A Walk through Manhattan: Demons, Downworlders, and Shadowhunters

Although this film was released some years ago (in 2013) and you’ve had plenty of time to see it – even by chance, when you were channel-surfing -, you may not want to continue reading this since it has a lot of spoilers from the movie and from the book. So, if you haven’t read or watched Shadowhunters: City of Bones, I recommend you to do it first – but then remember to come back! Happy reading!!!

City of Bones is the title of the book that opens one of the most famous sagas of the young adult fiction world – Shadowhunters. What many people don’t know is that this saga – formed by six books – is just one part of the big fictional world of the Shadowhunters created by Cassandra Clare. In this particular case, the saga is called The Mortal Instruments because all the adventures have something to do with the three tools the angel Raziel (who created the Shadowhunters with his own blood) gave to this new race of semi humans-semi angels to help them in their task of killing demons. As this saga has occupied the top positions in the bestseller list for years, it was obvious that somebody was going to try and bring these books to the big screen. That only the first of the books was made a film gives us a hint of how much the saga fans liked it – yes, you’re right: not much.

Lena Headey as Jocelyn Fray

The problem here is not the cast – which is great, by the way, with Lily Collins as Clary and Lena Headey as Jocelyn, Clary’s mother -, but the content. I get it: it’s not easy to adapt a novel of 350 pages divided in 23 chapters and an epilogue into a film of just 2 hours maximum. But what fans wondered angrily was, “why changing the order of the events? Why to omit important explanations?” And, most important detail, “why changing the end?” I understand that you can’t include everything in the movie, but there are some details you kind of miss if you’re not familiar with this fantasy world. And it would have been even worse if they had intended to continue adapting the rest of the books. But let’s go more in depth with these problems previously mentioned. 

The Pandemonium Club entrance signal, with the Shadowhunters sign.

First of all, the beginning is totally different from the one in the novel. In the written version, Simon and Clary are in the Pandemonium Club, a club they’re used to go since it is said that Simon doesn’t like it much, but he keeps going because of Clary. In there, Clary sees a boy with blue hair, and she immediately likes him, so she keeps an eye on him. But, oh, surprise surprise, he’s a demon, and he’s led by a gorgeous girl (dressed with a white, long dress with long sleeves, “the kind women used to wear when this world was younger”) to the storage room, where he’s killed by this girl – Isabelle – and other two boys – Alec and Jace. What’s the problem? Clary followed them into the storage room after having seen Alec and Jace with their weapons going after the couple into that same room and having sent Simon for security. She had seen it all, but when Simon and the guard arrive, the demon has disappeared (because when a demon is killed in this world, his body disappears and returns to his dimension, leaving no traces) and the three young assassins can only be seen by Clary. So, if you have seen the film, you’ll have noticed the first big difference – in the movie, it’s not just another random day in Clary’s life, it’s her birthday, and they’re not used to go to the Pandemonium Club. In fact, it’s their first time there, and they have got into the place after the demon guy (without blue hair) talked to the doorman to let them in not before Clary mentions she sees a symbol in the entrance signal (one apparently no one else, except for the demon guy, can see). There, this guy looks at Clary (like, a lot) and he’s going to talk to her, but then he sees Isabelle. Then, he’s killed in the center of the dancehall, with Clary seeing everything. And she screams. But obviously, no one sees anything she’s seeing, so she looks like she has lost her mind or that she’s high or something. The way in which this happens in the film makes me nervous: I mean, why the film director thought that it would have been nice to make look as if Clary is mentally insane? Besides, how is it explained that the Shadowhunters get to kill this guy in the middle of the dancehall of a crowded disco? We all know that you can’t barely breathe in a crowded place, imagine committing murder with a fight and everything. And another small detail – how is it explained the disappearance of this guy in front of everyone in the thin air? People couldn’t see the Shadowhunters, but they could see him. As I said at the beginning, it makes no sense.

           The Ravener demon is presented in the film similar to a dog.          

