Pitch it as Breaking Bad meets Game of Thrones, and I bet you could at least get a pilot filmed, rape scene included.
Hasn’t treatment of leprosy advanced tremendously in the decades since the book was written? Because if patients no longer have to live in fear of infection, it pretty much undermines the foundation of the story.
They were featureless and telic, like lambent gangrene. They looked horribly like children.
It’s not the fact there’s a rape scene that makes this a non-starter. It’s the fact that the main character, a modern American, who we’re going to follow as the “hero” for the entire rest of the movie, rapes a 16 year old girl.
That would be as faithful to the original as Will Smith’s “I Robot” was to Asimov. One of the major themes of the series is that Covenant doesn’t believe any of it is real. He thinks he’s fantasizing/hallucinating the whole thing, and the fact that he’s always unconscious in the “real” world while his adventures in the Land are going on supports that.
Well, I think that one of the differences between a movie and the books is that the movie will probably start with the assumption that it’s all real. Donaldson himself pretty much gives up on the concept by Illearth War when he starts telling the story from the perspectives of characters other than Covenant.
This is, of course, completely incorrect. Gilden-fire was excised from the text of The Illearth War precisely because it was from the point-of-view of another character than Covenant. It - and other similar scenes - were re-written as accounts told by the Bloodguard to Covenant as they randomly turned up to report throughout the book.
Donaldson abandoned the conceit that it was all Covenant’s delusion in the Second Chronicles. All of the First Chronicles was told from Covenant’s perspective.
I can’t imagine anyone who’s seen Game of Thrones thinks Gregor and Ramsay are the heroes of the tale. That’s a pretty huge difference.
Not true. Much of Illearth War is told from Hile Troy’s perspective. And the Power that Preserves is about half Mhoram and half Covenant. Covenant abandons the conceit in the 2nd chronicles, but Donaldson’s writing tells us pretty clearly by Illearth War that the Land is real, although Covenant is denied that information.
How’d I miss the numerous previous lives of this thread?
If her age is the big problem, then shoot, make her 18.
I agree that it would be tough to make a movie out of Covenant. A miniseries, maybe.
But only for the first trilogy. I’ve re-read that a few times. But the second trilogy (which I re-read basically to get the background for the third trilogy - I have to disagree with Nonyapit about this; even now, I can’t remember Kastenessen from the second trilogy, but Donaldson seemed to assume the reader of the third trilogy remembered all about him) just bogs down in the second book, and the third one isn’t much better.
In the third trilogy (AFAIAC, Douglas Adams broke important ground with the cover of the fifth Hitchhiker book, allowing the rest of us to apply the word ‘trilogy’ to multi-book series involving varying numbers of books), the first book moves pretty well, but by the third and fourth books, the action is all but incomprehensible. Did we ever find out how The Worm of the World’s End was thwarted? I missed that.
If you’re talking the One Tree, the worm didn’t fully waken. Linden got Thomas to stop fighting since a battle between the white gold magic and the worm would have destroyed the arch of time. The island was lost but it kept the worm sleeping.
Eta: sorry on reading it again realized you were talking about the third trilogy. I haven’t read those.
Looks like I missed this thread both of the times it came around before as well.
I am a huge fan of the books, and I think the rape scene must stand as it is.
Here’s the thing: Covenant was inspired to the rape (at least in his own mind) because he had feeling restored. He had adapted to living without sensation and to being unable to rape someone even if he wanted to. By allowing himself to feel, he lost control and he committed the rape.
If you downplay it with a less serious crime, then his justification falls apart.
If his justification falls apart, then all of his “whining” in the following books also makes no sense. It’s not always explicitly said, but his whole whining argument is “When I accepted the Land’s healing, I lost control and I raped a young girl. Lord Foul brought me here because he wants me use White Gold, lose control of it, and rape the entire planet. Therefore, I must reject the Land’s healing. I must reject the White Gold. I must reject my role in events. I am a bad person and if I take an active role, I will destroy the world the same way I destroyed Lena.”
(And honestly, it’s not whining so much seen in that light. If a pedophile says “It would be a bad idea for me to babysit your children. I shouldn’t be around children at all” is that whining, or is it actually the appropriate response?)
So it must be a serious and unforgivable crime unless you want to rewrite the whole trilogy. I know that many people do want to rewrite it, but this is a case where you have to let it stand or scrap it all and start over.
As to the original question of making it a movie: I don’t think it would be a good idea. Too much of the story is internal to Covenant, and that’s not easy to convey in a movie effectively. Any movie that stayed true to the source material would offend half the audience and any that didn’t stay true would offend the other half the audience.
Feasibility of adapting this into a movie aside, I’d like to bandy about the idea of who would be the best actor to play Thomas Covenant.
It’d have to be somebody who can simultaneously make the audience hate him and love him at the same time, like the tragic version of Sheldon Cooper.
ideas…
Christian Bale
Misha Collins
Viggo Mortensen
Gary Oldman
Shia LaBeouf - already knows how to be a polarizing figure
The rape is also essential because everything else that happens flows from that one act. The birth of Elena, which leads to breaking the Law of Death.
There’s one of those old Fanny J. Crosby hymns that has the line “the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.” Donaldson isn’t into quick, cheap redemption (which is one of the things I appreciate about him), but Angus made me think of that line, because Donaldson’s goal with him, way more than Covenant certainly, seemed to be to create the vilest possible offender and then find him a path to redemption.
He was just before his time. That seems to be a standard in TV plotting nowadays. Prison Break had several characters who were pretty awful and pretty much all of them got a shot at redemption and took it, except for Teabag.