"unfilmable" SF universes/works?

[Eviscerator]

What novels/games/etc are untranslatable or unable to be made into live-action/animated movies due to reasons of excessive gore, requirements of excessive CGI, etc?

The Lord Of The Rings would be a very massive movie if all the elements in the books were included, thats one, and i recall remarks that it was "unfilmable" in the 70's.

Another one that comes to mind would be an accurate rendition of Stephen King's The Running Man. The end sequence where richard has to drag his intestines and hold them in would make for a R rated movie if filmed accurately

Robotech and Patlabor also are contenters for "Live Action yes, but big budget Yes?"

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Robotech and Patlabor also are contenters for "Live Action yes, but big budget Yes?"

Seeing Avatar was enough to make me wish someone would do a live action version of one of those, or even Gundam. It also gave me great hopes with regard to the 40k movie. It jsut shows what can be done with CGI these days.

There has been some controversy over whether Frank Herbert's Dune could be done in full. The miniseries was more faithful to the books, but lacked a certain something compared to the David Lynch version. The sense of scale I found in the books just doesn't come across in the miniseries.

[Lost Soal]

[quote="Eviscerator"]
Another one that comes to mind would be an accurate rendition of Stephen King's The Running Man. The end sequence where richard has to drag his intestines and hold them in would make for a R rated movie if filmed accurately
quote]

Frankly, I think the whole flying a plane into a skyscraper part would be a far bigger stumbling block then any injuries you could think of.

[Eviscerator]

Damn i forgot 9/11 and the repercussions. Even LOTR The Two Towers faced flak over that. My bad.

[Oskuro]

I would have thought Dune was unfilmable due to the excesive amount of inner dialogue and sociopolitical manuevering in the novel, yet it has been done.

Now, you must clarify the notion of "unfilmable". Gore, shocking scenes, political incorrectness, sex... All these things are filmable, and would only be a problem if your itention is to create a movie for wider audiences, instead of niche or mature only productions.

As for visuals, Casshern kind of demonstrated that you can pretty much film anything. Now, to have that work as a movie instead of an eclectic collection beatiful shots and pretentious gits is another issue.

[Eviscerator]

Correction: general release film and portraying the work in question accurately to at least some extent. Or not make any real radical change.

Dune's (the one with STING) is one example where they turned Weirding from martial art into some sonic word weapon?

[Crazedwraith]

The Culture novels would probably qualify as near unfilmable. Especially the one's that deal with the actual culture alot like Excession or The Player Of Games

[Oskuro]

Dune's (the one with STING) is one example where they turned Weirding from martial art into some sonic word weapon?

Yeah, David Lynch's version, wich was so bizarre it was great. I mean, it had Patrick Stewart holding on to a puppy during a heated battle! That's up there in my personal list of awesome.

[Kingmaker]

Snow Crash wouldn't translate well into a movie, considering the sheer amount of internal monologues, infodumps, and scenes talking with a librarian. A lot of the stuff in that novel is entertaining because of the way it's written, and you'd lose that making the transition.

[Themightytom]

Old man and the sea would make a HORRIBLE movie does that count? For Scifi, Old man's War wouldn't translate well because of the brain PAL dialogue, I don't think any of the David Weber novels featuring Colin McIntyre would translate well except the first one, because the size off the planetoids is Stupendous.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

I offer the following candidate; Philip K. Dick's VALIS. It is barely describable, never mind filmable- it is basically a long, introverted-like-a-nautilus meditation on the relationship beween science fiction and the infinite by the split personalities of a writer and his friends, life in the shadow of the wrong monolith, the spin that the grit of life puts on our reaching for angels' wings, and how to invent gods in fourteen thousand complicated steps.

It is basically the science fictional equivalent of the Schleswig-Holstein question- on which everyone had an opinion, but only three men ever knew the full facts; one has since died, one went quite completely mad and the third has finally managed to forget all about it.

I think that the main thing that remains, or more likely since the forties has become, unfilmable is subtlety. Complexity of plot isn't far behind. Uneconomic to film, nyway- how many twists and turns can an audience put up with? When was the last time you saw a movie character with the basic intellectual honesty to revise their political/philosophical position in the light of new facts, in a way that resembled a real human being?

