Great ideas horribly wasted in film and literature

[JoeSki]

This is a thread for all those times when you catch the plot from a book or movie and say "Oh Snap! That sounds pretty baddass" only to walk away after immersing yourself in the story, totally let down at the wasted potential.

I start this thread with one specific book in mind: Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly.

I've read Reilly's books before, including the prequels to Scarecrow, and while totally outlandish and silly, they were always a good time and delivered when it came to fun action scenes. Scarecrow had an wonderful premise for a action/adventure novel:

For some reason baddass US Marine Schofeild, codename Scarecrow, winds up on a bounty list with 14 other soldiers from around the world, all of which carry reputations as being the most elite soldiers alive. The price for each head is $13.5 million, bringing every assassin, headhunter, and gun nut out of the woodwork for an international manhunt.

I mean, what a start for an action story. I mean, it gets you wondering why someone would want all of the best soldiers on earth killed, who would want them killed, and why they have so much money. It also promises lots and lots of mayhem. Unfortunately, Reilly's ideas pretty much ended right there for what he was going to write and he pretty much threw out the laws of gravity, physics, and human capability to top his last books. The book didn't ask for you to suspend your belief and just have a good time, it told you to take your belief outside, shoot it in the face, piss on it, and then turn your brain completely off.

To make matters worse, the reasoning behind the bounty list was just horribly, horribly stupid. It involved killing the elite 15 soldiers because they were the only people on earth with reflexes quick enough to disarm some missle launching activation thing.

What a waste.

Also, I'm a very strong believer in that the whole Aliens Vs. Predator thing was wasted. Here are some film makers that had a story that was already well recieved by comic book readers and game players handed to them on a silver platter and what do they do with it? Cram it down the garbage disposal and bake up some cockenammy story about Aliens and Predators playing around with each some on some totally isolated part of the planet. And then they do it again by making a handful of Predators and Aliens fight in a suburban town filled with whinny teenagers! What the hell? I want my Marines vs. Aliens vs. Predator world war movie!

Bah!

Bah I say!

[Palo Verde]

'Dies the Fire' and that whole series.

I love the premise. How would society adapt if suddenly there were no more electricity or vehicles. Just over 100 years ago these things didn't exist, but now our world is so totally dependant on them, that there would be a huge breakdown with mass starvation without them.

But the books are so badly written, that I find myself skipping paragraphs and just skimming pages and chapters.

Please, someone re-write these WELL.

[Don Draper]

Alien Nation: A UFO containing a sizeable population of alien beings lands in the deserts outside L.A. With no way of repairing their ship enough to be 'spaceworthy' again, the alien 'visitors' settle in L.A., and attempt to assimilate into human society.

Actually, this was a brilliant premise for a movie. Unfortunately, the movie deals with that aspect for roughly five minutes before it turns into a sub-par, predictible cop/buddy flick.

Never saw a single episode of the series, so I don't know how well it was handled there - but the movie blew it big time.

[puddleglum]

Suspect Zero was a great idea for a movie, before it was changed with all of the psychic stuff. It may have led to "Dexter" though.

[Dunderman]

Alien Nation: A UFO containing a sizeable population of alien beings lands in the deserts outside L.A. With no way of repairing their ship enough to be 'spaceworthy' again, the alien 'visitors' settle in L.A., and attempt to assimilate into human society.

Actually, this was a brilliant premise for a movie. Unfortunately, the movie deals with that aspect for roughly five minutes before it turns into a sub-par, predictible cop/buddy flick.

Never saw a single episode of the series, so I don't know how well it was handled there - but the movie blew it big time.Pretty much the same, but the kid I was loved it.

My nomination: Battlefield Earth. Aliens rule Earth. Humanity reduced to stone-age hunter-gatherers, its history forgotten to the point where the survivors have no idea that the remains of cities are the work of humans. The story follows a human who learns history and fights back.

In the hands of basically anyone who wasn't a paranoid money-grubbing cult-figure asshole con artist, it could have been great.

[CalMeacham]

Alien Nation: A UFO containing a sizeable population of alien beings lands in the deserts outside L.A. With no way of repairing their ship enough to be 'spaceworthy' again, the alien 'visitors' settle in L.A., and attempt to assimilate into human society.

Actually, this was a brilliant premise for a movie. Unfortunately, the movie deals with that aspect for roughly five minutes before it turns into a sub-par, predictible cop/buddy flick.

Never saw a single episode of the series, so I don't know how well it was handled there - but the movie blew it big time.

I mentioned this recently in the "I wish they had gobne a different route" thread.


This was a powerful concept, and I wanted to see how this cultureless race which was engineered, would come up with its own culture, borrowing from earth cultures and adapting it to theor own needs.

But then the TV series kept finding all these elements of Newcomer culture that they had on the ship. What? That completely goes against the premise!

[RealityChuck]

Gattaca probably could have been a pretty good film if they ever bothered to think out their own concept. As it was, it made no sense and had no internal consistency, but it's clearly an idea that has some excellent potential.

[control-z]

As good as it was, a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes amounted to a soap opera in space.

