Subgenres in Gravity

Recently I ran across a review of the excellent movie Gravity in which the reviewer announced that the movie was not actually science fiction. In his own words:

Gravity features no aliens, no interstellar space travel, no time travel, and it doesn’t take place in the future. In fact, given that it involves a space shuttle as its method of travel into space, it would seem to be set in a past. (http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/gravity-is-not-sci-fi.php)

Another similar review goes like this:

Gravity is not a science fiction film. […]There is no great speculation about future technologies. No aliens arrive to inconvenience Ms Bullock. Yes, it takes place in space. But so did Apollo 13. Was that science fiction? (http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter/2013/10/09/gravity-is-not-a-science-fiction-film/)

My first impulse is to nitpick the rationale that each critic bases their decision on, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader even though I find it particularly galling that for some reason both writers seem to believe that science fiction can only exist if there are aliens involved (Gattaca? The Truman Show?). Instead, I’d like to introduce a subgenre of science fiction to these critics.

Gravity uses today’s science and technology as the core to its plot, which may be what is throwing off these reviewers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t science fiction. Science fiction can generally be divided into two general spheres, “hard science fiction” and “soft”. Allen Steele describes hard science fiction as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone”; science fiction that doesn’t have this foundation is generally termed “soft”. Unfortunately, 99% of science fiction film is soft, with barely a glance at the fundaments of physics as they strive for better and greater special effects and costumes and make-up. As a result, in the popular imagination, science fiction is identified by those elements—big-ass spaceships firing on things, weird aliens, impressive technology with lots of lights. But in the history of written science fiction, hard stories are a healthy minority with a long rich history, and writing it requires something of a specialist’s touch. Writing hard science fiction requires two difficult skills—an understanding of scientific principles and their applications in reality and the ability to communicate those principles and applications in an entertaining way (Arthur C. Clarke is considered one of the masters of hard science fiction). Unfortunately, neither attribute is very applicable to cinema, where the audience generally has a short attention span and wants to be wowed rather than lectured to. Part of the power of Gravity is that it succeeds despite the potential pitfalls of its choice of genre.

Gravity also taps into a smaller subgenre of science fiction storytelling that is not often used in cinema, that of the “problem story”. In a problem story, the protagonist or protagonists are faced with some sort of crisis in exotic circumstances that can only come from the science fiction genre—an astronaut crashes into the lunar surface and has to figure out a way to communicate with his base, for example. The roots of this kind of story are clearly related to science fiction’s own roots in the adventure story: similar stories have been written in the western and action genres where cowboys run out of water crossing a desert or an expedition member gets cut off from his party in the deep Amazon. It could be argued that because other genres have similar kinds of stories, perhaps the problem story belongs in its own classification outside of genre silos. That isn’t an unreasonable idea, but the individual stories differ by the problems that are being solved, which in turn are based almost solely on the setting of the story. And if we presume that the setting is a good bit of what determines the genre, then we have to take genre into account. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone faces the problem she faces exactly because she is travelling in space. And in turn, those problems are directly related to established science.

One of the most widely beloved science fiction short stories of the pulp era is Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, a problem story of the first rank (I have actually found it online at http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/105/).  In the story, Godwin establishes a very precise set of circumstances: a colony is suffering from a deadly plague and a messenger ship races to it with the cure. The ship itself is stripped to the bare essentials in order to maximize its speed, and every bit of weight has been calculated to ensure that only the exact amount of fuel needed to land on the planet is onboard. The cold equation is that acceleration is dependent on mass, one that we have yet to figure out how to work around. But after the situation has been laid out to the reader, Godwin throws a wrench into the works—the pilot discovers a stowaway, a young girl who thought it would be a simple way to visit her brother on the planet, unaware of the crisis the ship and its pilot are trying to avert. With the girl’s extra weight, the pilot is faced with either a doomed attempt to land or perpetual orbits around the planet, never able to get down safely. What will the protagonist do—how will he deal with the hard science of physics and its remorseless effects on his mission? The solution is what sets “The Cold Equations” above most of its peers. At the time of its release, in Astounding Science Fiction in August 1954, I don’t think anyone solved the problem nearly the way that Godwin chose to.

No, Gravity doesn’t have aliens or time travel. What it does have, however, is a solid foundation in the traditions of science fiction. And as I watched Gravity, the knowledge that a much-beloved area of science fiction that doesn’t get much attention was getting a spotlight made it that much more enjoyable.

