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Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama going Hollywood?
Doug writes "Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is being made into a movie! I first saw it at this interesting article about Pixar. And sure enough, there is a website set up for the movie! Staring Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary. Its about a huge several kilometer long space craft passing near Earth, visited by humans who are taken across the universe. The trilogy was awesome, and I hope the movie is on par with Clarke's 2001!"
excellent... lets hope they dont make the rest of the Rama books into films.. they were terrible.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
I first remember looking at the site and reading about this project at least four years ago. While it's something going ahead, and four years is probably an acceptable time for developing the technology to create such a world (the technology has been demonstrated at various trade shows many times).... I can't help but wonder what/if the final result will look like.
:)
I could easily manage a production plauged by the same problems as Duke Nukem Forever - constantly changing base platforms to keep up with advances in technology. And given the huge leap in CG capabilities over the last four years, I also have to wonder how the Rama team has dealt with it. Hmm, a interview with Morgan's crew would be intresting
I just don't understand the mentality of "wow, that was a great book--they should make a movie of it!". Does anyone truly think that it won't be changed drastically to get on the screen? I mean, hell, there weren't really any bad guys, so they're probably going to add some.
Another 2001: A Space Odyssey would be great, but I doubt it's going to be anything like that. That movie came out during that tiny window between the bland, silly, middle-american movies of the 40's, 50's, and 60's, and the soulless blockbusters of the 80's. Right now the chances of a decent, introspective, philosophical sf book being faithfully copied to the big screen is close to nil. Probably just be focus-grouped into mediocrity.
Am I the only one who thinks the site looks like a fake? Hardly a typical movie site - complete with clip art navigation buttons and cheap looking posters.
Because the book was only mediocre. The second two followed Arthur C. Clarke's general method of piling pointless philosophizing on top of boring exposition, killing off everything that made the originals any good. I can't even go near 2001 after reading the idiotic tripe that was 3001. The last two Rama books (especially the last one) were truly buffalo chips.
Unless they do a completely bangup job and completely ignore the book, I will be staying FAR away from this one. Oh, and Kubrik's dead. No one else on this planet could do 2001 as well as he did. Get over it.
I dissagree, I think it would make a wonderful movie. However, it wouldn't make a very commercial movie. Has a couple of action sections I suppose, biut most of it is slow revelation. Think Koyaanisqatsi with digital effects and some small amount of narrative action to tie it together.
And there is no simple minded ending. The reason I don't lik ethe other books so much is that they are all collectively an attempt to graft an ending onto RWR, which doesn't need one.
Of course, the same can be said of 2001, the problems started when Sk and ACC were trying to tie down a Holywood-palitable ending.
On the whole I think it' best if they do a Blade Runner on it. Pinch some ideas and make somethign which is a movie in it's own terms.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The things that make a good book are not the same things that make a good film or TV series. How many good film adaptations of books can you name? How about the other way around? The same goes for Film / TV crossovers. Books thrive on deep character development, usually involving an insight into the character's mind. Films relly more on the 'Wow Factor'.
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How exactly did they "kill" LOTR? Like it has been repeatedly said, books and movies are two different media. You simply can NOT make 1:1 copy of a book for the silver screen, espesially not something like LOTR. LOTR the movie (espesially the extended edition) is an excellent adaptation of the book, but it is not 1:1 copy of the book, and to expect it to be an exact copy is unrealistic. When you move a book to the silver screen the will be changes. Learn to live with it.
I see people whining about the movie-adaptation of LOTR, yet no-one give any tangible examples how it should REALLY be done.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
In truth all great movies are usually done out of a desire to make a film unlike any other. If you end up using another movie as a measuring stick, you end up with something that's derivative. So it would be best to get off of Fincher's back and let him make a movie instead of living up to another one.
(And I'll ignore the fact that it was Kubrick's movie based off of Clarke's book).
What is music when you despise all sound?
Am I the only person that thinks that the entire series is awesome? I enjoyed the first book for it's technicality and vision, but let's face it... characters are not Clarke's strong point. The following trilogy, however, have the best characters and aliens in any SciFi I've ever read. They are fully realized, have very different personalities, and are very believable with plenty of flaws. Just look at Wakefield and Des Jardins for very good examples. Hell, even O'Toole isn't perfect. I've read everything that Gentry Lee has put out so far, and it's all top quality stuff, especially if you love good characters. The combo of Clarke and Lee is definitely the BEST combo I have ever seen. Clarke does the technical SciFi type stuff, and Lee adds the human touch.
I'm beginning to wonder if people who didn't like the series are the type that think Star Trek and Star Wars are SciFi, and are really only happy with Pop SciFi or mech anime. For those of us that actually enjoy literary tales, the whole Rama series is breath taking. The rama series is always the first books I recommend to anyone, followed closely by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. So if you're on the fence on whether to read this series, do so. I've even gotten several females to read it that aren't into SciFi and they all ate it up ravenously.