[Scumpup]

As I mentioned in a recent thread, World War Z was a great idea for a book. Alas, Brooks did a poor job of executing that idea. In the hands of a more competent writer, an oral history of the world after a plague of zombies could have been something wonderful.
One better way to handle the idea would have been to have the individual chapters penned by different authors. The various authors who contributed to The Book of the Dead back in the 90's would have been my A-list. They would have turned out a World War Z much more worth reading.

[Derleth]

As good as it was, a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes amounted to a soap opera in space.Oh, how I agree. The Borg in particular were horribly mishandled because the writers apparently forgot what they were from one episode to the next. Originally, they were a true hivemind with no individuality and no concept of the individual. Then they got progressively nerfed until the final insult: The Borg Queen. At that point, I lost interest in most things Trek.

(I also have to defend soap operas. Romeo and Juliet was a soaper. Much Ado About Nothing was a soaper. Twelfth Night was a soaper. Practically every Dickens novel was a soaper of the most rococo sort. The story only becomes a slogging morass when plots are never allowed to end.)

Snow Crash contains within it the seeds of a whole universe. I'm not kidding when I say a team of authors could spend their careers plumbing its implied depths, and most of them wouldn't even be writing SF. Sadly, Stephenson doesn't quite get that a simple plot buzzing through a dense maze of ideas isn't the same as a nuanced plot taking advantage of a very rich implied backstory. When that plot splats against a wall at the end of the novel, well, people get very wary about picking up any of his other novels.

[Anaamika]

Alien Nation: A UFO containing a sizeable population of alien beings lands in the deserts outside L.A. With no way of repairing their ship enough to be 'spaceworthy' again, the alien 'visitors' settle in L.A., and attempt to assimilate into human society.

Actually, this was a brilliant premise for a movie. Unfortunately, the movie deals with that aspect for roughly five minutes before it turns into a sub-par, predictible cop/buddy flick.

Never saw a single episode of the series, so I don't know how well it was handled there - but the movie blew it big time.

Fuck, yes. When I was reminded of this, years after I saw it, I could barely remember why it was called "Alien" Nation.

My nomination is for a David Eddings book. Yeah, yeah, I got what i deserved. But it was The Redemption of Althalus. The book jacket was a cool idea - a thief and all-around bad boy ends up serving a Goddess.

Inside it was the same old misogyny and the same horrible, horrible women as all of his other books.

I'm sure I'll be back with more.

[AuntiePam]

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale. It's non-fiction, about the murder of a child in the late 1800's. The "great idea" was examining upper class manor life, family secrets, employer-servant relationships, the role of the media, murder trials as entertainment, etc. Summerscale's insistence on sticking to the facts resulted in a dry, lifeless, uninvolving book. Speculate a little, why don't you? You've studied the period and the culture -- give us an opinion. Flesh it out.

[CalMeacham]

One idea I thought horribly wasted was Richard Matheson's old Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" from the second season:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734693/


A bunch of people trapped in a snowed-in diner receive a visit from a couple of policemen who say that a spaceship crashed nearby, and one of the people in the diner is really an alien. It's a wonderful situation with its own built-in appeal that makes the audience pay attention to your every line of dialogue. You could use it to explore relationships and how people behave under stress and why the alien would come to Earth, and why it would disguise itself as a human. You could go in all sorts of directions.

But they didn't. They had the bus crash and


the surviving guy reveal to the diner owner that he's the alien, which he proves by taking his coffee with a third hand. The diner owner reveals that HE is also an alien, though, as he reveals by pushing back his cap to show a third eye.




This is a good use for such a potent setup?




Several years ago I took the premise and turned it into a radio play. With a MUCH better series of events and payoff. And i say that even though I know Matheson is infinitely better than me, and could probably toss off a better script in his sleep.


I'm assuming that Matheson and Serling and company were under a lot of pressure to produce scripts fast, and matheson's first try was too long or something. But I was severely disappointed.

[Emily Litella]

"Vanilla Sky" - a guy is almost killed and horribly disfigured and crippled in a car accident, so he lives an alternate life in drug induced controlled dreaming. He buys it from a corporation that sells alternative lives and they take care of your body for you. You have no idea that you're dreaming this new life. When glitches start start happening he figures out that his life isn't real. The idea was good, and I liked the movie, but a lot of people hated it. The movie starred Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz. It was a remake of a foreign movie, I wonder if the original was better? ('scuze my bad writing please.)

[CalMeacham]

Just checked -- apparently Serling himself wrote that episode. I could've sworn it was Matheson:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734693/

[Busy Scissors]

Phillip K Dick is SF royalty, but I've always found his novels very hard work. Big on great ideas, short on great writing. His novels often take a brilliant premise, but flesh it out with extremely 'workmanlike' prose. His short stories are much better in this regard IMHO. He'd of been great working as a twosome.

Only Dick novel I really liked was Valis, which paradoxically is not a typical SF ideas-fest, but an extremely personal novel influenced by his struggle with mental illness.

In cinema, The OP mentioned ALiens v Predator - you could basically take your pick of classic comic strips that have been abused in the cinema. As a big 2000AD fan back in the day, Judge Dredd was a huge disappointment. Not sure if there's enough depth there to really make a quality film, but by Christ it could have been orders of magnitude better than the turd Stallone / Danny Cannon served up.