Greg Bear and John Carter

As I have been perusing the reviews for John Carter, one thing continues to stand out to me--a lot of the mainstream critics don't get it. They don't get how important a book this was--and thus how important the movie is to the genre. They don't get the time the movie is set in. They don't get how the characters are a function of that time.

It could easily be argued that the movie fails if it doesn't convince the viewer of these things. But it's difficult not to wonder if perhaps the critics are harboring some other biases. And given my general impression of how hypocritically speculative fiction is treated in the mainstream, I'm willing to indulge in that doubt a little bit. And now that I have read what Greg Bear has had to say, I'm willing to indulge it still further. You should check out what he has to say: http://www.gregbear.com/other/johncarter.cfm.

Locus and John Carter

Locus magazine has put two very good reviews of John Carter on their Web site. The first, by Gary Westfahl, says a lot of things that I have said in my own writings, but more elegantly (http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2012/03/barsoom-revisited-or-forewarned-four-armed-a-review-of-john-carter/). I found this paragraph to be particularly striking, where Westfahl describes the plot change to make the Therns provide Carter's method of transportation to Mars:

This change is particularly ruinous to the film because the power of Burroughs's original story, after all, lay in the fact that it represented the ultimate in wish fulfillment: you look up at another planet, you transport yourself to that planet, you find that you can beat the crap out of everyone and everything around you, and you marry a beautiful princess and become that planet's Warlord. This is the story that inspired many people to become interested in space travel, like Carl Sagan, who related how he as a child, after reading Burroughs, had similarly looked up at the stars and dreamed that he might be transported to another world. Significantly, he did not dream that he might somebody run into a powerful alien with a magical device that could take him to another world; it simply isn't the same. And this sort of story must end with the complete, transcendent triumph of the hero, something that the film's John Carter is denied: no matter how long he remains on Mars, the film suggests, he will always be gazing suspiciously at every person he encounters, fearful that he or she is a disguised Thern plotting his demise. Perhaps this was justified in story conferences as laying the necessary groundwork for a possible sequel, but one might respond that Burroughs himself, after nervously providing his early novels with cliffhanger endings, began giving his novels complete, satisfactory conclusions, confident that he could always devise some pretext for one more sequel without any obvious hooks; and certainly, Hollywood itself has never failed to find some way to keep a profitable franchise going, even contriving to produce three more sequels to a film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1969), that ended with the complete destruction of planet Earth. In sum, since Burroughs's novel already offered a sufficient number of dastardly opponents, there was no reason to add the Therns in the first place, and every reason to remove them in the final, chartreuse version of the script.

The second is a conversation between Howard Waldrop and Lawrence Person (http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2012/03/howard-waldrop-and-lawrence-person-review-john-carter/), both of whom mention some of the same points I've made but with the added benefit of Person claiming no emotional attachment to the source material. I've read a lot of reviews in the past few days, and it's a stroke of luck that perhaps the two best I have read thus far are on the same Web site.

The difference between the books and the movie: John Carter

Yesterday, I wrote what I hoped to be a fairly unbiased review of the new John Carter movie. If you are new to my blog, I should reveal that I am a lifelong fan of the Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the source for John Carter. Today, I want to look at the movie again from what I am jokingly referring to as the fanboy perspective, from the point of view of someone intimately familiar with the original story, with an eye towards describing the differences in the two versions of the stories and trying to understand why those changes were made. There may be spoilers in what follows, but I don't imagine they will be so severe as to ruin either the movie-going experience or the joy of reading the novels.

I should note also that I am not going to talk about every difference between the books and the movie. I expect there to be differences—books can't be adapted verbatim, for reasons of time and storytelling. For instance, in the movie John Carter is given the name Dotar Sojat meaning "my right hand" by Tars Tarkas. In the books, Dotar and Sojat are the names of the first two warriors Carter kills and thus his Barsoomian name. There is not a lot of value explicating this; the writers used a name from the source, which often is enough to get a giddy sigh from the fans of the original work, and they are able to suitably adapt the name to add more meaning to the story they are trying to tell. In this case, we don't have to have pages of Carter and Tars Tarkas fighting together to see that they build up trust and friendship between them, the movie spares the viewer time by having Tars Tarkas announce his dependence on his new comrade, by naming him "my right hand."

One detail in the books that make even their fans grimace is the method by which John Carter travels from Earth to Mars. Frankly said, the reader has no idea how it happens and neither does John Carter:

As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for the wonders of the earthly scene. My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination—it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.

