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10 Best S/F Films That Never Existed
Jamie mentioned (via a Metafilter discussion) a great article entitled The 10 Best Sci-Fi Films that Never Existed. From the piece: "There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. And that movie was Shaun of the Dead. That movie was not, unfortunately, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a movie that floated around Hollywood for about 20 years before it finally appeared in theaters as a flat, lifeless, americanized lump that was mostly hated by people who liked the book and loathed by people who hated the book. "
At least Gibson's treatment for Neuromancer didn't get filmed. His script for Johnny Mnenomic did, and it was a complete and total atrocity.
(That said, his script for Alien 3 would probably have been better than the abortion that Fincher foisted off on us.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
...who has struggled for years to fund my various off-the-wall projects, like Best Served Cold I know how hard it is to do anything different.
:)
I've been working on the project that follows BSC for a year now. It's a cheesy B movie pisstake with zombies and alien bugs, and it'll be a scream. But can I get funding? No! My low budget productions are well made and funny as hell, but fundraising when you're deliberately making cheesy movies, or movies with gorgeous fat chicks, well, it's tough.
Anyone got $15,000 I can use?
Guess they weren't concerned with novels. Little things like Mote In God's Eye and Ringworld. Even Lucifer's Hammer blew away any of the meteor films that got made, although many stole from it. Science fiction novels done properly for cinema are virtually nonexistent. There are rare exceptions like 2001 but the script was by the writer of the novel and Directed by Kubrick of coarse.
Although I'm sure many only know the character of Conan from John Milius' big screen romp with steroid-giant Ahnold (or possibly from the even more wretched TV series or the comic books), no one has yet had the guts to film a real movie based on the original Robert E. Howard stories from the 1930's.
The real REH Conan wasn't the dumb as a board Ahnold, he was a multilingual leader of men, an accomplished horseman, a stealthy and dextrous thief, and many other things that neither Milius nor Ahnold understood (and still don't to this day). He was a product of the pulp era and the Great Depression. He was the toughest guy not because he was chained (for no apparent reason) to a wheel for his entire life, but because he had survived as only the fittest did in his environment.
Hollywood very rarely avoids the trap of going for the "easy story". Why create a complex character that is truly interesting when a one-dimensional revenge-fest is so much easier to explain to a suit? Why respect the original stories when just grabbing the trademark name to use for promotion takes less time? Why cast an actor who can actually act when a steroid-giant looks so cool on screen?
I've given up on any story or book adaptation ever coming close to the original and hence am no longer disappointed. And that way I enjoy the very rare occasions when they do actually get it right. But for every Maltese Falcon there are hundreds of I, Robots.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
Forget Doom...
Enders Game
Stranger in a Strangeland - purchased by Tom Hanks is the rumor
The Cat who could Walk Through Walls - Heinlin again
I have no mouth and I must Scream - Ellison
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
It has already been made, and it's called Blade Runner. Gibson was working on Neuromancer when the film came out, and he came out of the theatre buzzing. It was exactly the world he envisioned for Neuromancer.
What I'd like to see done, and done right, is The Lensman Series, by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Yes, you'd pretty much have to re-write all the dialogue because Smith's writing style wasn't that good, but the story itself is a real classic. Most people reading it today find it cliched, but that's because Smith created the cliches and everybody's been copying him since then. I've heard that Lucas originally wanted to do this, but Smith's daughter turned him down. If so, there's a lot in the Jedi that looks like it was lifted out whole cloth.
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Wishing for novels or computer games to be made into movies, or better movies, is to be ridiculously naive about the moviemaking process. The problem with, say, the DOOM movie is that it's a dumb concept so it doesn't attract good people. Good people are a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for a halfway decent movie. You options are to pay lots of money to find someone obviously good (e.g. Ridley Scott) and try to get them interested in your movie, or try to pick someone you think will be good, and hope...
Why has StarCraft not been made into a movie? It's not so incredibly well-known that someone with $50,000,000 can be reasonably sure that folks will watch it despite it having a no-name director and no-name actors, and it isn't that interesting a concept. Aliens, only bigger. People in power armor. More aliens. Big deal. Any fool can come up with this concept, and many have.
And even if you have a great concept, there are other obstacles.
Why has Snowcrash not been made into a movie? Not because of any conspiracy, but because it's in creative purgatory somewhere. I guarantee you that (a) someone owns the movie rights, (b) that person has been trying to put the project together since the book was written (or he/she got the rights from the last person), and (c) the project has looked like it might happen at least ten times. The same thing happens to pretty much every halfway decent novel. "Forever War" -- for example -- has been optioned since it was published, and has had directors such as Ridley Scott interested in it, but there are only so many projects a top guy (like Paul Verhoeven, for example) can take on, and stuff gets left by the wayside. Meanwhile, do you want your brilliant SF movie directed by Ridley Scott in ten years or whoever's available today? Down one path lies a movie that never gets made; down the other lies DOOM: The Movie.