[woodstockbirdybird]

I thought The Matrix started out with a great idea before it devolved into a typical action/special effects showcase (not to mention the obligatory tacked-on love story). I couldn't bring myself to watch the sequels after I'd spent the second half of the movie laughing out loud at the cliches and bad dialogue.

[BrainGlutton]

'Dies the Fire' and that whole series.

I love the premise. How would society adapt if suddenly there were no more electricity or vehicles. Just over 100 years ago these things didn't exist, but now our world is so totally dependant on them, that there would be a huge breakdown with mass starvation without them.

But the books are so badly written, that I find myself skipping paragraphs and just skimming pages and chapters.

Please, someone re-write these WELL.

Try one of these. (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/44031)

[Scissorjack]

Event Horizon. Fantastic premise: long-lost spaceship reappears derelict and abandoned. Hard-bitten salvage team slowly discover that it has actually been on a dimensional jaunt to Hell itself, and is possessed by demons...

Sadly, what we got was a mad slasher flick set on a spaceship.

[Pollux Oil]

For some reason baddass US Marine Schofeild, codename Scarecrow, winds up on a bounty list with 14 other soldiers from around the world, all of which carry reputations as being the most elite soldiers alive. The price for each head is $13.5 million, bringing every assassin, headhunter, and gun nut out of the woodwork for an international manhunt.

I mean, what a start for an action story. I mean, it gets you wondering why someone would want all of the best soldiers on earth killed, who would want them killed, and why they have so much money. It also promises lots and lots of mayhem. Unfortunately, Reilly's ideas pretty much ended right there for what he was going to write and he pretty much threw out the laws of gravity, physics, and human capability to top his last books. The book didn't ask for you to suspend your belief and just have a good time, it told you to take your belief outside, shoot it in the face, piss on it, and then turn your brain completely off.

To make matters worse, the reasoning behind the bounty list was just horribly, horribly stupid. It involved killing the elite 15 soldiers because they were the only people on earth with reflexes quick enough to disarm some missle launching activation thing.

What a waste.

I agree that Scarecrow wasted a good idea, but I disagree on which one. I liked Scarecrow (and I'm a big fan of Matthew Reilly) but I think he really wasted the idea of the worldwide bounty hunt. I would have loved to see more development in who the bounty hunters were, instead most of them ended up Generic Dead Bounty Hunter #1-#3000.

Also I'm not sure if this counts, but they totally wasted the idea of Jason Statham and Jet Li in an action movie together. War sucked.

[John DiFool]

Event Horizon. Fantastic premise: long-lost spaceship reappears derelict and abandoned. Hard-bitten salvage team slowly discover that it has actually been on a dimensional jaunt to Hell itself, and is possessed by demons...

Sadly, what we got was a mad slasher flick set on a spaceship.

Ah yes, "Stupid Evil. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LawfulStupidChaoticStupid)" Isn't Evil much more threatening when it wants to do something more substantive than just eating the heads of the protagonists?

Actually, that is a general criticism of much of the horror genre (big screen). When you are faced with an obviously evil if not terrifying character, but it quickly becomes obvious that they are after something more significant than merely sucking you soul away (while still being very cryptic about what it is, exactly), that's much more horrifying, right? But all too often horror movies pull their punches in this way. Mundane Evil = Boring Evil.

I hate these kinds of threads, because my brain doesn't work very well trying to dredge up lists of specific items from specific categories. Other than my general complaint above no specific single film (or series) comes to mind. I guess I could rag on The Wizard of Oz for copping out at the end with no Ruby Slippers on Kansas Dorothy ("It was all a dream"), but that's for the Copout thread, not here, which is more about scripts with promise which were pretty much DOA after editing.

[A shameful cracka...]

One idea I thought horribly wasted was Richard Matheson's old Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" from the second season:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734693/


A bunch of people trapped in a snowed-in diner receive a visit from a couple of policemen who say that a spaceship crashed nearby, and one of the people in the diner is really an alien. It's a wonderful situation with its own built-in appeal that makes the audience pay attention to your every line of dialogue. You could use it to explore relationships and how people behave under stress and why the alien would come to Earth, and why it would disguise itself as a human. You could go in all sorts of directions.

But they didn't. They had the bus crash and


the surviving guy reveal to the diner owner that he's the alien, which he proves by taking his coffee with a third hand. The diner owner reveals that HE is also an alien, though, as he reveals by pushing back his cap to show a third eye.




This is a good use for such a potent setup?




Several years ago I took the premise and turned it into a radio play. With a MUCH better series of events and payoff. And i say that even though I know Matheson is infinitely better than me, and could probably toss off a better script in his sleep.


I'm assuming that Matheson and Serling and company were under a lot of pressure to produce scripts fast, and matheson's first try was too long or something. But I was severely disappointed.

I remember reading somewhere that in the original story, the twist was that the alien was disguised as a dog.