Most of Thomas Pynchon's work would be utterly unfeasible to get on film. Not that it couldn't be done, per se, but it would be another 'I, Robot'- so heavily gutted only the character names would remain the same.

Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence would be a bastard to film, pretty much the entirety of the complex cutting- edge physics the plot often turns on would have to be reduced to coloured lights with no explanation beyond 'big space flying/zapping thing'.

Actually, I think there's a cleft stick here. Getting the relatively exotic physics right is going to be tedious as fuck to the majority of cinemagoers, right? Getting it obviously and massively wrong- I'm thinking about Ray Bradbury Mars here- is going to reduce it to at best fantasy, at worse crap, and have every vaguely technical fan up in arms against it, right? (Not that that usually achieves anything.) How much of a middle ground is there left?

[Spekio]

Snow Crash wouldn't translate well into a movie, considering the sheer amount of internal monologues, infodumps, and scenes talking with a librarian. A lot of the stuff in that novel is entertaining because of the way it's written, and you'd lose that making the transition.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. The religion thing would have to be taken out too, like they did in The Golden Compass.

[Sarevok]

Old man and the sea would make a HORRIBLE movie does that count? For Scifi, Old man's War wouldn't translate well because of the brain PAL dialogue, I don't think any of the David Weber novels featuring Colin McIntyre would translate well except the first one, because the size off the planetoids is Stupendous.

Well there was the movie Castaway which was two hours of Nicholas Cage alone on an island. I am sure someone could make a movie about a guy sitting in a boat interesting as well.

Regarding Webers Mutineers Moon and sequel books I think they would make fantastic movies. They follow the same formula as Farscape by narrating through an everyday person who enters a space opera universe. It would be very easy to translate the backstory and setting to a film as seen through the main characters point of view. The size of the Planetoids would not be a problem at all. On the contrary the incredible scale and power of the Imperiums technology and weaponry would inspire a great deal of awe from the audience.

[FSTargetDrone]

Well there was the movie Castaway which was two hours of Nicholas Cage alone on an island. I am sure someone could make a movie about a guy sitting in a boat interesting as well.

It was Tom Hanks, not Cage. Though I suspect a Nicholas Cage version would be interesting!

[Nyrath]

Alan E. Nourse's THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN.
In the novel, researchers discover a gate to another dimension. Trouble is, everybody who takes a peek into it dies.

As it turns out, said universe is arranged with non-Euclidean geometry. You can see things like three parallel lines intersecting to form a triangle with seven sides.

Since it is impossible for lines to be simultaneously parallel and intersecting, and impossible for a triangle to have more or less than three sides, the viewer's brain cannot cope with it and shuts down.

Such non-Euclidean items would make this unfilmable, I would think.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm. The Lensman setting might be tricky- not because of the lack of cinematic battle scenes, or the difficulty of animating it, but because so much of the action involves the use of ESP or mind control (to use terms that post-date the series). You'd have a lot of things happening for no obvious reason: why did that man just switch off the sensor he's monitoring? How does Kinnison navigate in an environment of pitch darkness and super-hurricane winds? But it could probably be done if you got clever enough, so I guess it doesn't count.

Though on a general note, anything with a lot of psychic abilities that don't have obviously visual effects (like lightning flashing from the fingertips) will be a lot harder to render than the classic "gunfights/dogfights in SPACE!" setting would be.

I think that the main thing that remains, or more likely since the forties has become, unfilmable is subtlety. Complexity of plot isn't far behind. Uneconomic to film, nyway- how many twists and turns can an audience put up with? When was the last time you saw a movie character with the basic intellectual honesty to revise their political/philosophical position in the light of new facts, in a way that resembled a real human being?

...I'm probably disappointing you by missing the point, but that would actually be Avatar, where the protagonist goes native. On the other hand, that's mostly just a switch between two very stereotyped positions: Imperial Exploiter to Noble Savage, so it may not count.

There's some subtlety left, I think, but it does seem to be leaching out of the action-heavy end of the industry. You can have subtlety or you can have CGI explosions, but not both, and they aren't pitched to the same audiences.

Actually, I think there's a cleft stick here. Getting the relatively exotic physics right is going to be tedious as fuck to the majority of cinemagoers, right? Getting it obviously and massively wrong- I'm thinking about Ray Bradbury Mars here- is going to reduce it to at best fantasy, at worse crap, and have every vaguely technical fan up in arms against it, right? (Not that that usually achieves anything.) How much of a middle ground is there left?

