Period SF?

[Himachil]

I've been watching a bit of that Masters of Science Fiction series (ok... but not so much ) and it struck me that the problem with it wasn't the stories - which are proper SF short stories by good authors, but the adaptation by modern screenwriters. And that got me thinking.

SF along with more traditional myths is often set "just over the horizon", and as our horizons have changed so have the stories - the next valley > the next island > the moon > the stars etc... And the ideas set against those settings are often directly intertwined with those settings and the technology in those settings. The problem is that any SF story that includes elements of prophesy is going to look dated a few years down the road - Even if the concepts/themes/motifs in the story might still be valid.

If they made a film of any of those brilliant old concept stories of the 50s or 60s the screenwriter would of course change it - change yesterday's future into today's future. Telegrams become text messages, banks of clunking, magnetic-tape driven computers would become a touch-wall interface in an iPod-esque office. Also character's attitudes would seem dated, the cold war has ended and very very soon you have very little of the original story left.

What if that didn't happen?

Just to be clear: I'm not talking about alternate history here - or Sky Captain / Victorian-Steampunk or anything like that. Just keeping the original setting - Could brilliant stories from the 50s and 60s be adapted faithfully with their themes and technology intact? So they still reflect the problems and the issues of the time it was written and maybe through that illustrated our own time - like the good stories that stand the test of time do?

(Now I'm wondering if there are any examples of this already? )

[Omphalos]

The problem here arises I think from a combination of factors. Not only do modern writers have to overcome the audience's love for the original, but they have to back up and get down to the core of the themes that the original was about, then recast the story with modern attitudes about those themes. But what really happens most of the time is that the writers go for cheap laughs/easy recognition by apeing something from the original. Not that it is really worthy of discussion here, but the Brady Bunch movies were a perfect example of what I am talking about. Those dogs were just one recast after another of the images from the original series, not the themes of family togetherness and coming of age. For sure, those were what the movies were about, but the producers were more interested in giving us something so completely and easily recognizable that only a low functioning Down's baby would miss it.

On the other hand, look at BSG. In the first few episodes (and going forward) they backed down to the story of Exodus, and although they used some of the basics from the series, such as polytheism, attack from the enemies on the "Jews" instead of from God on the "Egyptians," and the family relationships, its not hard to see that the new show comes from an entirely different place by adding in terrorism and torture, for example.

I only saw one of the Masters show (The Discarded, IIRC), and while Ellison was involved in the screenplay for the series, I thought it was a pretty timeless look at the social utility of beauty, and gave a new look at how beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

[Liege-Killer]

Could brilliant stories from the 50s and 60s be adapted faithfully with their themes and technology intact?

If you're talking about a straight adaptation with no reinterpreting or modernizing, then I'd have to answer "it depends." Some stories and books date themselves terribly, while others are timeless enough or technologically sophisticated enough they could be filmed nearly straight off the page and work just fine.

Some examples I can think of that would require little or no updating:

Clarke's Childhood's End

Gunn's The Joy Makers

Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz
(Actually a lot of post-apocalyptic stories might film well, since technology isn't as much of a factor there, it's been largely wiped out.)

Lem's Return from the Stars
I just finished this yesterday, and it's a perfect example. Published in 1960, but it's timeless enough you could put it right into a movie as it is, and a modern audience wouldn't know how old it was.

Oh yeah, another great example from the 60's..... Dune!!! Not that it's been suitably filmed so far, but it certainly is filmable in its original form.

[Omphalos]

The last Lem adaptation sucked!

[SandChigger]

Omph brought up the example of BSG, so let's go with a movie-to-movie remake: the new version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. (I know, I keep bitching about this one!)

I haven't read anything about the new version since the first time we discussed it soon after it became news, but IIRC it's going to have some global warming/conservation theme?

The basic message from the aliens in the original was "You can fuck up and kill each other all you want on your own planet, but if you take your aggression into space, we'll squash you"...and that worked in the context of the Cold War and early space programs. And it even implicitly embodied a precursor of the later Star Trek "prime directive" in insisting on a right to self-determination on a local, planetary level. ("If you're that stupid, don't let us stop you.")

