graham is a lot less tough and ready in the book, and he gets jumped by the Tooth Fairy after the fake death portion, and is instantly put down by a stab and a stomp. The Tooth Fairy then chases after the son and wife, and the wife blows him away coolly and calmly when he breaks down the front door of their house. And that's that, no last crazy fight, no dramatic speech between killer and cop, nothing satisfying like that. The movie ending was every horror movie cliche "the monster will get back up and attack again any minute now" ending rolled into one, but at least it had a nice final showdown and a satisfying resolution. The book just sort of ended. Awkwardly.

So in conclusion, Red Dragon the movie isn't really worth seeing, even if you loved Hopkins in Hannibal and Silence of the Lambs.  Red Dragon the book isn't worth buying new, but it's not a bad read, though there's nothing in it that feels original at this point.  Honestly, I enjoy both of them a lot more having seen/read both of them.  The compare and contrast is the most interesting part for me, as I debate what worked better in the book or the movie, and why they made the changes that they did. I guess my recommendation is that if you've already seen the movie or read the book, but not both, you should go ahead and read/watch the other part, just to complete the couplet. And if you've neither seen nor read either form of Red Dragon, either don't start, or plan on going all the way.

I recall there being some of that in Red Dragon, but it never seemed like there was such intensity or intimacy.  It was just a couple of guys talking to each other in a movie.