If There’s One Thing Missing From “Red Mars”, It’s Val Kilmer. Wait, wasn’t he already..?
A little bit swamped today, so just a single item for you good people. And it’s a real WTfuckingfuckingF? moment, from Ain’t It Cool News:
“Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (’Die Hard With A Vengeance,’ ‘Jumanji,’ ‘The Saint,’ ‘Armageddon,’ ‘The Punisher,’ ‘Next’) is developing an AMC series based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1992 sci-fi novel ‘Red Mars’.”
The guy who co-wrote Armageddon. And The Punisher. And the fucking Saint. Producing one of the few true hard-SF classics of the past twenty years.
Utilising the kind of reasoning on display here, in terms of the assignment of individuals with a certain skill-set to important works of fiction, can I be the first to request a television adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation by the production team behind Battlefield Earth, a remake of Seven Samurai where the cast is made up entirely of subtitled monkeys dressed in garb appropriate to the English Restoration period, and a radical reboot, a reimagining, of the Epic of Gilgamesh by an illiterate alcoholic whom, after spending the last twenty years literally drinking nothing but White Lightning, is blind and unable to stop soiling himself constantly and then rubbing it in his own face and the faces of anyone near to him.
on October 6th, 2008 at 11:46 am
i would pay good money to see the restoration monkey seven samurai! Let’s get samuel l. Jackson interested and we can make it happen!
on October 6th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
What a stupid idea! Some of my favourite parts of Red Mars were about the botany.
Seriously, if you’re making a movie of Red Mars that I don’t want to see, that’s seriously idiotic.
on October 9th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Paul: Actually, you’re right. On second thoughts, that could work.
Plok: The problem is, as much as there is in the book that’s cinematic (like Phobos and the destruction of the space elevator), there’s a whole lot more that’s not. Robinson is a full-on science nerd, and that’s just not going to translate into something The Populace is going to want. The pedigree of the producer is an indicator as to how they’re going to deal with this adaptation, and it doesn’t look good.