Spoiler warning!
For fans of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series, its adaptation to a major motion picture has been a Very Big Deal. I can still fondly recall the frenzy when the movie started filming in Toronto; Tumblr exploded with set photos, anecdotes, and updates on the elusive Sideburns Guy, a crew member with a set of truly spectacular sideburns whom the fandom latched onto in that bizarre way that only teenagers on the internet can. Now, almost one year later, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was finally released last week. But how does it compare to the treasured source material? And can it possibly live up to the anticipation the fandom has nursed?
The answer to that is yes… and no. I know, I know—how maddeningly vague! But The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was a film that had a lot of good going for it, with a few jarring choices along the way that shook the film from the text in a way that ultimately drew some of the story’s teeth.
The movie had an uneven beginning, but that was fine; in fact, if anything, that helped make it truer to the book, which suffered from a slow and tedious opening. But like the textual City of Bones, the film seriously picked up when unassuming teenager Clary Fray stepped inside the Institute and was sent careening into the dangerous world of Shadowhunters. The Institute itself looked stunning as it bloomed into view with Harry-Potter-levels of thrilling transition, and Kevin Zegers and Jemima West crushed it as Alec and Isabelle Lightwood, both in physical appearance and in adopting that Lightwood brand of well-honed strength and snark. I didn’t love the way their runes looked painted on instead of seared into their skin (and this is true of all the Shadowhunters in the film), but it was an easy enough adjustment.
Visually, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones fulfilled and surpassed anything I could have imagined. and given the nature of the book—a YA urban fantasy steeped in adventure, romanticism, and breakneck plotting—I think this was intrinsically important in the transition from book to screen. Godfrey Gao looked flawless, gilded and ethereal as Magnus Bane, the high warlock of Brooklyn. The fight scenes were a treat, fast-paced and complicated and epic to watch. And the film’s take on demons, while a little different from the book’s, worked really well on camera. It was the first scene with a demon, where an attack dog splits at the skull to become a horrific, repulsive beast to attack Clary, that I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed by any visual tricks City of Bones had to throw at me, and to my delight, I was consistently proven right.
So what didn’t carry over so well? I would easily argue that the film’s treatment of its villain, Valentine, and romantic antihero Jace Wayland, made for some very rough storytelling patches. This isn’t to say that they were poorly depicted—in fact, I think Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jamie Campbell Bower did a great job, respectively—but the film adaptation made some adjustments to their stories that might have made for an easier story to tell, but not as high-quality a story.
I was struck by how it’s revealed quite early on that Valentine used the Mortal Cup to perform experiments with demon blood on himself and his unborn children, since this is not revealed in the books until City of Glass, the third book of the series. It’s a pretty enormous reveal then, and I’m not sure what the film was trying to accomplish by showing this hand so early—to show how Valentine is really evil? To tie his uses for the Mortal Cup to something that would immediately split him from the good Shadowhunters, ie: consorting with demons?
The other big change is that it’s explicitly stated that Clary and Jace are not brother and sister in the film, and that Valentine is using smoke and mirrors to manipulate Jace into believing that he was the man who raised him. Doubtless this was done because the filmmakers questioned whether they could sail a YA romance that in essentially hinged on incest (at least for the first three books), but unfortunately, the change does a huge disservice to Jace. So much of who his character is, and the journey he takes, is based in learning that the man who raised him, the man he loved as his father, is actually Valentine. To take that away not only changes who Jace is as a person, but shifts his character arc dramatically, and I wonder how this will affect the direction that City of Ashes takes when it begins filming this fall.
As a whole, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was a satisfying adaptation, despite its prohibitive sense of caution on the incest front. Which is really too bad, because after casting Lena Headey in a principle role (as Jocelyn Fray, Clary’s mother), you’d think they would have resigned themselves to inviting that comparison months ago.
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