[Scissorjack]

Actually, that is a general criticism of much of the horror genre (big screen). When you are faced with an obviously evil if not terrifying character, but it quickly becomes obvious that they are after something more significant than merely sucking you soul away (while still being very cryptic about what it is, exactly), that's much more horrifying, right? But all too often horror movies pull their punches in this way. Mundane Evil = Boring Evil.

Michael Mann's vastly under-rated The Keep offered a much more interesting take on a similar idea: a platoon of Nazi soldiers who hold prisoner an elderly Jewish professor and his daughter occupy a Romanian castle, until it becomes evident that this titular Keep was built to hold something in rather than keep invaders out, as something wakes and starts killing soldiers. However, instead of going down the "monster disembowels Nazis" route, the film becomes much more interesting as the demon begins tempting people: he offers the Jewish professor the chance to end the Holocaust in exchange for his soul... what would you do? What would you do?

[Ranchoth]

Oh, how I agree. The Borg in particular were horribly mishandled because the writers apparently forgot what they were from one episode to the next. Originally, they were a true hivemind with no individuality and no concept of the individual. Then they got progressively nerfed until the final insult: The Borg Queen. At that point, I lost interest in most things Trek.

Personally, I thought TNG generally handled the Borg pretty well. It was the other series' (Well, just Voyager.) that increasingly mucked 'em up. I couldn't tell if the writers didn't really understand what the "collective consciousness" concept was, if they thought the audience didn't or wouldn't, or if they simply out and out decided to change the premise of the species.

Heck, I remember one line in the final season of TNG where they actually made a point of referring to the Borg in the singular ("The Borg is everywhere!") in a throwaway line. I think the Voyager team saw them more like one of those comedy stories where two guys are hillariously stuck together by accident.

[MOIDALIZE]

I'll second AvP. Would anyone honestly have cared if they had made it without any human dialogue whatsoever? If you're not going to have Space Marines, just have aliens and predators duke it out for 90 minutes. They took a great fictional future universe and completely discarded it in favor of a time setting that I guess audiences were supposed to be better able to relate to.

I find The Ninth Gate to be a frustrating movie. One of the rare movies that could have used more special effects.

[John DiFool]

Michael Mann's vastly under-rated The Keep offered a much more interesting take on a similar idea: a platoon of Nazi soldiers who hold prisoner an elderly Jewish professor and his daughter occupy a Romanian castle, until it becomes evident that this titular Keep was built to hold something in rather than keep invaders out, as something wakes and starts killing soldiers. However, instead of going down the "monster disembowels Nazis" route, the film becomes much more interesting as the demon begins tempting people: he offers the Jewish professor the chance to end the Holocaust in exchange for his soul... what would you do? What would you do?

Alas that film has been tied up in knots (shorthand for various conflicts of interest) for so long that the chances of a DVD release currently seem very remote.

[AllWalker]

I half agree with the OP. When I first read the blurb to "Scarecrow" it sent shivers down my spine. The idea of an international bounty hunt targeting the world's best soldiers really appealed to me. But it wasn't up to the standard of his other books in some ways. For one, the reason behind the hunt isn't great. Also, the bad guys go for overkill - targeting 1 US city and 1 EU city would have done the job.

But it was better than a lot of other books of that style. I liked Killian as a villain - truly psychotic, with quite a romantic view on the dark side of humanity, IMO (if that makes sense). His plan to nuke Mecca, with an Israeli missile tipped with a US warhead, that too sent shivers down my spine. And we see Scarecrow reach a whole new level of dangerous - don't piss that guy off.

And Knight is pretty cool. I hope he gets his own stories, or at least reappears in others.

[Bridget Burke]

Phillip K Dick is SF royalty, but I've always found his novels very hard work. Big on great ideas, short on great writing. His novels often take a brilliant premise, but flesh it out with extremely 'workmanlike' prose. His short stories are much better in this regard IMHO. He'd of been great working as a twosome.

Only Dick novel I really liked was Valis, which paradoxically is not a typical SF ideas-fest, but an extremely personal novel influenced by his struggle with mental illness.......

On a PBS interview, many years ago, I head that PKD only had real editors for two of his books. One was The Man In The High Castle, his excellent "alternate history." I've forgotten the other.

But he was working in the SF ghetto, back when publishers rarely bothered with the expense.

[Bridget Burke]

'Dies the Fire' and that whole series.

I love the premise. How would society adapt if suddenly there were no more electricity or vehicles. Just over 100 years ago these things didn't exist, but now our world is so totally dependant on them, that there would be a huge breakdown with mass starvation without them.

But the books are so badly written, that I find myself skipping paragraphs and just skimming pages and chapters.

Please, someone re-write these WELL.

Yup, I'm currently slogging through The Scourge of God. Luckily, I slog quickly!

But Stirling shines elsewhere. The Island in the Sea of Time trilogy moves more quickly, so the well-constructed alt.history distracts from the depth-free characters. His Lords of Creation books and The Peshawar Lancers really left me wanting more. So I won't give up on him yet.

[Annie-Xmas]

Stephen King's Rose Madder would have worked much better as a straight story without all the science fiction horror crap. When Norman showed up to kill Rose, she could have just kicked the crap out of him, whereupon he leaves and gets hit by the Daughters & Sisters van coming back from the outing. He ends up a real parapalygic. Rose & Bill go on to live happily ever after.

