Posted by
Hemos
on from the tv-worth-watching dept.
E1ven writes "The Sci-Fi channel and Cyan have just announced that they are collaborating on a miniseries based on the MYST series of computer games and novels. If they can combine the story of the books with the depth of their Dune series, this could be a great watch."
Star Control 2
by
phunhippy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think what most people would love to see would be a series done on the great game Star Control II..
Seriously.. who else would love to see shofixti(sp?) running around on our TV screens getting whipped to death by Ur-Quan.
ahhhhh memories..... and the guy wrote babylon 5 should write the series... that would be perfect!
Re:Lovely
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
abysmal Lexx
Hey, don't dis Lexx!
Some of us like such weird scifi that doesn't even pretend to take itself seriously, is dripping sex (both hetero-, homo- and just plain out weird sex) and just makes the conservatives and puritans in general mad.
dune series sucked
by
mshurpik
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If they can combine the story of the books with the depth of their Dune series, this could be a great watch.
Just because it was six hours long doesn't mean it was deep. They threw in a generous amount of plot to satisfy the soap opera audience, and they cheesed pretty much everything else.
The casting of Paul Atreides was particuarly galling. It was like, "OK, we need to cast a military hero of mythic stature. Let's cast around Hollywood for the most gay and ineffectual actor we can find."
Sci-Fi channel is crap that my granny of a mom watches. Cleopatra was the only thing they had going in recent memory.
Myst should translate well
by
chazzf
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Myst was an impressive achievement for its day (1993), in terms of graphics and gameplay. It was fun, it was nice to look at, and it was, at times, quite challenging. Anyone else slave away trying to match tones on the rocket ship?
I notice lots of people are saying "games don't turn into movies, this will suck," and I would have to disagree. Myst isn't a game in the traditional sense. It bears as much resemblence to Tomb Raider or Resident Evil as a water pistol to Kalashnikov. Myst is a story, an interactive story, and thus ought to move better to the big/small screen. There were Myst novels, after all.
As I see, the difficulty will be in creating true character interaction when the game had practically none. Unless, of course, you just want to have interplay between Artus and the main character, but then it would feel like some sorry fantasy Charlie's Angels rehash (so what did the voice in the book say this week?)
~Chazzf
-- No statement is true, not even this one.
SciFi's Dune Sucked! (Was:Can't compare to Dune)
by
DBman
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· Score: 2, Insightful
SciFi's Dune was the biggest dissapointment of the whole millenium for me. It just plain reeked.
Technically, it follows the first book more closely than Lynch's, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Lynch took liberties with the film because he had to in order to make a good film. He knew what he was doing. The jokers who made SciFi's version are the media's equivilent of paper MCSE's. They got hired because they went to film school or whatever, but couldn't film their way out of a wet paper bag.
Lynch's version RaWkEd, even if it is a different story, it just stands by itself as a fantastic film.
that's my $0.02 anyway
No Way this works
by
ediron2
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Two strong prospects:
Myst suffers the usual game-to-movie lack of plot and dies an ugly hard-to-watch death. Sort of like that nasty jack-n-the-beanstalk miniseries from last year. The good money's on this prospect.
Myst hires good writers. They convert a few dozen hours of gameplay and several novels into something that vaguely resembles watching a movie on fast-forward, trying to cram in a jillion details. Even if this runs a dozen hours in miniseries mode, there's so much material that something has to give.
I conceed, there were stories that accompanied Myst. Granted. But anyone that thinks for one moment that they were *exceptional* must like the suspense in reading a good cheerios box. Ugh! What's more, the mere existence of all this background is a serious strait-jacket to anyone developing a movie script. They must tell a compelling story while not clashing with all that stuff!!!
Heck, it can be done. But expectations are high, and there are jillions more ways to fail than to succeed. I haven't touched on lots of other risks: 'artistic' conflicts with Myst's original creators on what *must* happen, attempts to avoid revealing info that spoils the game, attempts to cling too tenaciously to the gameline, attempts to stray too far from the gameline, production weaknesses, poor acting, or any of the six million other ways a movie can suck without this added baggage.