There's still hope; the other day I saw a movie starship where they remembered to mount radiators on the engines.

[Oskuro]

It was Tom Hanks, not Cage. Though I suspect a Nicholas Cage version would be interesting!

Specially if there are bees around.

Such non-Euclidean items would make this unfilmable, I would think.

As for non-euclidianity, Hypercube already went there (sucky as it was), heck, Labyrinth already did it too! You can always create an n-dimensional object with a computer and then project it to the movie's 2d plane, or simply have some funky effects and character exposition explaining what's going on.
For example, I'm pretty sure that Kubriks original idea of what entering the monolith should have been would've seemed unfilmable, yet some funky effects and eerie music made ti work.



Note: Interesting video of a Hypercube (as in the movie) simulation.
Note 2: Carl Sagan explaining 4th-dimensionality.

[Bilbo]

Dune's (the one with STING) is one example where they turned Weirding from martial art into some sonic word weapon?

Yeah, David Lynch's version, wich was so bizarre it was great. I mean, it had Patrick Stewart holding on to a puppy during a heated battle! That's up there in my personal list of awesome.

I am pretty sure that was a Pug and it was a homage to the fact that Royal Familes of Europe often bred pugs, obviously a tradition that came back into vogue in the Duneverse.

[Orm]

...Regarding Webers Mutineers Moon and sequel books I think they would make fantastic movies. They follow the same formula as Farscape by narrating through an everyday person who enters a space opera universe. It would be very easy to translate the backstory and setting to a film as seen through the main characters point of view. The size of the Planetoids would not be a problem at all. On the contrary the incredible scale and power of the Imperiums technology and weaponry would inspire a great deal of awe from the audience.

It wouldn't be the big things that would be the problem. It would be the small things, like Nazi's copying Imperial uniforms and many scenes working in the book but being being very B movie in style.

[Uraniun235]

Correction: general release film and portraying the work in question accurately to at least some extent. Or not make any real radical change.

Dune's (the one with STING) is one example where they turned Weirding from martial art into some sonic word weapon?

Lynch did that because he was afraid it would just turn into a big wacky martial arts battle ending. They probably could have pulled it off as originally described but it probably would have been even less well-received among the public.

[LadyTevar]

"The Left Hand of Darkness"

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Not helped, Simon, by me overstating my case...what got me on to that was a film noir season on british TV, so my standards were temporarily on an unrealistic high. Point to you.

Lensman would have exactly the opposite problem; the sheer goodness of the characters, and I don't mean mary sue although it would be easy enough to point that finger; morally. Kim Kinnison was, quite literally, incorruptible. He was the reductio ad absurdum of a hero.

Given a literally unlimited line of credit with no oversight whatsoever, what did he do? Scientific research and military engineering- then put his own life on the line, quite literally, testing it in combat conditions, for the sake of Civilisation, for no personal reward at all.

Next to his four hundred pound, 2.5 G world born, friend Van Buskirk, he's a pretty good but not brilliant fighter. Indeed.

He's an almost unratable supergenius, second only to his own offspring he's the most powerful human psychic who ever lived, and with all of that he appears to have no ego worth mentioning. Exactly the opposite, in fact, on a couple of occasions it looks more as if he has a deathwish, going in against any hazard for the sake of Civilisation. Totally dedicated to the cause, a bona fide crusader.

(If you want to talk about filming difficulty, think about what rating the spy run on Jarnevon would get. Doing that scene the way it happened in the book would amount to a snuff movie.)

The sense of perception wouldn't be that hard; in fact, it could be positively nostalgic- close eyes, colour fades out, X-ray vision like effect fades in. See under the surfaces of objects, zoom in to the atomic level- positively simple compared to the fact that the man himself is literally too good to be true.


And I don't mean to insult Ray Bradbury. He knew Mars wasn't like that, and he was writing mythically; and what beautiful nonsense it makes. There's a passage that's far too long or I'd sig it in it's entirety, about what time looks like, a hundred billion human faces drifing past like balloons in the night, and what it smells like, like dusty libraries and dried flowers- and so on. It really isn't science fiction. It's space age fantasy, and at least "The Silver Locusts" knew that and knew what it was setting out to be, and did it magnificently. That was filmed; and yet...