[Lumpy]

"Vanilla Sky" - a guy is almost killed and horribly disfigured and crippled in a car accident, so he lives an alternate life in drug induced controlled dreaming. He buys it from a corporation that sells alternative lives and they take care of your body for you. You have no idea that you're dreaming this new life. When glitches start start happening he figures out that his life isn't real. The idea was good, and I liked the movie, but a lot of people hated it. The movie starred Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz. It was a remake of a foreign movie, I wonder if the original was better? ('scuze my bad writing please.)Didn't Red Dwarf do a parody of this? Lister and Rimmer think they've returned to Earth and found the perfect niches for themselves, only to discover that it's an addictive VR game called Better Than Life?

As a big 2000AD fan back in the day, Judge Dredd was a huge disappointment. Not sure if there's enough depth there to really make a quality film, but by Christ it could have been orders of magnitude better than the turd Stallone / Danny Cannon served up.Tell me if you agree or disagree with this: the main premise behind 2000AD and Judge Dredd is that the human race screwed up so badly that God himself finally said "screw you". The protagonists of the stories live in a literally God-forsaken Hell-universe which is absurdly inimical to humanity. Survival is only possible due to the Judges being as inhumanly merciless as the world they live in. To translate this into a movie would require someone who's a genius at making the blackest of black comedies.

[Number]

Didn't Red Dwarf do a parody of this? Lister and Rimmer think they've returned to Earth and found the perfect niches for themselves, only to discover that it's an addictive VR game called Better Than Life?Red Dwarf did it first. The episode and book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Life) both came out well before Abre Los Ojos (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt012565), the basis for Vanilla Sky.

[Larry Borgia]

I don't think even Phil Dick's staunchest defenders (I am one) would claim he was a great stylist. He makes up for stylistic flaws with wierd plots, a singular vision, and a great sad and deep humanism. Also, in his better books, his style and characterizations have a quirky tone that serves his ideas well.

The plots in Neal Stephenson are secondary to the digressions, which I find highly entertaining but YMMV. But you have to expect that his books will stop, rather than end. He's like Pynchon, if Pynchon actually cared about communicating with his readers.

ETA: Open your eyes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125659/) is the movie Vanilla Sky was based on. I liked it. I never saw VS so I can't say which one is better IMO. Penelope Cruz is in both movies.

[mudkicker]

Stephen King's Rose Madder would have worked much better as a straight story without all the science fiction horror crap. When Norman showed up to kill Rose, she could have just kicked the crap out of him, whereupon he leaves and gets hit by the Daughters & Sisters van coming back from the outing. He ends up a real parapalygic. Rose & Bill go on to live happily ever after.

Totally agree. I loved that book until all the crap started with the painting in her room. It could have been such a strong woman-centred, triumph over tragedy style book like Dolores Claiborne, and the supernatural element spoiled it quite a bit.

[Ponderoid]

I love the premise. How would society adapt if suddenly there were no more electricity or vehicles.
[...]
Please, someone re-write these WELL.

You might like The Peace War, by Vernor Vinge, collected in an omnibus volume with its sequels called Across Realtime. The situation isn't quite "no electricity", but rather "no high power density", which severely limits its use. The novel skips past the initial breakdown of society and picks up decades later in the aftermath.

*** Ponder

[astorian]

"Idiocracy" had a brilliant premise, but the movie itself was mostly horrible.

[De La Rue]

Absolutely right about Idiocracy. I also think that while Underworld was exceedingly mindless, the idea of a vampire-werewolf conflict has potential if the vampires are characterized as "refined" and "civilized" (they often pose as aristocracy, right?) and werewolves are pure animal savagery, letting the beast in them come out.

[KneadToKnow]

I would have forgiven the powers that be behind Trek a lot if they had taken my suggestion to make the Borg Queen turn out to be the Ilia probe.

[RikWriter]

Gattaca probably could have been a pretty good film if they ever bothered to think out their own concept.

Actually, it was a very good film as is.

[Sr Siete]

Absolutely right about Idiocracy. I also think that while Underworld was exceedingly mindless, the idea of a vampire-werewolf conflict has potential if the vampires are characterized as "refined" and "civilized" (they often pose as aristocracy, right?) and werewolves are pure animal savagery, letting the beast in them come out.

I would have liked better Underworld if the romance happened between a Vampire and a Werewolf. Two warriors who are supposed to kill each other and all that.

The pairing Vampire - Crazy Hybrid thingie is a lot less star struck.

[appleciders]

you could basically take your pick of classic comic strips that have been abused in the cinema.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyone? Come on- I know Americans don't travel but we're not stupid enough to think that you could really drive a five-hundred-foot-long submarine through the canals in Venice, right? Right?

