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In the twenty-first century, film adaptation studies shifted to the reworking of the literary text within the new sociopolitical situation of the time. Such literary theories as cultural materialism can explicate the film adaptation. Here, Daneliya’s Hopelessly Lost (1973) is investigated focusing on the political orientations of the Soviet-American Cold War. Hence, through cultural materialism a window is opened unto the past literary text of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be read within the political presence of the Cold War. Per se, Sinfield’s practice of reading known as a ‘theater of war’ is applied to show the cracks and the faultlines that the director has used to depict his narrative of the Cold War. Therefore, it is demonstrated that Hopelessly Lost (1973) is a film adaptation that has focused on those parts of the novel that contain the dark images of the United States and attempts to develop the types of mutations that are in line with this orientation. Altogether the narrative of the film adaptation promulgates a grim reality that implicates the inevitable downfall of the United States amidst the political alignment of the Cold War through the character of Uncle Sam.

Children in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth 2015, represent many symbolic concepts, such as the dominant ideology of the Elizabethan era. This research study explains why the source text has undergone many changes regarding the representation of child characters. Kurzel has added new child characters to the original story to signify his concern for the young generation of our contemporary time. Contextualization and the socio-historical events will explain the reason behind the abundance of children in the film adaptation. Robert Stam’s model of intertextual dialogism helps to understand how Macbeth 2015 relates to real physical and psychological damage to contemporary children by war. The adaptation is in constant dialogue with the reality of violence and war in the turn of the century. Child soldiers, grieving and revengeful parents and children, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are serious contemporary dilemmas. These traumatic events are a consequence of the pursuit of power by people who encourage war and violence.

Justin Kurzel’s film, Macbeth (2015) demonstrates a large number of Christian symbols and images. This comparative study seeks the relation between the Protestantism discourse of the Elizabethan era, and the religious visualizations and images used in Kurzel’s movie including the Cross, paintings, costumes and mise-en-scene. By applying Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation to exploring the film, the meaning of these images can be found through contextualization. How Kurzel creates a new way to visualize the main socio-historical ideas of the original text will be examined. Stam’s model of intertextual dialogism helps a better understanding of how these images relate to the original setting. While Kurzel features an authentic medieval Scottish setting, he employs new visual ways to convey the socio-cultura context of the Shakespearean Macbeth. Concerning Macbeth (2015), it could be argued that there are still similar examples of the justification of violence and war in our contemporary era. By voicing the marginalized Macbeths, Justin Kurzel relates to similar unjust conditions in the contemporary time and place.

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charoltte Bronte’s famous novel Jane Eyre. It is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a white but Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman who is never named by the author. This English gentleman soon renames her Bertha; declares her mad; seizes her property and then forces her to come to England. Arresting an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor to the black Jamaicans, Rhys’s novel re-imagines Bronte’s devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. According to Linda Hutcheon any adaptation must be examined in its context of creation. John Duigan’s 1993 film adaption of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is in fact an appropriation re-canonizing Rhys’s novel as an extension of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Duigan’s intentions become more manifest in the light of Australia’s problems and anxieties over its native population of aborigines. By introducing very conspicuous changes and deviating from the original text, the movie re-silences the oppressed characters of Jean Rhys’s novel (who can stand for Australia’s native population) and re-grants the oppressor characters (who can stand for white Australians) full agency and power. In this process, the movie reclaims the superiority of the British culture, justifies the rightness of the British colonial and “civilizing” missions, and grants a kind of psychological pleasure to its white audience ensuring them that they still have power and control over their former aboriginal ‘slaves’. In this paper the researcher attempts to show the hidden purposes of the movie. Keywords: Counter-discursive novel, adaptation, aborigines, civilizing mission, othering.