How bad is it? Remember the rants about LoTR, and remember that it at least had a great novel as a basis. These guys start without a proven storyline but *with* all sorts of baggage.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what most people would love to see would be a series done on the great game Star Control II..
Seriously.. who else would love to see shofixti(sp?) running around on our TV screens getting whipped to death by Ur-Quan.
ahhhhh memories..... and the guy wrote babylon 5 should write the series... that would be perfect!
Hey, don't dis Lexx!
Some of us like such weird scifi that doesn't even pretend to take itself seriously, is dripping sex (both hetero-, homo- and just plain out weird sex) and just makes the conservatives and puritans in general mad.
If they can combine the story of the books with the depth of their Dune series, this could be a great watch.
Just because it was six hours long doesn't mean it was deep. They threw in a generous amount of plot to satisfy the soap opera audience, and they cheesed pretty much everything else.
The casting of Paul Atreides was particuarly galling. It was like, "OK, we need to cast a military hero of mythic stature. Let's cast around Hollywood for the most gay and ineffectual actor we can find."
Sci-Fi channel is crap that my granny of a mom watches. Cleopatra was the only thing they had going in recent memory.
Myst was an impressive achievement for its day (1993), in terms of graphics and gameplay. It was fun, it was nice to look at, and it was, at times, quite challenging. Anyone else slave away trying to match tones on the rocket ship?
I notice lots of people are saying "games don't turn into movies, this will suck," and I would have to disagree. Myst isn't a game in the traditional sense. It bears as much resemblence to Tomb Raider or Resident Evil as a water pistol to Kalashnikov. Myst is a story, an interactive story, and thus ought to move better to the big/small screen. There were Myst novels, after all.
As I see, the difficulty will be in creating true character interaction when the game had practically none. Unless, of course, you just want to have interplay between Artus and the main character, but then it would feel like some sorry fantasy Charlie's Angels rehash (so what did the voice in the book say this week?)
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
SciFi's Dune was the biggest dissapointment of the whole millenium for me. It just plain reeked.
Technically, it follows the first book more closely than Lynch's, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Lynch took liberties with the film because he had to in order to make a good film. He knew what he was doing. The jokers who made SciFi's version are the media's equivilent of paper MCSE's. They got hired because they went to film school or whatever, but couldn't film their way out of a wet paper bag.
Lynch's version RaWkEd, even if it is a different story, it just stands by itself as a fantastic film.
that's my $0.02 anyway
Myst suffers the usual game-to-movie lack of plot and dies an ugly hard-to-watch death. Sort of like that nasty jack-n-the-beanstalk miniseries from last year. The good money's on this prospect.
Myst hires good writers. They convert a few dozen hours of gameplay and several novels into something that vaguely resembles watching a movie on fast-forward, trying to cram in a jillion details. Even if this runs a dozen hours in miniseries mode, there's so much material that something has to give.
I conceed, there were stories that accompanied Myst. Granted. But anyone that thinks for one moment that they were *exceptional* must like the suspense in reading a good cheerios box. Ugh! What's more, the mere existence of all this background is a serious strait-jacket to anyone developing a movie script. They must tell a compelling story while not clashing with all that stuff!!!
Heck, it can be done. But expectations are high, and there are jillions more ways to fail than to succeed. I haven't touched on lots of other risks: 'artistic' conflicts with Myst's original creators on what *must* happen, attempts to avoid revealing info that spoils the game, attempts to cling too tenaciously to the gameline, attempts to stray too far from the gameline, production weaknesses, poor acting, or any of the six million other ways a movie can suck without this added baggage.
How bad is it? Remember the rants about LoTR, and remember that it at least had a great novel as a basis. These guys start without a proven storyline but *with* all sorts of baggage.