Then, another thing that is somehow annoying is the order in which the actions happen. First of all, the book begins with the night in the Pandemonium Club, as I have already said, and then with Clary going home and arguing with her mother the next day because she arrived late that previous night. Then, however, she goes with Simon to a poetry reading given by one of Simon’s band-mates – event that, in the movie, happens just before they go to the Pandemonium Club -, and there she sees Jace. She goes to talk to him because he seems to be stalking her, but while he’s with him having a very interesting conversation about her being a Shadowhunter, her mother calls and tells her not to come home under any circumstances, something that obviously worries Clary, who went like hell back home, only to find her house empty. Well, totally empty except for “something like a cross between an alligator and a centipede,” which attacked her while it was talking about eating her (yeah, such a nice creature). She gets to kill this thing – that we later on know that was a Ravener demon – with Jace’s sonar, but not after she was hit by it and poisoned by it. In the movie, this is really similar, except for the fact that, before we know Clary has been poisoned, she does a lot of things accompanied by Jace and Simon – character that does not appear until much time later in the original version, when they cross Dorothea’s portal (portal that doesn’t exist here but in the Institute in the movie, completely ignoring all the explanations that are given about portals during the next five books) and arrive to Luke’s farm. I can even say that half of the action parts of the novel happens before we know that Clary is poisoned – how can this be if this demon’s poison is described in the book as really lethal and almost of immediate effect? I suppose this was changed in order to create the tension that exists due to the love triangle formed by Jace, Clary and Simon. Anyhow, I wished this could have been more realistic – realistic having in mind we’re talking about fantastic literature -, but OK, no big deal. Still, the way the Ravener demon killing is presented in the film makes me a bit nervous: it’s not Clary who kills the demon, but Jace, who makes an impressive entrance just to kill it. So, Clary is not just presented as mentally insane, but she is the typical damsel in distress who needs to be saved by her hero all the time – and the original Clary is none of those. Clary can surely defend herself, and very well. 

Another difference can be found in the part when they go save Simon after he had been kidnapped by the vampires attending Magnus Bane’s party. In the written version, he’s taken to the Hotel Dumort – yeah, funny name for a vampire’s lair – after he drank something which turned him into a rat. Apparently, vampires tend to turn rats when they drink too much, so one of the vampires takes the rat with him by mistake, thinking he’s another vampire. In the movie, the vampires intentionally drug him to take him to their lair (just for fun, even knowing that they can be killed by the Shadowhunters present at the moment since it breaks the rules of the Covenant), just in front of Isabelle, who, all of a sudden, seems to forget how to use the weapons she’s carrying with her alongside to all her training. I mean, I know turning Simon into a rat in the big screen may not be as dramatic and work as well as being intentionally kidnapped, but it totally annuls some important things from the books: the Shadowhunters’ fierceness, the Downworlders fear of Shadowhunters’ reprisals, and the “sacred” rules of the Covenant (more or less followed by every Downworlder).

The scene in Hotel Dumort: in the original version, only Jace and Clary go to rescue Simon. In the film, Alec and Isabelle go too.

                                              Jace and Clary.                                            

But not even the order change is worse than the finale change. What makes the book great, besides the incredible fantastic world Cassandra Clase creates and the awesome characters that you end up loving at the end of the saga, is the main plot line around Jace and Clary. This plot line goes beyond their love, since the first book ends with a big plot twist concerning them which makes you want to keep reading in order to discover what is going to happen. But, what’s that big plot twist? Well, when Clary recovers the Mortal Cup (one of the three Infernal Devices), Hodge gives it to Valentine, committing treason against the Clave and almost everyone else. But when Valentine goes to get the Mortal Cup, he also takes Jace with him. When Clary goes to rescue him, she finds that he doesn’t want to be saved because he says he’s with his father. But, how can that be, if he’s the son of Michael Wayland? Well, apparently, he isn’t, but as Valentine was a fugitive, he raised Jace under the identity of Michael Wayland, and, then, faked his own death. This is a well-constructed story: you believe it because Jace himself recognizes the man and says that it was him who raised him, with a different name, but him in the end. So, what happens with this? Valentine is Clary’s father. And he’s also Jace’s. So… they’re siblings! This story will continue and will make Clary and Jace’s love story pretty interesting until we find out some books later that he wasn’t his son - he was the Herondales’ child, taken from them just when he was born and raised by Valentine himself. But it takes two more books until not only them, but us, as the readers, know this. However, in the movie version they completely this is completely destroyed: we hear how Hodge tells Valentine that it would be a very good idea to lie to them and tell them that they’re both their children, and that they’re siblings. And not to mention the fact when Jace doesn’t recognize Valentine as his father when he enters the Institute. Really? How can this be? He was raised by this same man during 10 years, how can’t he remember the face of his own father? Had been Valentine wearing a hood for ten years just so Jace couldn’t see his face? The way the person who decided to do this this way in the film ignored the fact that Hodge never showed a photo of Valentine to Jace so he wouldn’t recognize him, so Jace never knew how Valentine looked – at least as Valentine, not as Michael. Also, the way to solve this little problem is basically to make Valentine put a finger on Jace’s forehead and have him have a vision in which he’s telling something to little Jace, and to turn his ring and make him see that instead a W of Wayland it was an M of Morgernstern. An that’s all. Really? It doesn’t make much sense either, since we’re told in the book that Shadowhunters can’t do magic, so it’s impossible that Valentine could do that, and the ring thing it's not a very strong argument.