[Bosstone]

I also think that while Underworld was exceedingly mindless, the idea of a vampire-werewolf conflict has potential if the vampires are characterized as "refined" and "civilized" (they often pose as aristocracy, right?) and werewolves are pure animal savagery, letting the beast in them come out.Underworld stole its premise almost entirely from the World of Darkness RPG, to the point where the studio had to defend itself from a lawsuit from White Wolf, IIRC. There's definitely potential in the premise.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Actually, it was a very good film as is.
Yep! I think Chuck has some...interesting...ideas about how certain SF pieces are plotted.

I disagree, however, about The Matrix: I think it's exactly the opposite of the OP. That is, the premise--that computers are using humans as batteries--is completely stupid, so stupid that it almost ruined the movie for me. However, the movie is so freakin' cool that it succeeds despite the horrible idea.

Hmm, other examples...ooh, I know! The Tin Man is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, with a darker, grittier, low-magic feel to it. As part of the retelling, they got a bunch of developmentally delayed lemurs to write the script, and then held a "Worst Actor in America" contest as a casting call. It was dreadful.

Daniel

[Tuckerfan]

Alas that film has been tied up in knots (shorthand for various conflicts of interest) for so long that the chances of a DVD release currently seem very remote.

Having seen the film recently (yes, its out there on teh internets if you know where to look), I can safely say that it not being on DVD is a good thing. When the only interesting part of the film is the special effects used in one scene, you've got a sucky, sucky, movie. Ian McKellen defeats the bad guy using a flashlight with a piece of cardboard taped to it for Og's sake!

[Boyo Jim]

Yep! I think Chuck has some...interesting...ideas about how certain SF pieces are plotted.

I disagree, however, about The Matrix: I think it's exactly the opposite of the OP. That is, the premise--that computers are using humans as batteries--is completely stupid, so stupid that it almost ruined the movie for me. However, the movie is so freakin' cool that it succeeds despite the horrible idea.

Hmm, other examples...ooh, I know! The Tin Man is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, with a darker, grittier, low-magic feel to it. As part of the retelling, they got a bunch of developmentally delayed lemurs to write the script, and then held a "Worst Actor in America" contest as a casting call. It was dreadful.

Daniel

I agree with you. It was an incredibly stupid idea that was turned into a tolerable movie.

It also seemed there was almost no point to the human revolution. Since people over a certain (undefined but young) age can't be freed because of some kind of unavoidable psychological issues, a successful revolution would result in the death of just about every human on the planet.

[panache45]

I guess I could rag on The Wizard of Oz for copping out at the end with no Ruby Slippers on Kansas Dorothy ("It was all a dream"), but that's for the Copout thread, not here, which is more about scripts with promise which were pretty much DOA after editing.

I've always wished that, after convincing her that it was all a dream, they notice the ruby slippers . . . a color none of them had ever seen, in their sepia-and-white universe.

[The Second Stone]

Gattaca probably could have been a pretty good film if they ever bothered to think out their own concept. As it was, it made no sense and had no internal consistency, but it's clearly an idea that has some excellent potential.

You must have seen a different version. I saw the one with Uma Thurman, Jude Law and Ethan Hawke. It was possibly the best SF movie ever made, and certainly a contender for the title.

[CalMeacham]

I remember reading somewhere that in the original story, the twist was that the alien was disguised as a dog.


An interesting idea, if true. Zicree's book on The Twilight Zone doesn't mention this. In any event, that idea had already been done (but with a donkey instead of a dog) br Fredric Brown in his short story "Puppet Show".

[Justin_Bailey]

Actually, it was a very good film as is.

Gattaca was a pretty great movie, but Chuck is right, the "world" of the movie makes no sense at all.

[Dan Norder]

You must have seen a different version. I saw the one with Uma Thurman, Jude Law and Ethan Hawke. It was possibly the best SF movie ever made, and certainly a contender for the title.

I saw those actors in a movie of the same name and it just sucked all around. Nowhere near best SF movie ever made.

[AHunter3]

I happen to like books that turn out to have long, languidly slow and spectacularly powerful ultraplots that you don't see moving in the background until you're deeply immersed and entertained by the faster-moving foreground plots, and then you glimpse the shape of the vast strategy going on behind it and you almost tremble in awe. Unfortunately the works that attempt do to it seldom live up to the hints and promises....


The Da Vinci Code... OK, many of the huge chunks that this book did blow were parts of the premise, but the general setup — that the entire history of the Christian church had a cover-up at its core that had the potential, at least in the opinions of some powerful folks within the church hierarchy of the Catholic chursh, to bring the entire religion down.

Against the backdrop of rapid-fire skin-of-teeth escapes and unfoldings of a bit more of the mystery here, a bit more there, is this really HUGE plot-trajectory. What will the secret be? How complicit will the church turn out to be? How will our protagonists get the secret out into the open against the concerted efforts of these folks to keep it hidden, and how will the world react when they do? Will the religion in its entirety go down in flames, or will it become a Good Elements vs Bad Elements battle for Christianity's own soul? Will there be outpourings of anger, outrage? Contrarily, will people be angry at the truth-tellers for disturbing their predictable established world of belief with these revelations?

