Artemis Fowl spoilers follow.
Artemis Fowl director Sir Kenneth Branagh has defended making major changes to the story when adapting it for the screen – most notably the titular character's more sympathetic and less "11-year-old Bond villain" nature.
Since landing on Disney+ on Friday (June 12), the fantasy film has received a bunch of negative reviews from critics and fans of Eoin Colfer's original novels alike.
Many of them were seemingly left unsatisfied by the differences between source material and movie, with the latter painting newcomer Ferdia Shaw's Artemis as more classically heroic and stripping him of some of his alienating privileges.
Related: How Disney+'s Artemis Fowl sets up a sequel
"It's always going to be different in everybody's mind, even if they're looking at exactly the same sentence, or the same character," he said of his approach to specific story beats, in a new interview with Slash Film.
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"I wanted us to find the humanity inside the character," Branagh continued, before going on to explain that it was a conscious decision to invert the protagonist's baddie-to-goodie arc, and explore what it means to lose a bit of your morality rather than gain it.
"[It's] sort of integral in the sense of what I was looking for, which was a journey that maybe took our Artemis, which he arrives at the end of the movie ready to go to the dark side."
The Dunkirk star added: "It seems to me that that is a way of potentially introducing a much wider audience who didn't know the books to the characters.
"So that the great landscape that Eoin has in the rest of the books, we can hopefully, perhaps, go through, but travelling in the different direction."
Artemis Fowl is available to stream now on Disney+.
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