For years I thought that most movies were doing it wrong. They’d take a long, involved piece of complex science fiction and try to cram it, with all its explanations and new ideas, along with plot development and character exposition, into a traditional 1.5 to 2.5 hour movie. And, of course, it wouldn’t work. It’s seem nto hurried. essentialy stuff would be left out. People would simply be more confused than ever. Look at David Lynch’s Dune, for example.
The right way to do it is to take a less ambitious short story. You can then use time to develop the science and explanations as you develop the story and characters, and there’s no rush. Instead of trying to build an entire world or an entire civilization, concentrate on something smaller and less manageable.
Of course, like many things that I imagine and extrapolate (like the History and Development of Computer Animation, but that’s another story), when they actually did this, it didn’t work out the way I’d planned. There are a few cases where this approachj worked (You may disagree, but I hold up John Carpenter’s version of The Thing as an example), but generally what REALLY happens when they do this is that even the short story gets radically changed. Even more often, the short story gets told, but it becomes such a minor part of the plot and story that it gets swallowed up by everything else, and the everything else that the filmmakers add out of their own imaginatioons is, well, dumb.
I have to admit that frequently the thrill of a good SF short is intellectual, with often a nifty idea at its core and a clever twist at the end. this isn’t necessarily the best thing for a movie, which has, after all, to be largely visual. And a good popular movie that will bring in enough patrons to justify the expense of special effects will have to have enough action and excitement to bring in repeats and word-of-mouth business.
So we end up with the movies we have. Here are a few examples:
1.) Total Recall – arguably the poster child for this gentre of “good short story to overblown movie drowning in action and effects”. Philip K. Dick’s story started out, I’ll bet, as a result of a cute pun – the saying “We can Remainder it for you Wholesale” in Dick’s word-playing mind became “We can Remember it for you Wholesale”, and involved a company called Rekall that could implant false (and usualy fantastic) memories for a fee. The flip being, of course, that when they implanted false memories about secret-agent stuff on Mars into the mind of a nebbish-type, they found that it paralleled the real situation. This is in the movie, but they pretty much exhaust it in the first 20 minutes or so. And instead of a Woody Allen-like nebbish, they change the hero to the marketable Arnold Schwartzenegger. And instead of memories, the film turns into a dream/VR-style real-time adventure (which it almost has to do. You can’t film memories, and this is more direct than flashbacks). The plot of what went on on Mars has to come from somewhere else. I claim that it bears an uncanny resemlance to Robert Sheckley’s the Status Civilization, right down to the Skrenning Mutants, with a touch of A Princess of Mars (the Oxygen Plant) thrown in at the end. It’s a big dumb action film, which I really do like, but it’s a long way from WCRIFYW.
2.) Mimic – Donald A Wollheim’s short story about a weird old guy, looking like a street perv, who turns out to be a giant predatory insect camoflaging itself as a human (the way some praying mantids, for instance, can look uncannily like flowers) was a disturbing image (and got extra punch when another camoflaged creature snaps up one of its young at the end), but it doesn’t seem like much to carry a movie. The “perv in a raincoat actually a giant bug” actually gets played out in the movie Mimic, but it’s a shot of only a few seconds. The rest of the film is wholly made up of non-short-story elements, and I don’t recall any other sorts of bugs.
3.) Invasion of the Saucermen, later remade --terribly – as Invasion of the Eye Creatures (or Invasion of the the Eye Creatures. This actually is based on a pretty decent and clever short story by Paul W. Fairman, The Cosmic Frame (iMDB doesn’t understand the source, anf gives the title as “The Cosmic Flame”, which shows that the guy who put this in never read it) Paul W. Fairman - IMDb The story itself gets told in Invaion of the Saucermen (I think it disappeared by the time Eye Creatures was made), but it’s buried among all the idiocy of big-headeed aliens, dismbodied hands that inject alcohol, crawl ariound, and have eyeballs, and aliens that conveniently explode when you shine bright lights on them. The story’s worth a read.
4.) This Island Earth – the Raymond F. Jones story was really a novel, but it’s hard for me to believe that they read past the opening chapters, which appeared as the story “The Alien Machine”, and which is depicted in the film. I don’t think much of the rest of the book made it into the film – the screenwriter Coen and O’Callaghan seem to have made up the rest themselves – and from simply perusing pulp SF covers, it would seem. All the idiocy of the movie – the bug-eyed, bare-brained insectoid mutants, the irrational actions of the aliens, the planet-turned-nto-a-sun, even the names Zaygon and Metaluna – seems to be original. The good beginning was even screwed up – scientist CalMeacham in the film just follows the alien schematics to build his Interociter, as if it’s a high-tech Heathkit. That’s a test for a good tedchnician, not a scientist. In the book and short story, Meacham doesn’t get a diagram, and has to dope out how it goes together from clues in the catalog. And we get glimpses of some of the other “tests” given to other candidates. And Cal has to repair and rebuild parts that break – no small feat.