(Well, no, actually, we're just gonna wrap up the little mystery-stories and adventure-escape thriller shit and leave all that big stuff untouched)


Steven King is guilty of it several times over. In The Stand, behind the foreground story of a world decimated by illness, we shift towards the ultimate confrontation between good and evil. But there's not enough vision to the good and we go out with a nuclear fireball (yawn); In It, as in the far more successful The Shining, there's a sense of double-exposure (is this even really about supernatural spookyshit, or is it really about the spookiness of entirely real and realistically told people-behavior?), the kids and what they had to face and have to come back to face as adults, something creepy and just below the surface in the small town, a small town where the everyday nice-faced people like your neighbors and parents may disguise a rotten core... then it turns into a Brave Kids versus The Spider From Hell (oh please...)


Philip Pullman is another offender. His Dark Materials trilogy, story in the foreground of Lyra and her alethiometer and rescuing the kids from the oblation board and whatnot becomes more obviously a late and climactic chapter in a spiritual showdown between authority and freedom that harkens all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, and she is Eve again & anew, no less... so with increasing excitement I read on, to see the gradual reveal of what the conflict in the original garden of eden will turn out to have been, and where Eve v.1 went wrong, ... Pullman does this all better than most, with Lyra invading the world of the dead and upending the fate of the spirits there, but her accomplishments there slide through our fingers, leaving us a bit unsatisfied beyond the entertainment-fiction foreground level... then we move to the final conflict and the wheels fall off the trilogy as God the doddering old toothless Alzheimer's patient falls out of his carriage and the long-wave plot just sort of disintegrates amidst a final shoot-em-up.


Even Asimov could not write the Foundation in a way that lived up to initial setup, the unfolding of plots that would scale through millennia and throughout the galaxy. Ultimately he punted on a lot of it, leaving only a vague wave of the hand in the direction of a notion that ol' Hari Seldon started something in motion that would steer the fate of the galactic civilization through the collapse of empire through the rise of its replacement and the final triumph of psychohistory in ensuring a more stable future. We're told that it happens, but the psychohistory gets ghosted out where you can't see it once Seldon himself is out of the picture. Just too thin on the ground.

[Wolfian]

A good deal of the movies on MST3K. Teenage Caveman had a decent idea (brave caveman goes against authority for the good of his people) and a cool twist ending

The cavemen are the descendants of people who survived an atomic holocaust.

but it was ruined by wooden acting, bad special effects, and bad, repetitious writing.

Hobgoblins was about aliens who can make one's wildest dreams come true. With a good writer, that could have been a great movie, intend we got a mediocre 80s teen movie.

[An Gadaí]

Didn't Red Dwarf do a parody of this? Lister and Rimmer think they've returned to Earth and found the perfect niches for themselves, only to discover that it's an addictive VR game called Better Than Life?

Tell me if you agree or disagree with this: the main premise behind 2000AD and Judge Dredd is that the human race screwed up so badly that God himself finally said "screw you". The protagonists of the stories live in a literally God-forsaken Hell-universe which is absurdly inimical to humanity. Survival is only possible due to the Judges being as inhumanly merciless as the world they live in. To translate this into a movie would require someone who's a genius at making the blackest of black comedies.

Are you sure you're thinking of the right series? I never picked this up from Judge Dredd. It is set in a post-apocalyptic conurbation wherein most of the populace is no longer in fruitful employment because of mass automation. Mega City 1 is a police state and the Judges are harsh but from their point of view, fair. What is interesting about the character IMHO is that he is somewhat of an anti-hero, pedantic, dour, oft-times vicious but also principled. Stallone's rendition had none of the subtlety of the comic character.

[NDP]

A good deal of the movies on MST3K. Teenage Caveman had a decent idea (brave caveman goes against authority for the good of his people) and a cool twist ending

The cavemen are the descendants of people who survived an atomic holocaust.

but it was ruined by wooden acting, bad special effects, and bad, repetitious writing.

I don't think Roger Corman even deserves credit for the twist ending. It's a direct steal from "By the Waters of Babylon" by Stephen Vincent Benét.

Incidentally, would this thread cover movies and stories with tired and cliché-ridden concepts that were ham-fistedly executed that somehow--perhaps inadvertently--stumble onto some intriguing ideas as a side development? I can think of a few movies I slogged through which from the onset seemingly didn't have any ideas in their empty heads that suddenly came across something interesting only for it to be squandered because the filmmakers either didn't know what they had or didn't care enough to fully develop it.

[zenith]

If the movie "They Live!" had a little less trite dialog, a real actor instead of rassler Roddy Piper in the lead, and the stupid fistfight scene excised, it could have been great.

[Baldwin]

'Dies the Fire' and that whole series.

I love the premise. How would society adapt if suddenly there were no more electricity or vehicles. Just over 100 years ago these things didn't exist, but now our world is so totally dependant on them, that there would be a huge breakdown with mass starvation without them.

But the books are so badly written, that I find myself skipping paragraphs and just skimming pages and chapters.

Please, someone re-write these WELL.You might like Ariel, by Steven Boyett, written a couple of decades earlier. (A little rough, but pretty impressive considering he was 21.)