Look at the books that do get made into movies... They're either something that has grabbed the attention of someone with serious clout (e.g. Clint Eastwood or Oprah or whoever) or they're absolute no-brainers ("The Da Vinci Code").
Aside:
Hitchhiker's Guide was originally a radio play, so statements (from TFA) such as "since most of the comedy was in the narrative language and descriptions" are baloney. This reminds me of the director of "The Saint" (the version with Val Kilmer) who referred to having researched "the original TV series" (sorry, bud, it was originally a series of books).
You know what would have worked, if Lucas wanted to do prequels, is, say, a movie dedicated towards the ancient history; say a movie about the first confrontations between the Jedi and the Sith. A second could deal with the rise of the Republic, and then one single movie to deal with Anakin becoming Darth Vader.
I think that would be way too much history to cover with only 3 movies. One of the things I liked about the OT was that it didn't try to tell the whole story of the rebellion, it focused on the adventures of a few key characters. The civil war served as a backdrop, with the story threads winding in and out of it. So you end up with a grand universe that allows for many interesting stories to be told in the EU in parallel with the OT events.
I agree with your description of the first 2 prequels. The problem I had with those movies, is that there was no sense of history (the OT had allusions to the republic, clone wars, etc), the universe seemed revolve around the main characters. That is what made them so shallow, Lucas tried to handhold the story of the creation of the empire entirely through a handful of characters. The thrid prequel had more of that sense of "a grand universe" that was in the OT.
I think Lucas decided to take his space opera and turn it into some sort of political parable. The problem is that Lucas isn't a very good writer, so loads of nonsense like midichlorians get loaded into the brew just so he can progress his almost-plot with as little effort as possible. He's so busy with his wannabe-political-philosophy nonsense that he forgets that a movie has to be interesting, whether it aspires to greater things or not.
If he was a good writer the prequels could have been very interesting. He does bring up several good points on the failure of democracy during crisis, liberty vs security, law vs morality, but ends up skimming over them. The prequels could have been filled with political intrigue, backstabbing, the grey of good vs evil. After watching the TV series "Rome" on HBO, I thought a similar story would have been great for the prequels. The underlying elements were similar (political disputes, assassination, self-interest, etc) just Star Wars didn't make it interesting.
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The way I figure it, Episode I was a total waste of time. It was dull, badly written, poorly acted and just generally no damned good. What Liam Neeson was doing in this movie I'll never understand, and the introduction of idiocies like midichlorians and Anakin-as-Jesus-virgin-birth crap was nonsensical, and would require the most bizarre explanation for Anakin's brother Owen in the next film.
Agreed. Episode I raped my childhood. I've already gone off about midichlorians. The idea of Anakin being a created being caused by Sith force-manipulation of one of Shmi Skywalker's ova is interesting, but was introduced clumsily in Episode I. This revelation might have been something for a later episode. Or maybe an aside in a single prequel movie.
I always come back to it, again and again: Episodes I, II and III would have made a bitchen single movie.
Another thing that rankled about Episode I was the blatant pandering to the juvenile audience. Jar Jar Binks was only the tip of the iceberg. Young Anakin as a boy genius was just intolerable and gag-producing. Episode I didn't have to be kidvid. "The Phantom Edit" proved that.
Episode II just didn't seem to know where to go. Did it want to be Obiwan's detective story? Did it want to be the love affair between Anakin and Padme? About Anakin's descent into the dark side? The Sith's bizarre machinations (including a Sith apprentice who tells Anakin that "oh yeah, the Sith control the Senate")? Or is it a political thriller? It wanted to go so many places in two hours that it ultimately went very little distance at all. One way to have patched things up would have been for Anakin to become Darth Vader at the end of that film, which would have made the next film much more interesting.
Again, if the prequels had just been one movie, a lot of this weirdness could have been just asides and flashbacks. Also the main weakness of the film was the actor chosen to play Anakin as an adult. Sorry, but Hayden Christiansen falls completely flat as a pancake. He reminds me of the deer-caught-in-the-headlights performance of John Travolta as "The Boy In The Plastic Bubble." He might have been good elsewhere, but he was a bad Anakin.
Everyone screamed when Leonardo DiCaprio was considered as Anakin. However, he had chops as an actor before "Titanic," (Go rent "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "The Basketball Diaries" sometime) and he definitely showed he had chops and could portray a character like Anakin in the movie "The Aviator." DiCaprio's Howard Hughes was a swashbuckling, rogueish guy who started coming apart at the seams. Anakin Skywalker always struck me as a swashbuckling roguish guy who came apart at the seams. DiCaprio is going to wind up like fellow ex-teen idol Johnny Depp...a really awesome character actor who can do anything he wants to. I don't know if his oevre will be as quirky as Johnny Depp, whose work I love.