I just can't see the movie working (other than as another "Aw, kewl!" SFX extravaganza) with a bunch of intrusive, meddling Green Grays. Remaking it, I mean, really remaking it, set in the '50s like the original, might have been a more interesting approach, no?

(Sorry...off-topic as usual. )

[Himachil]

The new BSG is the best example of a great re-make that changes things. It is completely different, and yet manages to be one of the most engaging shows on at the moment - it is a modern show, and it will be interesting to see how it dates. If only every adaptation was as brave and as successful.

Things like Dune and Leibowitz could be filmed faithfully because they use timeless analogues in far distant futures that are so far removed from their times as well as our times. (Although the architecture in Dune Messiah is as dated as all the 60s tower blocks they're pulling down )

The Day the Earth Stood Still remake is actually a good example - It is possible that they could bring something new and interesting to the concept and are simply using the title as free marketing, which (post BSG) I am not totally opposed to. Could they have remade it still set in the 50s? We have great historical films that have only a slight basis in actual history - why not SF films?

I can't remember where I got this without checking the bibliography on my dissertation, but somewhere someone said the difference between fantasy and science fiction is that fantasy suspends our disbelief, where as science fiction builds on what we already know. Would setting a SF film in the 50s make it fantasy... science-fantasy?

In a post somewhere else I think I was Chigger who said he didn't like the men-from-mars motif any more - because it is highly unlikely that anything above simple bacteria every existed on the Red Planet. So what about the jungles in the canals? Because we know they're not canals and there are no jungles and no life, does that it less believable than jungles any other far flung sf planet?

Are yesterday's motifs dead?

[Himachil]

(The Discarded was the best ep of the lot - though a couple of the others were worth a gander. Not the series I was hoping for though - I hope the BBC makes an anthology series at some point, I reckon they'd do good)

[Liege-Killer]

The last Lem adaptation sucked!

Lots of adaptations suck. That doesn't mean the books they're based on are poor sources for movies. It usually just means the filmmakers involved are idiots.

[Omphalos]

The last Lem adaptation sucked!

Lots of adaptations suck. That doesn't mean the books they're based on are poor sources for movies. It usually just means the filmmakers involved are idiots.

Completely agree. Though I think it should be a law that George Clooney not be allowed to introduce romance movie tropes into the next SF story he does.

[Omphalos]

In a post somewhere else I think I was Chigger who said he didn't like the men-from-mars motif any more - because it is highly unlikely that anything above simple bacteria every existed on the Red Planet. So what about the jungles in the canals? Because we know they're not canals and there are no jungles and no life, does that it less believable than jungles any other far flung sf planet?

Are yesterday's motifs dead?

Throwback movies are fine, if done well. I personally cant imagine anyone who would do it well though. I guess we will have to wait until John Carter finally comes out to see. But Mars presents totally new problems now, and the stories around it are better than they ever have been.

But I am pretty sure that a forward-facing, modern movie about an alien encounter will have to stay as far away from pulp tropes as possible. Audience expectations are that virtually anything can be out there, so giving them Ming the Merciless is going to rattle some cages. I don't even think that they could get away with giving us the Kzin any more. Movies like The Thing and Alien have taken us so far away from the aggressive alien that just wants to make war and enslave our planet just cannot be done any more. Now, that being said, I loved Stargate, which was about that just that. It was made 10 years ago, but maybe Im wrong and there is some room for older notions of first contact out there.

[SandChigger]

Ah, they're doing a John Carter movie? Barsoom and all that? Never read any of those, actually.

Maybe it will work as an alternate, never-happened or parallel universe?

(Maybe something along the Sky Captain and World of Tomorrow line? I managed to sit through that. Of course, it was so over the top from the start that I just accepted it as science fantasy and went with it. Not saying it was a great movie, mind you, but I was into Angelina's lips at the time. )

[Baraka Bryan]

entering this conversation late but responding to L-Ks assertion that Dune is filmable.. maybe the themes are timeless and always meaningful, but i honestly don't think it's a filmable book. the internal dialogue and depth cannot be captured in picture the way it is expressed in the written word.