[Baldwin]

As I mentioned in a recent thread, World War Z was a great idea for a book. Alas, Brooks did a poor job of executing that idea. In the hands of a more competent writer, an oral history of the world after a plague of zombies could have been something wonderful.
One better way to handle the idea would have been to have the individual chapters penned by different authors. The various authors who contributed to The Book of the Dead back in the 90's would have been my A-list. They would have turned out a World War Z much more worth reading.You're in luck -- some guy coincidentally also named Brooks took that idea and wrote a pretty good book, also titled World War Z. What you read must have been some weird knock-off.

[DrDeth]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Busy Scissors
you could basically take your pick of classic comic strips that have been abused in the cinema.


League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyone?

Except that it's hardly "classic". The author stole a bunch of other great authors characters and abused them, ending up in a just average comic. Yes, his take on this same idea with Watchman was quite well done, but LoEG was average and his last kiddie-porn treatment was just horrible.

[DrDeth]

The Da Vinci Code...
(Well, no, actually, we're just gonna wrap up the little mystery-stories and adventure-escape thriller shit and leave all that big stuff untouched)



Philip Pullman is another offender. His Dark Materials trilogy, story in the foreground of Lyra and her alethiometer and rescuing the kids from the oblation board and whatnot becomes more obviously a late and climactic chapter in a spiritual showdown between authority and freedom that harkens all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, and she is Eve again & anew, no less... so with increasing excitement I read on, to see the gradual reveal of what the conflict in the original garden of eden will turn out to have been, and where Eve v.1 went wrong, ... Pullman does this all better than most, with Lyra invading the world of the dead and upending the fate of the spirits there, but her accomplishments there slide through our fingers, leaving us a bit unsatisfied beyond the entertainment-fiction foreground level... then we move to the final conflict and the wheels fall off the trilogy as God the doddering old toothless Alzheimer's patient falls out of his carriage and the long-wave plot just sort of disintegrates amidst a final shoot-em-up.
.

True, the ending of The Da Vinci Code was one of the biggest anti-climaxes of all, but it had to be. I mean, really? Some crazy group comes out of nowhere with some "evidence" that Jesus was marrried and perhaps his bloodline survies. So? There's been books and theories and dudes claiming even worse that that for a hundred years, with little or no effect.

And, I disagree about Pullman. He can't write. We liked the Golden Compass for his imaginings of a Steampunk world with Panzer-polar bears and everyone with their own familiars (kids loave that idea). Once we left that world, he had nuttin.

[RikWriter]

You might like Ariel, by Steven Boyett, written a couple of decades earlier. (A little rough, but pretty impressive considering he was 21.)

That's one of my favorite fantasy novels.
Of course, I disagree totally with the other poster in that I think Dies the Fire is a very entertaining series.

[pepperlandgirl]

A good deal of the movies on MST3K. Teenage Caveman had a decent idea (brave caveman goes against authority for the good of his people) and a cool twist ending

The cavemen are the descendants of people who survived an atomic holocaust.

but it was ruined by wooden acting, bad special effects, and bad, repetitious writing.

Hobgoblins was about aliens who can make one's wildest dreams come true. With a good writer, that could have been a great movie, intend we got a mediocre 80s teen movie.

I personally think that's one of the most frustrating things about Edward D. Wood. It's not that his ideas were bad--some of them weren't. Alien invaders raising an army of zombies in a bid to take over the Earth? I would totally watch that!

I also think the core of the idea behind The Sinister Urge is a good one. It'd make a good suspense movie--it's got all the elements people like in a good suspense movie, and the basic idea (an illicit smut ring in Hollywood with girls turning up murdered) was used to great effect in L.A. Confidential.

You know, in a lot of ways, George Lucas reminds me of Ed Wood.

[GargoyleWB]

When someone trades their immortality for mortality, gaining the gift to see into the hearts and minds of all humans, and becomes the catalyst for a new golden age of civilization...the creative possibilities are endless.

One of those possibilities unfortunately is Highlander 2.

[Lemur866]

The trouble with Gattaca is that I just don't buy the idea that genetic engineering would turn everyone into uber-conformist cookie-cutter yuppies in grey flannel suits. For instance, take the six-fingered pianist from the movie. He's a genetically engineered freak of nature. Why aren't there more people like him? Why isn't the whole world of Gattaca populated by weirdos and eccentrics and mutants?

If everyone were smart, healthy, handsome, and athletic, that just becomes the new normal. I understand that in today's world everything comes easily for the smart handsome healthy people. But Jude Law isn't Jude Law anymore if everyone in the world is Jude Law. And what's the point of discriminating against the unengineered? It doesn't make any sense to go out of your way to exclude the unengineered. Yeah, it's a metaphor for elitism, or racism, or some such. But it doesn't make sense!

[gaffa]

In re "The Matrix":
I agree with you. It was an incredibly stupid idea that was turned into a tolerable movie.

It also seemed there was almost no point to the human revolution. Since people over a certain (undefined but young) age can't be freed because of some kind of unavoidable psychological issues, a successful revolution would result in the death of just about every human on the planet.
I enjoy the first Matrix, and really wanted to see the sequel promised by Neo in the last lines of the film:

I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

I wanted to see that film, rather than a giant shoot-out defending a troglodyte city of rave kids.