Episode III. As close as we'll ever get in Lucas's post-1980s world to a good Star Wars film. Still clunky, but at least the Emperor comes off interesting (by now he's clearly the only character in the prequels that is really all that interesting). Still, way too much deux ex machina. Anakin still seems to sort of abruptly become Darth Vader rather than a slow descent into evil (which is why I think the more natural transition would have been at the end of Episode II). The whole "my apprentice is in trouble" which gets the Emperor on a ship to fly to Vader's aid was the worst example. The ending was idiotic, the Darth Vader suit sequence seeming anticlimactic, and the whole bit about Padme dying not only ridiculously maudlin but making the Epside VI statement by Leia that she could still remember her mother rather odd, considering Luke didn't.
Episode III would provide the backbone to a potential "Mega Phantom Edit." Every important element that moved the plot forward in Episodes I and II could be told in flashback around the framework of Episode III.
The whole relationship between Padme and A
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You see, that's the whole point -- it was wrong. The Jedi Order from the prequels was getting a little too big for its britches, a little too political, a little too technical. They were starting to abandon the mystical connection to the Force in favor of things that they could see and measure. As a result of this, they started to miss the whole point of this Force business, and the only way to rescue things and "bring balance" was to fucking kill them all, and start over from scratch.
At least, that's how I would have wrote it.
This would have required only minimal changes to the sequencing of things, and could have shown off off the fall of the Old Republic as an honest-to-goodness tragedy. Having the Sith successfully playing off two honestly well-intentioned sides against each other could have worked out excellently well.
What was also unfortunate is that little more than lip-service was paid to the various "failures of democracy." It seemed to me that when Dooku explained, in Kenobi's earshot, why he was collecting up forces to oppose what was going on in the parliament, he had some pretty legitimate reasons for concern.
Unfortunately, all we saw, after the various "things failing," was that people seized at power of one sort or another to respond to them. What perhaps wasn't clear enough was that seizure of power was, in every case, a mistake.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
So many other folks don't seem to get how the Jedi Order in the prequels was intentionally a bit crap. The "return" in ROTJ means Luke is restarting the Jedi, but it also means that the purity has returned, the Jedi are back to their ideal.
Note how neither Yoda nor Obi-Wan try to teach Jedi culture to Luke. No "council", no rules, no "padawan" or other ranks. If they hadn't the time while alive, they could still do it while blue and glowy - but no. I'd call that deliberate.
I actually did that, just for the hell of it. It wasn't 100 minutes, but 117 isn't too far off. As to whether it flattened anyone's balls, I couldn't really say - but I do know it's now the only way I can watch the sequels, because it made me realise just how awfully bloated and padded and pretentious they are.
The major changes:
All the 'Trinity's death' dream sequence (and references to it) removed.
Film now starts with Smith possessing Bane, then cuts to Neo jolting awake on the Neb as if that's what woke him.
Meeting of the captains shortened.
Arrival at Zion shortened.
The Kid excised almost completely (I accidentally left one shot of him in).
The rave deleted.
Neo's fight with Seraph removed.
The Oracle's conversation with Neo shortened.
Most of the meeting with the Merovingian taken out (including the 'virtual orgasm').
Chateau fight shortened.
Twins fight shortened.
Car chase shortened.
Fight between Morpheus and the Agent deleted.
The scene where the Machines destroy one of the ships re-edited to take out the 'WTF?' accident that kills the crew (now they just get blown up).
The Architect's bafflegab shortened.
Trinity/Agent fight shortened.
Trinity doesn't get shot while falling - Neo simply grabs her, so the scene of him taking out the bullet also goes.
The 'DUN!' ending of Reloaded re-edited using a shot from Revolutions so that the two films blend together.
The entire Mobil Avenue/Club Hel/Morpheus and Trinity meet the Oracle section deleted.
Neo's meeting with the Oracle shortened.
Smith's meeting with the Oracle, ditto.
The standoff between Neo and Bane as Trinity's held hostage removed.
The three stories at the climax are now intercut - Neo's flight to Machine City, the Hammer's Sewer Shark fight and the Battle of Zion now all take place at once.
Huge amount of cutting of the Battle of Zion - the only minor character who now gets any screentime is Mifune (Zee and all her pals are completely gone).
Major re-editing so that Mifune, not The Kid, opens the door.
Trinity's death scene cut by three frickin' minutes!
Super Burly Brawl shortened.
Meeting between the Oracle and the Architect cut - the film now ends with Neo's apotheosis cutting straight to sunrise over the Matrix.
All done using iMovie and iDVD! I know that some Matrix purists were enraged by the mere idea of cutting any of the existential dialogue when I posted about this elsewhere, but screw 'em - if you live your life according to the philosophy of a movie, you've got bigger problems than some guy doing his own edit of it.
You must think in Russian.