[Omphalos]

Ah, they're doing a John Carter movie? Barsoom and all that? Never read any of those, actually.

So they say. Its been in the works for longer than an Ender's Game movie. It should come out on the 32nd of Never.

[SandChigger]

Works for me.

[Himachil]

I remember quite liking the Clooney Solaris... up until the point I realised it was a bum-awful adaptation. I did like the 70s Russian film version though - it's a weird beast and takes a bit of watching... but it is brilliant in it's own right and captures more of the book than the new one did.

John Carter has been picked up by Pixar... and I'm kind of interested to see where they take it. They say it won't be a typical Pixar film, which is encouraging

Any film of Dune would have to be an adaptation - A straight page>screen non-adaptation wouldn't work very well at all (Intro to Eye) and getting a good script together will take some doing and will never catch all the subtleties. But Dune hasn't and won't date nearly as much as more down to earth 50s-style concept stories. Many of those stories are specific to the time they were written - directly addressing the fears of the time, and even if the fears continue (machines, bombs, viruses) the way those motifs are addressed (above the most basic fear>response level) could change dramatically.

I mentioned that the BBC would do classic scifi proper...

I started listening to a (*new) 2-part BBC radio adaptation of Nevil Shute's On the Beach at work today (a book I've been meaning to read for years, but have never found in a charity shop... yet). And I was pleasantly suprised: The Soviets were responsible to the bombs

It's not an alternate history, played for laughs, or a true throwback. Just a serious adaptation set sometime in the mid-sixties.

It were brilliant .. part 2 tomorrow...

[Liege-Killer]

entering this conversation late but responding to L-Ks assertion that Dune is filmable.. maybe the themes are timeless and always meaningful, but i honestly don't think it's a filmable book. the internal dialogue and depth cannot be captured in picture the way it is expressed in the written word.

Ahh, yes, good point there. I guess I wasn't really thinking about that, and overstated the case. What I should have said was that it might be very difficult to film, and audiences might reject some particular film version for being done poorly, but they wouldn't reject it for feeling outdated. The "datedness" issue was what I was trying to address the most.

[Omphalos]

I whole-heartedly agree with L-K on that issue; the themes in Dune are timeless.

[Baraka Bryan]

entering this conversation late but responding to L-Ks assertion that Dune is filmable.. maybe the themes are timeless and always meaningful, but i honestly don't think it's a filmable book. the internal dialogue and depth cannot be captured in picture the way it is expressed in the written word.

Ahh, yes, good point there. I guess I wasn't really thinking about that, and overstated the case. What I should have said was that it might be very difficult to film, and audiences might reject some particular film version for being done poorly, but they wouldn't reject it for feeling outdated. The "datedness" issue was what I was trying to address the most.

for sure. that was the genius of those books, that no matter what time or context you live in, the themes of Dune can speak to you, which gives it some potential for feature film success, even if its execution is tough to pull off.

[Seraphan]

Could brilliant stories from the 50s and 60s be adapted faithfully with their themes and technology intact? So they still reflect the problems and the issues of the time it was written and maybe through that illustrated our own time - like the good stories that stand the test of time do?

I do think it depends. Most people only take themes seriously if the story is set in the future or near future. It's not to say that making a movie about nations that pursue military technological advancements and their uses in a close future, wouldnt have the same effect on some people if it was set in the Cold War period. The bottom line being, while some will see the movie thinking of what might happen in two or three years, others will see it and think of mankind's timeless search for superiority since the dawn of time. *Insert the prehistoric scene of 2001 Space Odyssey*
I think that good SF uses it's fictional building to put themes and ideas into perspective, rather than use it has an attractive window to the future.

Edit: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innosense has a lot of thematical and philosofical ideas well inbedded in the narrative and the movie is one of the best sci-fi works i've ever seen. So i do think that you can make a good Dune movie adaptation with it's main themes present. Obviously not all will be there but the main threat to it's adaptation is the director's and producers lack of testicles to make a movie that will make people think; they're interested in our wallet, not our brains.