Another entry on the list of things unfilmable; poetry. Language like that. It didn't come across on film at all, I don't think they even tried.

[Vympel]

Yeah, David Lynch's version, wich was so bizarre it was great. I mean, it had Patrick Stewart holding on to a puppy during a heated battle! That's up there in my personal list of awesome.

David Lynch's Dune was a big, glorious, wonderful catastrophe of a movie. Unwatchable to normal people, but there's definitely some cult value to it for the sci-fi fan, I think.

The problems with the movie is that its just not greater than the sum of its parts. I mean damn, it had excellent casting, great visual design, AWESOME music, and even though the plot was a jumble, the script had tons of great lines, delivered extremely well:-

"The sleeper has awoken!"

"I will kill hiiiiiiiiiiiim!"

"My name is a killing word!"

"Long live the fighters!"

etc.

But it was a Frankenstein movie, with lots of WTF? moments - like Thufir Hawat having to milk a cat. WHAT?

Two years ago it was said that Peter Berg would helm a remake, but he pulled out and now they've gotten the guy that directed Taken, which I thought was awesome, but its not exactly sci-fi credentials. So ... yeah.

ANY Dune remake must reuse the music from David Lynch's version. That shit should be law.

[xerex]

Old man and the sea would make a HORRIBLE movie does that count?

erm.....you mean the Hemingway story that was an Oscar nominated movie ?

[Simon_Jester]

Not helped, Simon, by me overstating my case...what got me on to that was a film noir season on british TV, so my standards were temporarily on an unrealistic high. Point to you.

Lensman would have exactly the opposite problem; the sheer goodness of the characters, and I don't mean mary sue although it would be easy enough to point that finger; morally. Kim Kinnison was, quite literally, incorruptible. He was the reductio ad absurdum of a hero.

Given a literally unlimited line of credit with no oversight whatsoever, what did he do? Scientific research and military engineering- then put his own life on the line, quite literally, testing it in combat conditions, for the sake of Civilisation, for no personal reward at all. Next to his four hundred pound, 2.5 G world born, friend Van Buskirk, he's a pretty good but not brilliant fighter. Indeed. He's an almost unratable supergenius, second only to his own offspring he's the most powerful human psychic who ever lived, and with all of that he appears to have no ego worth mentioning. Exactly the opposite, in fact, on a couple of occasions it looks more as if he has a deathwish, going in against any hazard for the sake of Civilisation. Totally dedicated to the cause, a bona fide crusader.

That would be tricky, yes. You'd need an actor who can do a square-jawed, two-fisted superheroic hero with an utterly straight face, and a fair chunk of the audience still wouldn't get it.

You might do very well even with some of them, though; larger than life heroes can sell even if the critics don't care for them, and there are very few entities in fiction who are larger than Kimball Kinnison. Combine it with Avatar levels of visually awesome CGI and I think you'd have a decent summer blockbuster, though probably not anything as classic to the SF movie genre as the stories are to the SF literary genre.

(If you want to talk about filming difficulty, think about what rating the spy run on Jarnevon would get. Doing that scene the way it happened in the book would amount to a snuff movie.)

Oh, Christ. You're right. Hadn't even thought of that.

Hmm. If you were willing to go for an R rating you could probably do it with only modest toning down; for PG-13 you'd have to use a lot more toning. [Those are American ratings; not sure how things work on your side of the pond]

Probably have to fade to black at some point, maybe very early on. Maybe shoot the scene from Worsel's point of view, so you're only hearing (telepathing, whatever) what happens through the link instead of actually seeing it. Hmm... fade away from Kinnison's point of view right when the Overlord comes in, because by this point you know enough about Overlords to know what's likely to happen next.

But no real need for that; you could make a good movie (or two?) out of Galactic Patrol alone; it's got everything it needs. Who would we cast as Helmuth?

Another entry on the list of things unfilmable; poetry. Language like that. It didn't come across on film at all, I don't think they even tried.

Talking about poetic passages in general, since i haven't read the one you're mentioning:

I think it can be done, but it's so hard that it can't be done repeatably. A brilliant team could do it and it would be one of the crowning achievements of their career, and you'd never ever expect that they do it again. Even if they did that just means they've pulled off two miracles instead of one.