      Clary recovering the Mortal Cup from where her mother hid it.      

Another huge difference: how and why Jocelyn leaves her home in Idris with the Mortal Cup. In the book, there’s this big event called the Uprising, when the members of the Circle – a radical group against Downworlders and against the Accords for peace between Downworlders and Shadowhunters being signed – attacked the Hall of the Angel the day the Accords were to be signed. Jocelyn had been helping Luke, who had been Valentine’s right arm until he was ambushed by him and was converted into a werewolf, to stop the Uprising, so when Valentine found out, he burned her parents house. Next to her parents calcinated bodies, she found other two – presumably, Valentine’s and her baby, Jonathan Christopher. So she run away. We do not get the sense that Jocelyn is a bad mother, in fact, we get totally the opposite: she was pregnant and all her family had just been murdered, so she run away in order to raise her child in peace, far away from the dangerous world of the Shadowhunters. But this completely changes in the movie. The Circle was a group led by Valentine to improve the Shadowhunter race with the Mortal Cup, but he started to do pretty bad things with it, like injecting himself demon blood, for instance. It’s not that he didn’t do this in the written version, in fact he does, but there’s no such thing as the Uprising. She doesn’t help Luke anyhow – we don’t even know how Luke became a werewolf in the first place, we just know that he is and that he had been a Shadowhunter, period – nor she runs away after having found all her family murdered. She just run away because she was scared of what Valentine could do with the Mortal Cup, so she left her home with it, and without her child – something the Jocelyn of the book would have never done. So the feeling we get from the Jocelyn of the movie is that of a bad mother, not because she runs away with the Cup because she wanted to – actually, she did it to save the world from Valentine -, but for leaving her baby with the monster of his father. Also, we’re not explained how Valentine managed to make the Clave think he was dead, nor why Jocelyn was so sure her child was dead. 

In conclusion, there are several ways in which you can adapt a book into the screen – like it is done in The Haunting of Hill House, by using the book as the base and then creating a whole new story out of it and making references to the novel; or adapting literally the novel, with the same characters, the same plot, the same everything. Shadowhunters was intended to be done in the second way, but it isn’t done like that. They had changed so many things that, for at least a person who has read not only this but every book of the saga, it ends up being a total mess. There are so many nonsenses and so many things unexplained that I don’t know how would have been solved in the second film that they wanted to do. Finally, the shooting was cancelled due to the little success the first one had, and all the critics made to it. It is not that the film is bad, actually, I like to see it from time to time, and I am aware people that are not familiar with the saga like it. But I highly recommend reading the books – they’re written wonderfully, the story inevitably catches you and the world is so well-constructed that you don’t even question how can all that be possible. 

All the titles of the Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments saga by Cassandra Clare.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have enjoyed this article. What about you – did you watch the film, read the book, or both? What do you think about this adaptation? Do you think it is not so bad adapted, or you agree that it’s a complete mess? Let me know your opinions in the comments below.

See you soon!