My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of though through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness. (A Princess of Mars)

…and John Carter opens his eyes on the planet Mars. But using this method in the movie would bring hoots of derision and monumental eye-rolling from critics—Carter got to Mars by wishing himself there? Instead, the screenwriters take other elements of the story and expand them to fill their need: the priest class of Barsoom has the ability to travel between the planets and Carter stumbles across one of their way stations in the Arizona desert and is accidentally transported to Mars. This method is more palatable to a mainstream audience and also opens the door to further plot development, allowing this priestly class, the Therns, to become the overarching villains of the story and provide a threat that could support a franchise of movies. Also, by couching the plot change in terms familiar to the audience familiar with the books, the screenwriters placate that same audience somewhat. Thus the story change maximizes the benefit to novice viewers and minimizes the pain for fans of the books, deriving the most advantage overall.

Of course, it could be argued that the movie could have remained true to Edgar Rice Burroughs's original vision, but that would have pushed the movie closer to an independent sort of movie, one suitable for art houses. Filmed that way, John Carter could have become a cult favorite on the art house circuit though the odds on that happening are pretty long and the profits pretty small, especially when compared to a potential movie franchise. Just by choosing to go the blockbuster route, the crew narrowed down the parameters of the kind of story they could tell.

Another fairly big change which worked pretty well for the movie was in the character of Dejah Thoris. Bearing in mind that the original novel, A Princess of Mars, was published in 1912 and was generally intended for an audience of boys and young men, Dejah Thoris as written is really not more than a plot point. She's beautiful and in need of rescuing, giving John Carter a reason for his subsequent actions. Burroughs makes it clear that she is smart and well-trained in swordplay, making her something more than just an ornament, a model of the strong woman that Carter needs by his side, but she isn't developed very far as a character in that first book. In the movie, however, Dejah Thoris is not only smart but something of an academic (Carter refers to her regularly as "professor") and still also a swordswoman, capable of not only defending herself but engaging in witty banter as she does so. Modern audiences would have been disturbed if Dejah Thoris was as flatly portrayed as she is written, and given that a potential franchise needs support across all demographics, a solid female role model can only help, especially in the young girl and teen girl segments. And frankly, it's pretty hard to read Dejah Thoris without wincing at the stereotypical portrayal of her from the time period. This updated version seems a much better match for John Carter, especially to audiences with experience with relationships, which the intended audience for the books surely never had. I freely admit to being totally messed up into my 20s about how men and women relate in part because my first impression of it came from the Burroughs books.

But on the other hand, the attempt to make John Carter himself more accessible to mainstream audiences doesn't work so well. In the books, Carter is a stoic warrior, a man of few words and little humor, but generally radiating charisma. He is the greatest swordsman of two worlds, unbeaten and unbeatable. But that sort of uber-competence doesn't work with movie-going audiences; for some reason, we want to see our heroes with flaws. The plot goes out of its way to demonstrate his ability as a fighter and his ability to strategize in its time in the Arizona desert, but then, somehow, Carter seems to forget most of it when he gets to Barsoom. The movie's John Carter is somewhat impatient and selfish, traits that belong nowhere near the character as he is written. The books' John Carter fights on Barsoom because he sees injustice and because he can make a difference, and while the movie's John Carter ultimately arrives at the same determination, it takes a lot of work to get him there. And while it may make his character more accessible, it also makes him weaker and distinctly less heroic.

One difference that was somewhat mixed in its success was the portrayal of Woola. The novels make it clear that Woola, a beast called a calot and the Barsoomian analog of a dog, is perhaps John Carter's most steadfast companion on Barsoom, the archetype of the doting watchdog. When John Carter shows appreciation, even affection, when Woola originally leaps to his defense, Woola commits himself to Carter's protection, never wanting to leave his side. The movie does a decent job of showing this, but then takes it perhaps a bit too far by making Woola a comic bit. First, Woola is ugly, described in Burroughs's writing as nothing so much as frog the size of a Shetland pony but with ten legs. The movie plays up the ugliness by letting us see often into Woola's hideous mouth, wherein is hidden his huge blue tongue. Being a faithful dog, the movie pulls out the stereotype that dogs apparently are incapable of life without drooling and slobbering over their owners, and it is made that much funnier by the dog using its huge blue tongue to show its affection for John Carter. And while calots are fast animals in the books, in the movie, Woola runs at ridiculous speed, leaving trails of dust behind it as though it were more Barsoomian roadrunner than dog. I understand why this relatively minor change was made—Woola offers some levity and appeal to a younger audience, and cynically, if it succeeds, then perhaps every child will want a stuffed Woola—but the actual carrying out of this change becomes grating to the adult audience. But the vision and conception of the beast feel dead on; the movie just pushes what passes for personality a trifle too far.

There is one fairly large change that I have no explanation for; I can neither figure it out from a writerly point of view nor from a marketing one. The main conflict of the movie is between the two city-states of Helium and Zodanga. For some reason, the plot of the movie requires that Zodanga be a mobile city, basically a city that walks on tremendous legs all over the planet. While it has a gee whiz factor and is impressive in the idea of it, the fact that Zodanga is a walking city has no bearing on the story of the movie at all, and very little time is spent there, so that there are no long scenes of the city to wow the audience. This one just feels like change for change's sake.

So, ultimately, I generally understand why the writers changed what they did to make the movie more accessible. I can accept them though in some cases I don't really like them very much. That's the trouble with the devoted (some might say "obsessed") fan; I really wanted to see the books that Burroughs wrote in cinema. But that movie would have even worse reception than what the one we have has received. And it is the very rare moviemaker who can ignore cost and income in pursuit of a vision.

10 minutes from John Carter

Disney has posted the first ten minutes from its upcoming release, John Carter. I won't watch it, trying to save myself for the movie experience. But you can watch it and let me know what you think.

ten minutes

One think I have noted as I searched for times to see the movie--this is a 3D movie. I don't remember seeing that in any of the trailers or commercials. I'm not sure how that makes me feel, since 3D very often is more of a distraction than a feature of the recent movies that have employed it. I'm still being cuatiously optimistic....

John Carter minus two weeks

"I've talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon." -- Ray Bradbury, Listen to the Echoes, 2010.

In my morning ghosting about the interwebs, I happened upon an article forecasting a disaster come March 9 and the release of the first tentpole movie of the year, John Carter. The Daily Beast (story here) first describes the doubts about the picture's success, then goes on to talk about its troubled history and clashing expectations. Followers of this blog know that I am trying to maintain optimism about the movie (first and second posts), but finding an article like this eviscerates the hopes that I have and strengthens my convictions that the production and marketing of the movie didn't have a unified vision of what they wanted to accomplish. I readily admit to not having much background in marketing, especially in Hollywood, but if the inside view that The Daily Beast describes is accurate, then it fulfills the worst of my ruminations about the decisions being made for the movie.

But also in my daily interwebs search, I found the quote by Ray Bradbury at the top of this article, describing something that I knew in my heart of hearts but didn't have the evidence to defend—John Carter and the Barsoom books are wildly popular…to a certain set of people. Maybe even two sets of people. The first are folks with connections to the sciences and thus perhaps already predisposed to enjoying science fiction, a genre to which the Barsoom books tangentially belong. Unfortunately, fans of science fiction don't necessarily make up a large proportion of the paid audiences of movies. For John Carter to be considered a success, it has to find a mainstream audience beyond those stereotypically referred to as geeks (even if geek is currently chic). Think of the biggest "science fiction" movie successes—Star Wars and Avatar. There are many similarities between those movies and the story behind John Carter, so the potential has always been there to make a strong movie. But you have to convince a mildly curious audience to care about the characters and their worlds, or else the movie is going to flop. And that kind of distinction requires a unified effort on the part of everyone involved with the movie.

The second audience that the Bradbury quote describes is ten year-olds, and it's a telling detail. I first read A Princess of Mars, the first Barsoom book, when I was seven or eight years old. I promptly fell in love with it and had to have all eleven books in the series. And because of my love for it, I often talk about it with people I meet who profess an interest in science fiction. Those conversations raise a fascinating pattern—people who approach the books between the ages of seven and twelve really love the book in the way that everyone loves the best memories of their childhood, but people who try to read the books as adults are put off by its childishness and simplicity. And perhaps even more striking is that the women I've talked to generally don't like the books much at all, at any age.

It's the very nature of the sub-genre of planetary romance to be relatively simplistic. In another post, I described the subgenre like so:

Planetary romance is a sub-genre of speculative fiction that deals with exotic planets and attempts at human interaction on them. The standard plot of planetary romance is that the traveler spends about half the story learning about life and survival on the exotic planet and then is faced with a crisis, usually having to do with his continued existence in the exotic locale—sometimes the protagonist must fight to remain at his new home and sometimes the hero must fight just to survive. For the reader, the strength of these stories is the detail that goes into the world-building, the creation of an alien biology that is both marvelous and consistent at the same time. Often, the exotic environment becomes a character in its own right.

The plots of these kinds of stories are almost interchangeable, but the best of them spend more time with world-building than with character development and interaction. Fans of Barsoom are fortunate that the series is eleven books long, giving John Carter space to become a more fully rounded character than is usual with his sort. But we can't confuse breadth of experience with filling out the character—Carter and his family have amazing adventures on Mars, but he remains essentially very flat.

I think the problem is that, at his root, the protagonist John Carter is nothing but a ten year-old boy in a man's body. He leaves Earth in a strange fashion only to arrive on Barsoom completely unclothed, naked and ignorant as a newborn babe. He succeeds madly there not because of intelligence or wit or charm, but because Barsoom's gravity makes him that much stronger and faster than the inhabitants. Every ten year-old boy dreams of physical superiority, and John Carter lives that dream. Nothing makes the point about Carter's puerile character better than his halting relationship with Dejah Thoris. His desperate desire to be near her but complete inability to say anything in her presence is a pinpoint description of when a boy first notices a girl he likes.

I'm pounding on these details because it emphasizes the issues that anyone making a movie out of the novels has to deal with: ten year-old boys and people who used to be ten year-old boys love the stories. And that kind of audience is not going to justify the huge amounts of money put into the movie. Star Wars and Avatar had a similar prebuilt audience, but their marketing was fairly straightforward compared to how John Carter tries to portray itself. The first attempt was to make it a romance picture—two people from different worlds (literally!) try to come together as they wage a desperate battle against….what? And here is another flaw in the marketing of the movie. Who the heck is John Carter fighting anyway? Sometimes they appear green with tusks, sometimes they look just like him. There is no real indication of the conflict, just that there's a whole lot of it. Us former ten year-old boys know what's going on, but if you don't know the books, the trailers are a puzzling combination of images more about the grandiosity of it all without paying much attention to that little thing called plot. And perhaps that was a serious consideration in the marketing plans—special effects do seem to sell better than good stories.

My guarded optimism is waning; nonetheless, I am taking a vacation day to see the movie maybe even twice, trying to wear different personae as I view it. My problem is that I can't not see it; not only do I love the books, but in many ways, A Princess of Mars may be the most important book in my reading history, in that it was the first time I struck out on my own and found something beyond what my teachers told me to read. That simple little novel set off not only a lifelong love of speculative fiction but also of reading and books in general. In fact, when I see the movie, I'm told I'm going to have my own audience: Mrs. Speculator and a friend who intends to go with us have both said they are as interested in watching me watch the movie as they are the action on the screen itself. I'm just hoping I don't feel compelled to give them their money's worth….

Wild Cards movie follow-up

Back in October, I posted some thoughts about a movie being proposed to be based on George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2011/10/wild-cards-movie.html). In that article, I thought some about what causes superhero movies to be a success and postulated that the movie either had to be a character that is widely known or have a big-name star to pull the audience in. To support this hypothesis, I went to a box office Web site, Box Office Mojo, and looked at the top 10 and 40-50 domestic grossing superhero movies of all time. I also lamented my inability to see the list based on numbers adjusted for inflation.

Well, Box Office Mojo recently upgraded their Web site, and now we can see the list based on adjusted inflation figures. The list reads as follows:

The Dark Knight
Spider-Man
Batman
Spider-Man 2
Superman
Spider-Man 3
Iron Man
Batman Forever
The Incredibles
Iron Man 2

The two that fell out of the list were X-Men: The Last Stand and Hancock, to be replaced with Superman and Batman Forever. I think this more accurate list strengthens my hypothesis about the audience for superhero movies. Again with the exception of the Pixar movie—and I think it could be easily argued that Pixar acts as a big name for theatre-goers and promises good entertainment, the characters in the list are limited to Superman, Batman, Spider-man, and Iron Man. And I think Iron Man is there because of Robert Downey, Jr (how many people who don't read comics regularly know much of anything about Iron Man?).

These more accurate numbers also increase my confusion about why anyone makes comics movies and makes me wish I knew where to do research about the thought processes behind movies being greenlighted. It'll be an interesting case to follow if Wild Cards actually does get filmed.

The second trailer for John Carter

So take a look at this: http://disney.go.com/johncarter/.

A few months ago in this very blog (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2011/08/ignominious-and-perhaps-constructive.html), I expressed some concerns about the first trailer. It seemed to me that the trailer was playing up the romance aspect of the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I did express hope that it was a marketing ploy, that perhaps the trailer was playing up the romance to attract an audience it might not find otherwise. But there were enough other stylistic choices that gave me pause about the whole thing, fearing another crushing cinematic retelling of a story that I love, like The Spirit or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

This new trailer on the other hand makes me very excited.

First, this trailer plays up the adventure aspects of the original novel, Princess of Mars. I've never had a conversation about the Barsoom books in which people talk about the romance aspects—what they remember is the battles and the unadulterated joy of being able to leap yards without trying, of fighting great white apes in a gladiator pit. And this trailer seems to indicate that these moments will be in the movie. We even get a quick glimpse of Woola, John Carter's faithful calot, which just made my fanboy hackles stand on end.

Second, there is more color and pomp in this trailer, a counterindication to the dolorous feel of the first trailer. No doubt this is due in part to the inspired music choice, again. The first movie centers on Peter Gabriel's remake of "My Body is a Cage", but this one has chosen a choral reinterpretation of Led Zeppelin's classic "Kashmir." Perhaps there is no more stately and moving rock anthem than U2's intro to "Where the Streets Have No Name" but the rhythm that drives "Kashmir" would have to be a close second. And then when the choir opens up, again the music selection just gave me goosebumps. It fits the images in the trailer extremely well.

I still have nits about some of the stylistic choices—the youth of the protagonists, Carter's long hair, the reluctance to give the native humanoid Martians copper skin—but I'm much more willing to accept them when this trailer shows how much more deeply the creators have embraced the story than I had originally believed. The two trailers in combination give me a great deal of hope for the movie, such that now I have to worry that my expectations are getting too high. Nonetheless, 9 March 2012 is circled in bright red in my mental calendar. Heck, I might even splurge and go IMAX on this one.

Wild Cards movie?

I found this article this morning on my daily news run.

With author George R.R. Martin's HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones one of the hottest things on TV right now, it's fitting that another Martin-penned project has caught Hollywood's eye.

Syfy Films, the theatrical division created in December 2010 as a joint venture between Syfy and Universal Pictures, has acquired the screen rights to Wild Cards, a superhero anthology edited, co-created and co-written by Martin. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/game-of-thrones-george-rr-martin-wild-cards-254382)

The idea of a Wild Cards movie, done right, is exhilarating….for fans of the series already.

(I need to point out that the intention is for a theatrical release, not a Syfy network movie. Syfy has already proven it doesn't know what to do with good writing when it comes to their TV movies and mini-series. For reference see Dune, Earthsea, and Riverworld [twice!].)

I have to wonder, safe in a comfy chair far away from the decision-making process, what these folks are thinking. The only movies that do really well (at the box office) are those that involve a hero that most everyone already can recognize, such as Spiderman, Captain America, Superman, or Batman. Movies that involve characters most people barely know, like Ghost Rider or Green Lantern or Hellboy, can get a nice initial bump from the die-hard fans and then they die miserably over time. I'm willing to admit I don't know what the sales are like on the DVDs, and perhaps sales and marketing folks are expecting solid revenues from those sources as they measure the potential profit, but from a purely box office revenue point of view, using unknown characters is dicey at best.

It can be argued that it helps if the movie is actually well-written and well-crafted; such proponents point to Iron Man and The Dark Knight as examples of what thoughtful superhero movies can do in the box office. But I would counter with the Hellboy movies again, the first one of which I found to be just delightful and also relatively true to its source. I'd also point to Watchmen which had attention paid to the source material and was a tremendous production (despite the ending they just could not film). But fans and non-fans alike were turned off by the story in a visual format, more concerned with Dr. Manhattan's giant anatomy than with the smart and thoughtful story. So, I have to fall back on theatre-goers generally wanting to see movies about characters they recognize.

Let's look at some numbers! The following table is total box office receipts for the top 10 and numbers 40-50 movies in the "superhero" genre per the Web site Box Office Mojo (boxofficemojo.com), organized by domestic receipts.

	Title	Domestic	International	Total	Release
1	The Dark Knight	$533,345,358	$468,576,467	$1,001,921,825	7/18/08
2	Spider-man	$403,706,375	$418,002,176	$821,708,551	5/3/02
3	Spider-man 2	$373,585,825	$410,180,516	$783,766,341	6/30/04
4	Spider-man 3	$336,530,303	$554,341,323	$890,871,626	5/4/07
5	Iron Man	$318,412,101	$266,762,121	$585,174,222	5/2/08
6	Iron Man 2	$312,433,331	$311,500,000	$623,933,331	5/7/10
7	The Incredibles	$261,441,092	$370,001,000	$631,442,092	11/5/04
8	Batman	$251,188,924	$160,160,000	$411,348,924	6/23/89
9	X-Men: The Last Stand	$234,362,462	$224,997,093	$459,359,555	5/26/06
10	Hancock	$227,946,274	$296,440,472	$524,386,746	7/2/08
40	Hellboy II: The Golden Army	$75,986,503	$84,401,560	$160,388,063	7/11/08
41	Blade	$70,087,718	$61,095,812	$131,183,530	8/21/98
42	Sky High	$63,946,815	$63,946,815	$127,893,630	7/29/05
43	Superman III	$59,950,623	not found	$59,950,623	6/17/83
44	Hellboy	$59,623,958	$39,695,029	$99,318,987	4/2/04
45	Spawn	$54,870,175	$32,969,867	$87,840,042	8/1/97
46	Blade: Trinity	$52,411,906	$76,493,460	$128,905,366	12/8/04
47	The Crow	$50,693,129	not found	$50,693,129	5/13/94
48	Kick-Ass	$48,071,303	$48,117,600	$96,188,903	4/16/10
49	The Rocketeer	$46,704,056	not found	$46,704,056	6/21/91
50	The Legend of Zorro	$46,464,023	$95,936,042	$142,400,065	10/28/05

I'd love to see these adjusted for inflation, but that part of the Web site seems not to be working and is premium besides. I'm curious, but probably not curious enough to potentially have to pay for a one-time look-up.

Let's look at the outliers from my expectations. #7, The Incredibles, is a Pixar movie. Anything that Pixar makes is box office magic, and so the name alone will overcome any resistance to a movie featuring characters no one has heard of. #10 is Hancock and stars Will Smith, a huge name when it comes to box office draw. Perhaps big names will somewhat thwart ambiguous knowledge about the story. On the other end, a movie starring Superman would seem to go against my hypothesis, but remember, this is the abysmal Superman III, which gets a sad 24% positive review from Rotten Tomatoes (compared to 94% and 88% for the first two in the series). Plus Superman III is the earliest movie in this selective list, and it might be somewhat higher if I had access to inflation-adjusted numbers. And I'll be darned if I know why Zorro is even in the superhero category…. Bearing in mind I just don't know what "good numbers" are for a movie, this breakdown seems to give my hypothesis some weight, at least as far as comparison between films within the genre goes.

So, a superhero movie needs to either be about characters people know (and perhaps like already) or star some name actors. Wild Cards has no characters that anyone might recognize, and since it is actual a series of books, the story goes to some non-traditional places that will likely go against popular expectations for what superhero stories are all about. How would the standard movie-going audience deal with people receiving superheroic powers as a result of alien weapon testing on Earth? Or the virus that gives people powers actually killing 90% of whomever comes into contact with it and hideously deforming another 9% so that life is completely miserable? How would they feel about heroes whose powers include magic based on tantric sex rituals? Or the non-discriminatory nature of the powers—anyone can get them—such that truly vile and reprehensible people receive the powers? How would they feel about a protagonist that is not only alien but gay? These sorts of plotlines work in books, and maybe in comics directed to adults, because the audience for them generally self-selects. But when it gets to adult ideas being treated in a movie, the overall record is not too good (see Watchmen again).

While the technology to make a nice-looking and visually accurate Wild Cards movie exists, if it is used, one of two things is going to happen. The movie can be a faithful adaptation of the story, resulting in a movie popular with the people who know the story but not very successful "mainstream." Or the movie could not be very faithful at all, resulting in a movie that just antagonizes the fans (see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Spirit). And if I were to be connected creatively with the production, neither of those options seems very good to me.

What seems far more palatable is the current explosion of long-form drama series on cable television, such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad (on AMC), Justified and The Shield (on FX), or the series that probably got people thinking about Wild Cards in the first place, Game of Thrones. If the creators could be given the time to tease out the characters and plots for an adult audience as these examples do, the results could be really good. But I don't think anyone is willing to take that much of a monetary risk. So, once again I find myself nervously excited about the potential for a story I enjoy being made into a movie. Sometimes they get it right, but it seems too often something important is given up to appease one audience or another. For every The Dark Knight there are lots more Blade: Trinity.

The Difficulty of Ending: Being There

I have a vague recollection of reading or hearing some place that "Beginnings are dangerous things." I had thought it might have come from Dune but the pertinent quote there is "A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." Which is, to some extent, more explicit in why I think beginnings are dangerous things, especially when it comes to story-telling. Imagine the daunting task of opening a novel or a movie—somehow, you must grab the reader's attention and maintain that interest until the actual momentum of the story itself keeps the reader hooked. In some ways, I imagine it might be easier to start a book because it would seem a writer has more tools with which to hook the reader—evocative description, bold action, an example of writing skill. Movies, on the other hand, either grab you visually from the get-go or test the viewers' patience.

All that said, however, I think endings are far more difficult for storytellers. The story has an inertia of its own, and the storyteller has to somehow bring that energy to a satisfying end without betraying the forces that got the story there in the first place. And the ending is the last memory of the story that the audience will have, so you don't want to send them away unhappy. Off the top of my head, I suspect there are probably more clichés for ending a story than for beginning them.

For years now, Mrs. Speculator has been trying to get me to see 1979's Being There, a sharp satire starring Peter Sellers and directed by Hal Ashby. To be candid, I had tried at least three times to watch Being There, but I fell asleep about 20 minutes in every time. My movie fan friends have long found this situation to be intolerable, as they think Being There brilliant and audacious, and my life would just not be complete if I did not make it through at least one viewing of it. This past weekend, due to the magic of Netflix, I finally did.

Peter Sellers plays Chance (or as he is later known in the film Chauncey Gardener), a middle-aged man who has spent his entire life in a single home and the adjoining walled-in garden. Everything he knows about the outside world comes from television, and while this stirs up the possibilities of over the top satire, the movie doesn't go there. Chance is a simple man, who has apparently been kept in this household to protect himself—it's never really clear if he is retarded or just utterly ignorant, or even how this set of circumstances arose. But when the homeowner (who may or may not be his father) dies, he is forced to make his way in the world on his own, and the world outside his garden is Washington DC.

The real comedy and its closely associated satire of Being There is that all the influential and smart people he meets mistake his calm ignorance for calm assuredness. Asked his opinion about current events, Chance always responds with his observations about maintaining a garden, which in turn are interpreted as philosophical anecdotes and keen insight. Asked about the country's flailing economy, Chance responds that seasons turn, the spring follows winter. And those people who listen—first an influential lobbyist, then the President of the United States, and ultimately the entire country—hear him saying that things will get better.

The movie is, in fact, brilliant in its use of Chance as a focal character through which we observe ourselves. We laugh at the gullibility of those who seek Chance's insight, and we snicker at Chance's utter reliance on television to make it through his life. And then a thoughtful audience will use those moments to evaluate their own actions and beliefs. The screenplay is wicked in its constant use of essentially two conversations at one time—the one Chance's questioners want to have and the one that Chance thinks he is participating in. The comedy is soft and quiet, rarely descending into anything more overt including just one physical bit from Sellers, the master of physical comedy.

The problem, the issue that pushes me to write this and solicit insight, is with the very last scene of the movie. (I should note that from here on out there will be spoilers, so stop reading if you don't want to know how Being There ends.) As a funeral takes place over a hill from where Chance stands beside a pond, he steps out and onto the water, walking across it and even reaching down to dip his umbrella into its depths. And as I watched it, it made me angry because it seemed to be a betrayal of what the rest of the movie, a quite good movie up to this point, was about. I've spent the last few days thinking about this and actually searching the Interwebs for some insight, but I can only come down to two readings of the final scene:

1. It's just another indication of how pure and innocent Chance is.
   
2. Chance is Christ.
   

These two readings are obviously closely related but they have different effects on how to accept the story being told. In the first case, we've already spent more than two hours seeing example after example of how innocent Chance is. Approached sexually by both men and women who are swayed by his charm and demeanor, he has no idea what they are asking for as they try to seduce him. And outside of the physical innocence, the movie has made it clear repeatedly that he just doesn't understand worldly issues beyond the garden and his complete reliance on the truthfulness and good wishes of those who know him. So, having him walk on water as a final example of that purity is gilding the lily: we just don't need anything that heavy-handed at this late stage and especially as the last scene we take away from the movie.

The other possibility is worse because there is absolutely no foreshadowing that this might be the case. Christ was not a simple man, potentially retarded. Historically, Christ has been depicted as intelligent and well-spoken, while Chance repeats often "I don't read" (which is interpreted by his audience as "I choose not to read" when he is really saying he doesn't know how). Unexpected twists at the end of a movie are often delightful, recasting the entire movie in a new light from the unusual position of its conclusion, but those twists need to be supported by the events that take place in the rest of the movie. It just doesn't happen here.

I'm also mindful of the difficulty that Being There presents to the director and screen writer; if the walking on water bit is not suitable as an ending to Chance's story, what then should replace it? And as I've tried to interpret what was intended by Chance's miracle, I've also considered other ways to bring the movie to a conclusion. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything better, especially when I try to continue the movement and direction the movie seemed to have. The result is that I am frustrated because Being There is such a delightful movie, and it comes to such an unsatisfying and jarring end.

And so I throw out this plea to my readers—if you have seen Being There, do you have a different interpretation of the final scene? Or can you think of a better way to close the movie?