Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Hey, for lack of other Intermission topics, you guys could always discuss trailers and prospects of upcoming movies.

...

And hey, I am stoked for Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Cosmos.

Here's my NDT story:

I got to meet him at a book signing following an interactive Q&A astronomy lecture. Because I love astronomy and sf, I wore my Nostromo t-shirt.

This one:
http://www.cafepress.com/+long_sleeve_m … ,346252171

I kept telling myself that it wasn't a test, and that it wouldn't bother me if he didn't recognize the name, or get the reference, but what can I say? It was a test.

I got up to the signing table, and he said, "Wait a second. Is that the ship from Alien, or Aliens?" I said something to the effect of "I think I love you."

True story.

I think my favorite bit in EMBER, which I didn't mention here, is that they have this whole complicated plan written in plain English on unlaminated paper, and bits of it get lost or damaged or whatever, and then at last when they make it out of the city, there's a box of matches, and they have instructions in pictograms. Like the Builders thought the ride down the river would render everyone illiterate somehow.

At which point the director says, "If you had gone to see the film, they would have let me adapt the sequel!" I think that that's an example where it's legitimate to claim, "I had to because that's what's in the book!"

Or you could find a different movie to watch

In most of the cases with these adaptations, the first book held up well enough on its own to justify the sequels, so theoretically a movie just based on it should work. Sure, the later books might have most of the fun stuff, but you have to leave something for the rest of the franchise. That said... it's not uncommon for an adaptation to combine two or more books of a series. I was very amused to see how the Horatio Hornblower movie, scripted by the author of the books, managed to combine the first three novels into one film.

Master and Commander sort of did what Bullet3 is suggesting but ended up having the opposite problem. They combined (IIRC) book 3 with book 6 because, hey, that's where the good naval battles are.

But the reason those battles are so great in the books is because we've watched our heroes work their way up from a crappy ship to one that can really be effective. Better would have been to collapse books 1, 2, and 3 and get our heroes introduced to each other, have them serve on a crappy ship at first and struggle with an enemy, and then capture the good ship Surprise and plunge into the third act for vengeance on that enemy.

Then, if that was successful, you could collapse books 4, 5 and 6 and get thru the espionage adventures, the romantic entanglements that strain the main characters' friendship, and, resolving that, get them back to sea for a rollicking battle in act 3 that's tied back to the espionage.

On listening to this one, I was amused to hear myself say Terra Nova was a bad concept, and then later say there's no such thing as a bad concept.    

My intended point was that "People go back in time and live with dinosaurs" may sound like a fully-realized concept, but in actual practice it's not as much of a slam-dunk as it seems.  As evidenced by the Terra Nova episodes thus far - every one has had to contrive some reason for the characters to leave the safety of their walled, sonic-cannon protected community, just to give them an excuse to bump into a dinosaur in the first place.  To put it perspective, if Terra Nova was a show about a family that went to live on the Serengeti, they'd have to be pretty stupid and/or unlucky to get chased by lions every goddam week.     

But to be fair, the core Terra Nova concept might have worked, just with a different approach.   For example, nobody at Terra Nova wanted to go hang out with dinosaurs, the time-whatsis just happens to dump them into the Cretaceous.   So naturally, the first thing they did was build a big wall to keep dinosaurs out of their tomato gardens.   But the show could have started earlier in Terra Nova's history, before the wall was even up.  You could get at least a few episodes of hot dino-action outa that. 

And it sure would be nice if the colonists had a reason to HAVE to interact with the dinos every week.  Hell, at least Jurassic Park had that - the main characters were paleontologists.  So even though they knew it was dangerous, they WANTED to go poke the dinosaurs.  From what I've seen, Terra Nova doesn't have dino experts on staff at all - presumably all those slots were taken up by teenage guitar-strumming Twilight stand-ins.

Anyway, I retract the statement "Terra Nova was a bad concept", and hereby replace it with "Terra Nova is a terrible execution of a concept, and your mom's a whore."

Back even before Lost started, I thought that it would be great to have a TV show about people having to create a new society out of nothing. It could be on an island, a different (Earthlike) planet, or whatever—the time-travel idea is terrific. It would be this great adventure/drama that mixes the danger of technophilic humans trying to survive in a wilderness with the drama of people forming a political and economic system.

But Terra Nova is very orderly and controlled, so they start off with pretty much everything they need. But the real problem is that it's just badly written. Even with a ready-made society, it could still be like Spartacus, but it's not.

They could still do a good Star Trek series based on that idea. A sizable starship's crew has to abandon ship and starts an impromptu colony on a planet with weird and dangerous animals. It could even be a group of actual colonists who suffer an accident with some of their equipment, cutting them off from the rest of the Federation.

Eh, you're timeline is a bit off.

They liked the spec script, which was people on an island.  They brought in JJ Abrams, THEN he decided to dd spooky shit.  He introduced a couple things without knowing any of the backstory.  He was just thinking purely from a perspective of what would be cool for a pilot.  He brought in Damon Lindelof and they brainstormed the backstory together.  Then he promptly dropped it in Lindelof's lap, who then brought in Carlton Cuse to be his creative partner.

Lots of aliens/monsters would have been better left only seen once. The more you bring them back, the more the writers feel they have to expand on them, and the less effective they become. Doctor Who is full of this kind of thing, both original and next gen. The Angels, in the episode "Blink", are fucking awesome. However, it only takes one more story with them (written by the same author) to already have them talking and with a personality. and ignoring the rules already set up. I'd be willing to bet we see some allied with the Doctor at some point...

In retrospect, I wish there were dinosaurs on the Lost island. Would have made more sense than a lot of what did happen

Last edited by Jimmy B (2011-10-30 13:36:06)