Nicodemus
Au contraire. The omission of Tom Bombadil is one of the fatal mistakes of the movie. In the book, the Tom Bombadil episode tells us that the world is fundamentally good, and that the good was around before the evil came. It shows us that the good cannot be corrupted by the evil, as Tom is unaffected by the Ring, and that gives us hope. However, we later learn (from Gandalf, I think) that if Sauron is not defeated before he becomes too powerful, that not even Tom Bombadil will stand, and that gives the quest to destroy the ring urgency. Without Tom Bombadil, the movie is an oppressive onslaught of Evil! Evil! Evil!, loud screeches, and booming bass, with little optimism or even interest. (I think it's this way because Peter Jackson missed the point of Tom Bombadil, too, a mistake that epitomizes what's wrong with his interpretation of the story.) I don't know what it takes for something to be essential to the plot, but Tom certainly is essential to the tone and meaning of the book, and the movie does suffer for his omission.
...interstellar journey that spans the next 3 books (which degrade in quality in each subsequent book).
It's dirty old sf-writer effect at it's worst:
Female Protagonist: Hey grandpa, you and me and my sister have to repopulate the human race!
(I'm not making this up- I thought only the Old Testament could get away with this stuff)
Does this malady afflict other genres? It's not that I'm completely uncultured, it's just that I tend not to exhaustively read every book good-or-bad by of a given author outside sf.
Although, most of the worst books were co-written with Gentry Lee, perhaps we can blame it on him.
Somewhat true. The initial work was classic Clarke -- cut to the chase, no-nonsense, present the story. I don't think I've read more bloviated prose than Gentry Lee's additions in the sequels.
Although terse, Clarke's approach is very effective. He cleanly gets across the main ideas and issues in the story, and lets your imagination take it from there. Lee's approach was to stifle through belabored description that last, important part of good sci-fi: your imagination's interpretation/expansion.
I wouldn't say the later novels outright suck. They don't, and there is several good ideas in the later books. But skipping 20-30 pages at a time becomes routine with no lost content as one will see.
I'm not going to deny that this is one of the all time greatest sci-fi novels. It is. I absolutely loved this book.
What I worry about is that it's the type of sci-fi which mostly revolves around characters who spend most of the story simply gawking in awe and wonder at whatever they stumble across. In a book, this is alright, as the author can stop and explain in detail what a character's looking at and why it's important. However, this is exactly the sort of thing which creates lousy sci-fi movies.
2001 is possibly the only movie ever to make this sort of extended gawking interesting. I might hear some objections, but I thought the first Star Trek movie came pretty close to pulling it off too. More recently, however, we've seen movies like the Solaris remake and Mission to Mars do this in exactly the WRONG way.
I'm going to have to say I'm going to wait for this one with nervous anticipation. There's so many ways this movie can go completely wrong, yet, somehow I still want to see them make the attempt.
I mean, what if they do it right?
It'll be damn cool, that's what.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
Gentry Lee's style added an additional human element to a lot of the sequels that were not to be found in the original. However, Lee also filled the books with a lot of bullshit that no one really found interesting, either. :) And the plot twists in the series (Rama II and on) were not to my liking (or many other people's liking). In my estimation, Lee took away more than he added to the mix.
That said, I realize they've only announced the first movie. It's a risk (it's not as popular as Clark's other movies and the last one--that I'm aware of, Deep Impact--based on Hammer of God was completely eclipsed by the inferior Armageddon), so the Movie Studios aren't going to risk a three or four movie deal and blow the first one to hell.
That said (if the first movie does well), Hollywood should do the following with the movies in order to have a most successful investment.
- Hollywood needs to make the first movie true to the heart of the first book. The book is a classic. And it seems that they are off to one hell of a start with the cast. They need a true script and complete the arc of the story as much as possible with the first movie. Add a little crap-Hollywoodness to it, and they will have a successful start.
- "The Ramans do everything in threes." That was the last thought that Clarke left us with the book. And then he forgot the whole damn thing until people started complaining that they weren't seeing sequels. And he came back to the table thinking, "Thats a hell of an idea!" So what's he do? Come out with three more books (not two, as it would suggest). So Hollywood should correct this grievous error and pull a LOTR-butchery.
- Yes dammit, I think LOTR movies became butchered in the 2nd movie. However, some may argue that it was to the good of the whole. I disagree on it mostly. However...
- It can only be to the benefit of a Rama series to order it logically in a 3-movie deal. Three visits by the alien ship, three movies. Three reactions. Three plots. The books are, to some extent, already charted out this way. Due to the fleshing out process of Lee's and Clarke's writing, they felt that their storylines were too large for two additional books, so they arrived to the conclusion of three. This worked out for the books just fine (though I don't like them as much), but the movies are going to cut out a lot of the bullshit anyway, and with some stealthy cutting in the script area, they can come together quite nicely in the trilogy vein.
- Finally, they need continuity. Which destroys much if not all of the latter books. In the books, the first ship comes in the year X (can't remember offhand, and I ain't looking it up). The 2nd ship comes X+150 years later. Holy God. Buuuut, the 3rd ship comes only 30 years or so later. That continuity is crappy. It works for the books, but not for a movie. Unless you're working in the horror genre, and you're not. You're going to need repeat actors in order to mesh the movies together intelligently movie-style. This destroys much of the future storylines in the additional books, but people will think it sucks if not done this way.
Ah well... forgive my not-very-well-put-together rantings. I'm thrilled to death about the whole thing. I can't wait for it. Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait.