Memo To The Executives: Tomb Raider

I know you’re all shaken up by the big news about Peter and Jamie so just to cheer you up, I’ll let you have this week’s memo a day early.  That’s the kind of guy I am.  So far in this series we’ve taken a look at ways to breathe new life into film franchises which could use a respirator.  And we’ve also taken a look at some franchises which could use emergency surgery.  But Tomb Raider is a different matter altogether.

We’re talking about a franchise where even the source material that the films are based on is practically dead.  The last game in the series ‘Tomb Raider: Underworld’ felt like it was lost in time, a time where wonky controls and frustrating camera angles were acceptable.  But games like the ‘Uncharted’ series have left Lara Croft in the dust and ‘Underworld’ was released to lacklustre reviews and, even worse, lacklustre sales.  Gamers clearly don’t care about Lara anymore.  I mean we’re talking about a franchise whose corpse needs to be dug up and then re-animated using mystical voodoo magic.  That’s how dead Tomb Raider is right now.

So why do I care more about seeing another Tomb Raider film than Indiana Jones 5?  Why do I care more about a spin on the genre rather than the series which created, defined and inspired?  No, it isn’t because I’m mad.  That’s par for the course at this point.  It’s because Tomb Raider deserves a good film.  I do not believe in any ‘videogame to film translation’ curse which automatically dooms any adaptation to be a car wreck on-screen.  Every videogame movie has its own specific reason why it failed and the Tomb Raider film has many.

But they all seem to boil down to the fact that its director Simon West either didn’t know how or didn’t care to make an exciting adventure film.  I’ve heard other people go easy on the first Tomb Raider movie but I will hear none of it.  I’ve rarely seen a film so incompetent.  A film about treasuring hunting in exotic locations which contains absolutely none of it before the one hour mark.  A film which makes the dense jungles of Cambodia look like the back-lot at Pinewood Studios (which I think it probably was).  A film which seems to be trying to be grounded and realistic but throws in giant statues coming to life and people being frozen in time.  A film which takes a simple plot and makes it look incomprehensible.  A film where an epic battle with the Illuminati over control of the Earth plays out as the most deflating confrontation is film history.  To this day, I can’t believe that ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Con Air’ were directed by the same man.

I’m not saying, had it worked, that Tomb Raider would have become a film series to rival James Bond.  All I am saying is that she is a cool character with a lot of cinematic potential and she deserves a good picture, as does the entire videogame movie genre.  I will admit that one of the main reasons for even musing over another Tomb Raider film myself is inspired by the thought of seeing one particular actress in the title role; Rebecca Hall.  Having made recent appearances in, among others, ‘The Prestige’, ‘Frost/Nixon’, and ‘Vicky, Christina, Barcelona’, Rebecca is quickly becoming one of most well known and versatile younger actresses.  The posh accent comes naturally to her.  She has an athletic build, and can see-saw between the delicate ladylike poise of an English rose and a spunky, adventure seeking hot head.  If you can point out an actress who is a better fit for Lara Croft than her then I’d like to hear it.  The only problem is that she’s too perfect for the part, literally too good for it.  Rebecca Hall wouldn’t be caught dead in this picture.  We’d best put together a good enough story (and pay check) so she’ll say yes.

Having watched both films and played all eight videogames, I can assuredly say that the best story out of all of them, and slightly depressingly, is the original game originally released in 1996 and remade a decade later as ‘Tomb Raider: Anniversary’.  For the unenlightened, the story begins in New Mexico where nuclear testing accidentally cracks open a seal of ancient design, and releases the mysterious figure inside.  Decades later, Lara Croft is hired by enigmatic millionaire Jacqueline Natla to find an artefact know as the ‘Scion’, the supposed power source of the rulers of Atlantis.  Once in Peru, having located the Scion, Lara realises it’s the genuine article when Natla’s henchman Larson tries to double cross and kill her.  Furthermore, the piece she has is merely one of three.  Out-racing slimy Frenchman Pierre Du Pont in Greece to the second piece allows Lara to join the two she has together, pointing the way to the third in Egypt.  Once all three are joined, Lara sees a vision which makes everything clear.  Natla is actually one of the three rulers of Atlantis, dethroned by the other two for her misuse of power and imprisoned in the bowels of the Earth until that explosion in New Mexico freed her.  Taking the Scion from Lara, Natla finally has the power of Atlantis back in her possession and can pick up where she left off all those eons ago.  Lara, having escaped death once more, races to face her enemy in the remnants of the lost continent, determined to save the world from whatever fate Natla has planned for it.  Oh, and to do it she only need fight her way through hired goons, deadly traps, dinosaurs and Atlantean monsters.

As you can see, it’s a captivating plot with a great villain, a cool twist, and a solid three act structure with plenty of opportunity for action sequences, not to mention the MacGuffin is based upon Atlantean mythology which is so open to interpretation that you can go a little crazy with monsters and amulets of power and the audience will go with it.  But it is not enough to simply copy the plot of the game beat for beat and put it on screen.  I really think it is worth taking a ‘Casino Royale’ approach with Tomb Raider.  This is not to say that the story should tell her entire origin, starting from childhood, but rather show the audience her first mission, which presents challenges and odds previously unknown to Lara and which shape her into the veteran character we all know from the games.  The Lara of this new film would be a budding adventure seeker/archaeologist who, as we meet her, has had little experience or success in her travels.  Rather than being an orphaned heiress to a vast mansion and seemingly unlimited wealth, our Lara is a rebellious outcast who has been disinherited by her father and is determined to make a success of the path she has chosen. 

The film would be largely about obsession and in this,  Lara and Natla are quite similar.  Both have  been expelled from paradise, in their own way.  Neither one will give up and the key to success for both of them is the Scion.  Natla needs to take back the power she lost and to gloat over the long dead rulers who expelled her.  Lara needs to find an artefact of unprecedented historical significance to bring her the success she craves, and probably to gloat over her estranged father.  Natla chooses Lara to find the Scion piece in Peru very specifically over more experienced treasure hunters in the hope that she will blindly stumble into and expose the booby traps which lay inside, get herself killed and allow Larson the lackey to take it from her corpse.  Instead, despite her inexperience, Lara’s determination to succeed gives her an unexpected strength and resolve against the obstacles she faces.  What makes her a complex character is that this willpower comes, not from a desire to do anything good or selfless, but simply to vindicate herself.  This obsession comes to a head in the climax where Lara is forced to take a life and experiences a catharsis .

The remake of the original game added a very significant moment to the story which had been missing from all of her previous adventures and addressed something which always bothered me about the character.  Lara may be a veteran adventurer but where in her job description does it read “has no hesitation about gunning down countless human beings”.  From the second game onwards, the player as Lara is required to mow down hordes of human enemies with a variety of weapons, all to beat someone else to some treasure.  It never sat well with me that she was capable of it.  In ‘Tomb Raider: Anniversary’, there are only three human adversaries apart from Natla.  Two of them accidentally kill themselves and the other is Larson who, in a final face off with Lara is gunned down by her in self defence.  It is clearly the first time Lara has taken a life and is something she feels genuine remorse for.  I’d want this moment put on screen beat for beat.  In this film, it snaps Lara out of her own obsession when she sees the price to be paid in Larson’s dead body.  It is from that moment that she becomes the Lara Croft we know; the hero who forsakes her own selfish pursuits (and her life if she fails) to face overwhelming odds and destroy the Scion and Natla.

So we have a driving action adventure story that deals with a theme, allows its main character to develop and grow, but never looses sight of its primary function to entertain and thrill.  When you get right down to it, that’s where the original film failed.  It was a pretentious load of twaddle that thought it was better than the source material and tried to change it into something that Tomb Raider wasn’t.  It is true enough that other videogame movies have tried to take their inspiration directly from the games on which they are based and have failed (‘Doom’ for one) but in this case, we’re talking about source material that itself is directly inspired from movies.  If they can pull this off, not only will they have made a good film but they may very well end up bringing the game series itself back from the dead.  In short, Lara doesn’t deserve to stay buried.

But maybe you disagree.  Maybe you don’t care.  Maybe you believe videogame movies never can and never will work.  As always, I welcome your abuse and feedback folks.

Memo To The Executives: 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wit's End'

AAARRRRRRRRRRR!

That was my initial reaction after seeing all three ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ films.  The only difference is that I walked out of the first movie with an ‘arrr’ of pirate glee and the ‘arrr’ for the other two was a cry of agony.

We can hypothesize all we want about why Pirates 2 & 3 sucked (and there were many reasons) but the bottom line is that a franchise based on a flipping theme park ride lost all sense of fun, burying itself in its unbelievably convoluted plotting.  My investment, such as it is, in a forth (and positively final) instalment is purely based on a love of the pirate world and the desire to see the series end on a, if not high, then at the very least redeeming note after the debacle of the third film.

The good thing about launching into a fourth is that the groundwork has been laid and the basic story has been set up.  There is a magic treasure to find and you just need to have Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa and a really cool new villain all opposing each other and sailing round the world looking for it.  The film needs to be a tight, lightning paced film under two hours in length, to make up for the obscene running times of the first three.  There needs to be a lot of action and the set pieces need to take themselves away from the farcical tone of ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ and the computer generated overload of ‘At World’s End’ (actually there was barely any action in that film).  To be honest, I wasn’t even crazy about the action in the first film.  I’ve seen great swordfights and great pirate ship battles, both of which I go crazy for, and POTC has been severely lacking in both.

I will never forget how ripped off I felt as the third act of Pirates 3 unfolded.  I saw the shots in the trailer of the two huge armadas of ships ready to face off against each other.  I expected, nay demanded, the ‘Return of the Jedi’ of pirate ship battles.  After all, the trilogy had pilfered so much else from the Star Wars movies by that point it just seemed logical.  If Pirates 3 were able to use its $300 million dollars to show us the largest, most awesome sea battle ever seen on the screen I could easily forgive its shortcomings (I gladly admit to ‘Cutthroat Island’ being a guilty pleasure of mine because the big pirate ship battle is so great).  But that didn’t happen.  With the entire pirate brotherhood and the British colonial forces ready to face off, the fate of the Caribbean rests on two ships having a piddling sword fight in a bit of bad weather, and when that’s over the British just retreat and the pirates cheer.  The fearsome pirate lords from the four corners of the Earth who our heroes spent the last two fucking hours bringing together to stand their ground and fight their oppressors, stand on the sidelines and do absolutely nothing.  What a fucking waste.

Another criminal waste in Pirates 3 was Chow Yun Fat.  They actually created a really cool, loathsome, irredeemably evil pirate villain and then just threw him away.  The whole crux of that film is the pirate legions amassing together for a final no-hold barred battle and the one cast member who we actually want to see kick some ass gets killed an hour beforehand, and not even by a physical opponent but by cannon fire and a sharp piece of wood.  Not only did we lose the opportunity to see Chow Yun Fat fighting in the finale but if they’d let him survive right to the end he could have easily been the main antagonist in Pirates 4.  Imagine Sparrow vs. Barbossa vs. Chow Yun Fat and a crew of ninja pirates?

So since we can’t have that, we need something as cool.  We need James Woods.

Yes you heard me right.  You can’t just have any actor facing off against Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush.  You need someone who has expert training in being awesomely villainous.  An actor who can hit his marks.  An actor who has never sucked, even in bad films.  The Sylvester Stallone action film ‘The Specialist’ is a terrible movie but worth watching just for Woods giving every ounce of his energy to the part of the villain.  So many actors who end up playing bad guy roles in blockbusters base their performance on the Alan Rickman/Hans Gruber school of villainy, trying to portray an antagonist so charismatic that you almost want to root for them to win.  The problem is that most of them end up being so charming that they lose any shred of menace.  Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Barbossa very cleverly dances back and forth across that line but never goes off the edge.  Meanwhile, James Woods is smart enough to take the opposite route and just play the biggest asshole in the world.  That’s the Pirates 4 villain that you need; someone you’ll love to hate.

I know what you’re thinking but the only reason you can’t visualise Woods as a pirate is because he’s never played a role this abnormal before (in live action I mean, I know he played Hades in animated form) but if you give him a great costume and make-up, plus a beard perhaps, then it’s going to be glorious.  It is true also that the new villains will need some kind of gimmick.  We’ve had skeleton pirates and anemone pirates so we’re running out of angles.  Honestly, I think Woods’ crew should just be a batch of filthy pirates.  I mean pirates by their very nature are filthy but these guys should be the most disgustingly dirty and ugly bunch of guys ever seen on the screen, literally repulsive to look at.  They should make Mackenzie Crook’s character look like toothpaste.  They should be regular human beings but just so thoroughly unclean that they transcend any hobo or comic book dealer you have ever met in real life.

But enough about the new villains; what are they chasing?  The end of Pirates 3 suggests that the treasure to be chased is none other than the fountain of youth though only Jack Sparrow has the map which will lead to it.  I think that’s as good a MacGuffin as any.  The plot of Pirates 4 needs to be simple as hell so they can concentrate on the fun and action.  That is not to say that it shouldn’t be about something.  If I could sift through the heaps of bullshit in Pirates 3, it was essentially about the remaining pirate dynasty fighting a desperate battle to preserve their way of life against the changing tide of progress threatening to crush them.  It is a theme worth continuing.  Though the pirates have temporarily postponed their extinction, their time will not last.  Jack Sparrow in particular is a character whose defining attribute in all three films has been his attempt to cheat the reaper; to escape his own mortality.

What might make that interesting is rather than the film taking place right after Pirates 3, it actually fast forwards a good ten to twenty years later.  This would accomplish several things.  Firstly, it’s unexpected.  Secondly, it purposely gives the film a different look from the identikit trilogy.  Thirdly, it provides a potency to the characters quest for the fountain of youth being that they are all old guys now, their best days are behind them and practically all of their brethren have passed on.  The film would start with exactly the same scene that Pirates 3 ends on; with Jack Sparrow alone in his tiny little boat but old and haggard and twenty years on, still searching for the key to eternal life, completely obsessed.

Of course that poses the question which everyone is asking right now; is Johnny Depp coming back?  As we know, the recent departure of Dick Cook from Disney (the man who persuaded the actor to play a pirate in the first place) seems to be giving Depp serious pause for thought.  I cannot answer the question whether he will return but I can tell you something.  Johnny Depp is replaceable.  He is, no doubt, the one measure of comfort which will allow Disney to spend another $200 million dollars on this franchise, safe in the knowledge that they will get it back and some change.  You could even argue that, though the words were on the page, he literally created the character of Jack Sparrow.  But that doesn’t mean he is the one and only actor who can play it.  James Bond is a bit of a blank sheet until the actor comes along and infuses his own personality into it.  Sometimes it works and, you may argue sometimes it doesn’t but Bond is still here.  People weren’t protesting outside cinemas because Sean Connery stopped playing him.  It is only hard to visualise another actor playing Sparrow because they haven’t.  Is it so hard to imagine another talented and versatile actor, not only taking the role, but infusing it with their own style and making it their own?

Is it too hard to imagine James Marsden with a beard, dreadlocks and a pirate hat?

Disney had better seriously consider it.  The fact that Pirates 4 just pounced on the May 20th 2011 release date vacated by ‘The Mighty Thor’ this week seems to indicate that the project is very much moving forward.  I really do hope this isn’t going to be another film rushed to completion by a pre-imposed release date; a film that starts filming without a finished script and makes stuff up as they go along.  A film that needs to pay platinum overtime to the visual effects artists just to get it finished on schedule.  That’s exactly what you did last time Disney.  It made a billion dollars but it was a horrific mess.  If you’re going to make Pirates 4 you need to prove you still have brain cells.  You have a talented director.  You need a finished script, a solid cast, location scouting and Depp needs to make his mind up if he’s on board or not, and all this needs to be done.............NOW.

....Although I think I’ve proven over the last few paragraphs that they shouldn’t hire me as a casting director.  See you next time.

Memo To The Executives: Alien 5

I’ve had this one in the works for a good while now folks.  If you’re writing a series pitching the best direction to take awesome franchises that have sadly run out of steam then you have to tackle ‘Alien’.

But the problem with this particular franchise is that if you asked a hundred fans of the first and second film which direction they would like to see the series head next, you’d probably get a hundred different responses. 

“They should do a prequel on the Alien planet.  I want to know where that Space Jockey came from.”

“They should do what they did with Superman Returns.  Make another film which acts as the official third entry in the series and pretends the other films don’t exist.”

“They should just make Alien 5 taking place after ‘Resurrection’ and set on Earth.”

“They should make a real ‘Aliens versus Predator’ movie, on an epic scale.”

“Just do Aliens on Earth.  That’s what we want, never mind how.  Screw the continuity.”

“Whatever it is, they should just scale it back to its essence; the scary monster in the dark.”

“Don’t make another one; period.  It‘s been raped enough.”

…and so on.  We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if things had gone to plan.  After the one-two punch of ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’, it seemed a forgone conclusion that the third film would feature a whole horde of the species invading Earth while the fourth would have space marines landing on their homeworld to kick ass.  For reasons far too elaborate to go into, David Fincher’s ‘Alien 3’ went in an entirely unexpected direction.  I’m actually quite fond of that film and will quite happily consider the series a trilogy myself  ‘Alien Resurrection’ on the other hand is a film I find so repellent that (call me a fan boy) I really do try to pretend it doesn’t exist.  I didn’t even watch the ‘Alien vs. Predator ’ movies because of the terrible word of mouth and now we hear that Ridley Scott is charting a course to, at the very least, produce a prequel film that will presumably take us to the Alien homeworld and explain their origins.

Since it is still in the development stage at this point, I have no problem pitching something completely different as a possible Alien 5.  Whilst there is, of course, some appeal in the idea of the creator of the franchise exploring the origins of this fascinating universe and possibly giving us a full two hours of wonderfully shot H.R.Giger lunacy, I can’t believe it is going to go down that well with the fans.  Even if they want to know the true origins of the aliens, the space jockey and how they ended up on LV426, they’re only going to end up disappointed no matter what the explanation is.  The shroud of mystique surrounding the aliens is pulled back and they lose some of their appeal.  And like all prequels, it threatens to seriously undermine the film that chronologically follows it.

So a sequel is going to be best course of action.  But then we have to solve the problem of continuity.  If it simply is an Alien 5 following the events of that wretched fourth film then it holds about as much appeal (to me anyway) as a tax bill.  On the other hand, a sequel to ‘Aliens’ which disregards the films after it seems like a more enticing prospect but runs the risk of annoying the fans of David Fincher’s third outing and even those fans desperate to tie the whole saga, including the ‘AvP’ movies, together into one continuity.  The solution seems to be to make a sequel whose starting point is vague enough in the timeline that it can be placed anywhere.  That means, regrettably, no Ripley, Hicks or Newt.  Either with the original actors or, inconceivable as it sounds, recasting the parts, having those characters back would just confuse the issue. 

The other critical element of any new film is which specific genre it is to belongs to.  The real appeal of the series is how versatile it is.  Within the basic context of science fiction, we’ve had a claustrophobic horror film, an adrenaline fuelled action picture, a depressing prison movie and…….some other shite after that.  What can be done for Alien 5 to continue in that tradition? 

How about...................a disaster movie?

I don’t mean a terrible film that nobody will go and see.  I mean a gigantic scale story set on Earth with the aliens representing an uncontrollable force of nature which threatens to destroy the entire planet allowing us to follow multiple characters and locations and how they react to the crisis.  I know you think I’ve lost my mind but for all the reasons mentioned above, I feel painted into a corner here.  It would be so much easier to pitch an ‘aliens on Earth’ story in an original, clever and slightly satirical way if ‘District 9’ hadn’t gotten there first.  Nor would it do the franchise much good to embark on a ‘Conquest of the Planet of the Apes’ rip-off with imprisoned aliens breaking free and turning on their human tormentors.  Just stick with me on this idea and see how it sounds.

The film would not open with a long protracted set up of how the Aliens arrive on Earth; it would open with a bang.  The aliens are already here and they’re tearing the place apart.  Only a few cities spread throughout the globe remain free of the infestation.  The rest have been completely overrun, which gives the film a potentially visually stunning opportunity.  Remember the disturbing sight of seeing an entire human colony on LV426 infested with aliens, dripping in acid and decorated with dozens of cocooned bodies and hundreds of eggs?  Imagine seeing that on the scale of an entire city?

How this catastrophe happened will be the great mystery of the film.  We learn very quickly that the general populace know nothing about the aliens or Weyland-Yutani(the ‘fucking’ company that spent three films trying to bring the species to Earth for study)’s involvement.  Yutani no longer exists (according the fourth film it was, ugh, bought out by Wall-Mart) and the military conglomerate which now owns their holdings, patents, technology and files have it all archived and stored as one of its many seemingly inconsequential assets.  Yet they are as surprised by the appearance of the aliens as anybody.  They have none of the species in captivity, nor are they artificially creating them.  For once, a private military-scientific interest is not the villain of the piece.  But just try persuading the rest of humanity of that.

This is our first real opportunity, though we got small glimpses in the other films, to see the future Earth of the ‘Alien’ universe.  You may disagree but I’ve always thought of it as not too far removed from our own.  We have space stations but space travel is heavily regulated and most of the population have remained grounded.  Technology too,  is privately owned by corporations.  This is not a ‘Blade Runner’ future of flying cars and animated billboards.  I also think it would be most interesting if the majority of humans had never seen an extra terrestrial species of any kind before the arrival of the aliens.  It is implied in ‘Aliens’ that Weyland-Yutani, in all its colonisation of over 200 surveyed worlds has encountered other species before but who is to say that anyone outside the company ever knew about them?  It makes the fear of the humans and their helplessness against their enemy far more believable and palpable if they have never had any experience of dealing with an alien species.

Their appearance, seemingly from out of nowhere, also has very strong religious implications; that demons have finally arrived on Earth for judgment day to make us all pay for our sins (something which was minimally explored in the third film).  One particular religious fanatic rallies the fearful remnants of humanity and gives them a target for their anger, accusing the military conglomerate of bringing these alien creatures back from their home planet in order to study them here.  Once again, science and technology are the devil and have brought about the downfall of humanity.  In reality, they are listening to the ranting of a lunatic, fanatical despot, an ex-employee of Weyland-Yutani with access to their files which disclose that they did find the location of the alien homeworld allowing him to venture there and bring back alien eggs to hatch on Earth.  Having gotten impatient in old age waiting for the apocalypse to come and for humanity to be judged, he has decided to accelerate the process, and them blame it on science.

Nevertheless, like any great lie, there is a small kernel of truth behind it.  In this case, Weyland-Yutani did discover the aliens and their home planet.  One particular character in the story, a high ranking officer in the military conglomerate, decides to dig into the company’s archives to see if there is any truth in the fanatic’s claims and, upon discovering the horrifying truth, digs deeper to expose him.  Near the climax of the film, humanity is down to its last city and its last few hundred people.  The aliens are closing in on their position and will be there within hours.  In a clash of ideologies, the military are trying to find a way to fight the aliens back and stand their ground, the scientific minds are trying to formulate an escape plan and the religious nuts are telling everyone to lie down and die already.  As humanity’s deciding hour approaches, do you think this is going to have a happy ending; that all the aliens will be dealt with in one final massive attack and the Earth will be reclaimed and brought into a new era of peace and happiness like in most other disaster films of recent years? 

No fucking way, this is ‘Aliens’ we’re talking about.  The film would end on an incredibly bleak note but one which would leave the story on an enticing cliffhanger and totally change the concept of the series.  The company rep, having dug into Weyland-Yutani’s files, as well as feeling the guilt of their mistakes, at least has detailed information on the species and how to fight them.  On a pedestal in front of what is left of the human race, he tells them everything he has found out.  Now they are faced with the critical choice which will define their species for whatever remains of its time in the universe.  Do they stand their ground and fight, surrender or escape?  In a totally unexpected move, they choose a fourth option.  They turn hostile on the very man who gave them the information.  Having actually confirmed what the religious leader said, despite having nothing to do with it, they decide he is the personification of all their sorrows.  Determined to get retribution, they tear the poor guy apart, attacking with the same brutal savagery of the aliens.  The last act of the human race on Earth is the murder of one of their own.

What is left of the sane minded humans know that there is no chance for their species now, least not on Earth and quickly scramble to nearby spacecraft.  Rather than face extinction, they have no choice but to abandon Earth to its new colonists for good, as well as leaving the mob to its fate on the planet.  Exhausted from their ordeal and with no knowledge of any habitable planet they could go to, they leave the ship, which seems to be on a pre-ordained flight course, to take them into the unknown.  After all, wherever they are headed, it can’t be worse than what they have just escaped from. 

The ships they are on belongs to the religious nut and that pre-ordained flight course is taking them straight to the alien homeworld.

And in the sequel after this, we would have the wonderful twist that, with the humans inhabiting the alien planet, it is THEY who are the aliens in the title.*

I don’t know about you but I’m pretty happy with that as a basic structure.  It’s a totally different style of film to the others with unexpected twists, plenty of opportunity for action scenes, scary monsters coming from the dark, R rated gore, and all on a huge scale not yet seen in the series.  Most importantly, the story retains the mystique of the aliens rather than over-exposing them and blowing their origin, as well as keeping the focus on the human characters.  Or does it?  Do let me know in the comments section.  I just hope it goes down a little more smoothly than Conan.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return this pitch to James Cameron’s file cabinet before he notices it’s missing.  Till next week folks, all the best.

*Full credit goes to regular commenter Darren Seeley for that idea.  He mentioned it when Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ prequel was being discussed and I think it’s such an astute observation.  Bravo sir!

Memo To The Executives: Conan

Yes folks, on this edition of ‘memo to the executives’ it’s time to pitch the best way to reboot ‘The Tonight Show’.

On second thought, why don’t I pitch something I actually care about; Conan the barbarian.  As my good friend Jamie knows, I’m a sucker for the sword and sorcery genre, that wonderful breed of film which seems intrinsically part of the 1980’s and never made it out of that decade.  I suppose if you did try and make a film like that today (and I really don’t count ‘300’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ as such), it would seem quaint and passé.  You could also argue that the genre has a pretty abysmal track record as far as producing quality films.

But one of those, and maybe the best, is the original ‘Conan the barbarian’ from 1982.  It has a classic revenge story driving it, peppered with the philosophy of Genghis Khan and Friedrich Nietzsche, a great villain in James Earl Jones, really brutal and savage swordplay, wonderful cinematography and it makes, debatably, the best use of Arnold Schwarzenegger of any of his films.  The movie made the promise of future instalments which would eventually see Conan made a king by his own hand and director John Milius was very keen to make this happen but, for reasons that are still unclear (apparently producer Dino De Laurentiis hated him for one), they never came to be.  The actual sequel ‘Conan the destroyer’ was that typical 80’s follow up, rushed into production, made by a different crew armed seemingly with no knowledge of what made the original work.  While the first film had the logic to show Conan wearing clothes, the second had the character prancing around a frigging ice castle in nothing but his underpants; that’s the kind of descent into camp we are talking about and it prematurely ended the series.

A few years back it seemed Milius might get another shot at making those lost films when he wrote a script entitled ‘King Conan: Crown of Iron’, presumably to be directed by him, to star Arnold once more and to be produced by the Wachowksi Brothers fresh from their success with ‘The Matrix’.  Drew McWeeny aka Moriarty at AICN (as big a fan of the original film as myself) adoringly gushed over the script in a piece you can drool over here.  Clearly too awesome to ever get made, we got hit with the old ‘creative differences’ shtick again as Milius and the Wachowski’s parted ways and Arnold become the Governator, never to wield a sword again.

I could spend the rest of this article just detailing the number of stops and starts the new Conan film has had in the last few years but I’m not going to.  I have actually resigned myself to the fact that, like the proposed He-Man remake, I just don’t believe Conan will reach the silver screen again.  But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming as it has the potential to be such an enticing, maybe even unique, project.  I initially started thinking about the legitimate possibility of a new Conan film after watching Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Beowulf’.  Just seeing the sheer amount of violence they got away with in a PG13 made me realise you could make a Conan movie with a commercial rating and, utilising the same technology, Arnold could conceivably return to play the part, regardless of old age and pot belly.

I will concede now that any chance of a sequel to the 1982 film and the story of Arnold’s Conan as king has come and gone.  But for once, the idea of starting over from scratch may be even more exciting to fans.  Regardless of how good a film it is, the 82 movie was not a completely faithful telling of the original Conan stories.  John Milius wanted to make a Viking story, something which could have actually happened in our history and that’s what he did (James Earl Jones turning into a snake withstanding).

There is a whole other version of Conan which, I guess, cinema has never had the power to realise before.  Fan as I am of the film, when you say the word ‘Conan’ to me I immediately think of Frank Frazetta’s artwork and that is what needs to be brought to the screen.  Forget grounding the story.  Sure, give us strong characters and exciting storytelling first, but also give us hordes of demon mutant creatures, mountains of corpses and skies of blood red fire.  I don’t mind if it is done on a green screen sound stage as long as you are able to bring his paintings to life.  I will maintain that if a filmmaker could pull that off, they would have a live action film that looks like no other.*

I think if you are going to tell a new Conan story, it must not fall into the clichéd plot of going on a quest to retrieve some magical dohickey; something which is all style and no substance.  This is not ‘Dungeons & Dragons’.  I think you should take the basic story of the original film and reconfigure it.  Rather than telling a straight forward origin following Conan from boy to manhood, it would start with him as an adult, already a well established thief.  His family and people were killed when he was a child but he can barely remember it.  Nor does he remembers any special connection or bond to his family, or any teachings or wisdom they passed on to him.  As such, Conan has grown up having to discover his own philosophy on life and his own purpose.  That philosophy is that life itself is a vicious killer which delights in hunting men down and taking them before their time.  Conan only response is to be a vicious killer himself,  He does not wait for good things to come to him.  He takes as much pleasure as he can and aims to get as much from life as he can before the world decides to chew him up and spit him out.

He also, in order to earn the gold needed to sustain this pleasure, earns a reputation as a formidable mercenary warrior.  We cannot have a watered down Conan in this film.  In battle, he is a savage animal and since his whole life is one long fight, that doesn’t leave any room to be sensitive or caring.  It is this ruthlessness and efficiency which brings him to the attention of our villain; a powerful sorcerer.  You can call him Thusla Doom or Toth Amon or whatever you like; just pick a name, it doesn’t matter.  Having uncovered an ancient evil force which threatens to consume the world, he informs Conan that he has managed to suppress the beast  so far with human sacrifices.  The more that are sacrificed, the more time he has to figure out a way to use his magic to stop the evil for good.  All our villain asks is that Conan be the one to bring those sacrifices to his altar, each body worth its weight in gold to the barbarian.  Having always been wary and distrustful of magic and sorcery, Conan readily agrees.

Conan starts the body count by hunting down the undesirable elements of the world, the killers, thugs and lowlifes that won‘t be missed.  It isn’t long, however, until the killing becomes so mundane and such a regular routine that Conan thinks nothing of it.  He doesn’t realise that he is being slowly, brilliantly manipulated by the villain the whole time.  The lines become so blurry that Conan begins to slaughter innocents all for the greater good of saving the world from destruction.  After a particularly brutal raid on a peaceful village, Conan sees a young boy in front of him standing over the bodies of his slaughtered family which triggers what memory he has of his own family’s death.  Conan realises to his horror (probably the first time he has felt such a thing) that it was our villain who was responsible for the death of his people, but even worse, the actual killing was probably carried out by a mercenary for hire, a man with no conscious, a man ready to justify his actions by saying it was all for a greater good but in reality, destroying lives for just a little more gold...........a man just like Conan.

Conan turns his back on the villain’s bidding but by now it is too late and too much blood has been spilled.  The villain was obtaining sacrificial lambs in order for the evil power to regain it’s full strength so as to cover the world in darkness and that goal is now in sight.  Conan heads off to face his enemy against unspeakable odds.  But even after cutting down an army of freakish undead creatures, the sorcerer and the ancient evil, Conan must face himself.  His quest is not for revenge or even to save the world but to save his own soul.  Only after he has accomplished his mission can he continue with his life content that he finally did the right thing after years of being the very thing he would normally kill without hesitation.

After about 30 minutes of magic and demon slaying carnage, Conan has won and the final shot of the film mirrors Frazetta’s most famous portrait of the character, standing upright on a mound of victory, sword in hand and the last man standing.  The audience (hopefully) cheers.  So you have a story of character growth, of a man facing himself and changing his entire outlook on life.  You throw in a sexy lady, colourful locations, villains that are really scary and repulsive to look at, hard R rated action and you have a film.

But enough about what I want.  Conan is many things to many people and if you are reading this I’ll bet you are more fluent in your Robert E. Howard than me.  What do you want from a new Conan film?  Feel free to mock my ideas in the comment section.  Just bear in mind…

…ifff you do nat liszten..............DEN DA HELL WITH YU!

*Of course I’ve just remember that Frazetta also did work on ‘John Carter of Mars’ which is in production right now and if I were a betting man, I would say that his art will have a big influence on the look of that film.  Oh man, now I have a boner from anticipation and must excuse myself.  I’ll see you next week.

Memo To The Executives: The Second Simpsons Movie

I am convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that the only reason ‘The Simpsons’ (currently in its 21st season) is still going is because, apart from the inexplicable fact that the show still seems to make Fox money, if the show were cancelled tomorrow, ‘South Park’ would takes its place as the longest running animated comedy series.  Even though South Park still has a long way to go to surpass the Simpsons run, I really do believe that.  The Simpsons, for whatever reason, is determined to stretch its run so far that the goal of overtaking it will be insurmountable to anyone else.  When it finally does end, I hope they can feel proud of their achievement because they have sacrificed any other legacy the show had in the process. 

I was once as big a fan of the series as anybody you could find and whilst I heard the rumblings feeding back from the US a few years ago that the show was deteriorating in quality and that it had finally jumped the shark, I still remained faithful.  I will never forget the moment when I realised what my American friends were saying was true.  It was an episode where the Simpsons went to Africa.  That’s all I remember about the episode’s content.  In fact, I didn’t even watch the whole thing.  Not only did I realise that the show had run out of ideas and become totally formulaic (throwing in yet another plot which serves no function other than to get the family out to another country, or continent in this case, that they haven’t been to before) but………there wasn’t a single joke that worked.  The Simpsons had stopped being funny.  Now I know it is silly to give up on a show just because of one terrible episode.  Believe me, that was just the beginning of a long process of eventually turning my back on the series.

But that didn’t stop me from being giddy when the movie was finally announced.  I maintained a belief that the people behind the show had waited this long to make a film so they must have a real story to tell, one that cannot be told on television.  And it is no word of a lie to say that ‘The Simpsons Movie’ was the single biggest disappointment of 2007 for me (yes even more that Spider-man 3).  There is no worse feeling upon exiting a movie theatre for me than knowing I have just seen a bad comedy film.  You go in with such high hopes.  You thought the film would be a slam dunk.  You start to question whether it is your sense of humour which is the problem.  Maybe you’re just not in a funny mood today (this happened to me after seeing ‘Austin Powers: Goldmember’ as well).  But nothing can shake the feeling which slowly sinks in that the film just wasn’t very good. 

‘The Simpsons Movie’ did make the right choice of focusing solely on the actual family rather than making them supporting characters fighting for screen time amongst all of the fan favourites.  But what is the point of that if, instead of giving us a real character driven story, the film serves as an excuse for just another wacky adventure where the Simpsons get to go to yet another far away place they haven’t visited before?  The best moments of the series for me, are the emotional ones such as hearing Maggie say “daddy” for the first time or Bart’s breakdown after trying so hard to get a pass grade on a school test.  My favourite moment of the entire series is in the episode where Homer eats supposedly deadly blowfish sushi and is given 24 hours to live.  After making the most of his last day, Homer sits in his recliner and decides to spend his last moments listening to the Bible on audio cassette (read by Larry King).  He slumps in his chair and drops the tape player and, given that the show was breaking so much new ground by this point, we actually think he is dead.  But Homer survives, vows to live life to the fullest.............and goes right back to his usual coach potato routine.

The only moment of the film which I thought really worked was the scene where Homer finds that the rest of the family have left their Alaskan cabin and returned to Springfield with only a videotaped message from Marge to explain any of it.  She tearily confesses that she cannot live with Homer’s screw ups or his inability to fix them anymore and is leaving him for good.  Once the message ends, it cuts back to their wedding video (the priceless memory which she had to tape over to make the message).  That’s the kind of moment which can separate a Simpsons movie from just a silly comedy film.  But did we get more of that?  Nope; we got Bart getting drunk and Lisa falling in love (which she’s only done about ten times before that on the show).

It goes without saying that ‘The Simpsons’ needs to end as a series.  I don’t know anybody who is watching it anymore and I don’t know anyone who even talks about it anymore, except with disdain once they hear it has been renewed for another twenty seasons.  I am, however, game for a second Simpsons movie, if only so they can make the film we were all hoping to see the first time out.  Let’s see a film which, with the series being out of the way and no continuity to worry about, takes risks and gives us something we haven’t seen before.

Allow time to finally pass and age the characters, specifically the children.

The second film would take place roughly ten years into the future.  Bart and Lisa, despite being polar opposites in terms of ambition, are at the turning point in their lives where it is time to progress into adulthood and perhaps leave Springfield for good.  Lisa, of course, is dying to leave and head for university, feeling that being able to put Springfield behind her is the justification she needs that tells her she is a success (or at least is going to be).  Bart meanwhile, in what could turn out to be the most touching part of the story, feels the exact same way as Lisa but lacks the actual education to accomplish what she can.  After graduating from high school with less than average grades, Bart has been working in a variety of odd jobs with no focus and no foreseeable goal while his sister has marched along the path to success, unstoppable.  And no matter how Marge may try to hide it, Bart knows that his mother is disappointed in him.  Having learned nothing from the previous twenty seasons of the show, Bart decides an elaborate lie is the best way to make it go away.  He manages to convince his parents that he has been accepted into a college and will be leaving Springfield but in actual fact, the latter is the only truth in it.  Bart intends to leave the town with absolutely no idea of where to head.  He only knows that it will be worth leaving if he has a proud mother.

That idea of a child who wants to be smart and make their family proud but doesn’t believe that they genetically capable of it, no matter how hard they try is something that I believe helped make Bart so appealing to kids back in the early 90’s when he was the epitome of pop culture and it is central to his character in my opinion.  In fact, the concept of betterment of one’s self, of realising all you can be before your time is up and the symbolism of escaping the home town you seem glued to in order to accomplish those goals is the theme that will reverberate throughout the film, for all of the characters.

With the recession having struck Springfield’s economy badly, the eccentric millionaire and supervillain wannabe Montgomery Burns offers to throw enough money at the town’s problems to solve everything, so long as all of its assets now fall under his control.  With no other option, Springfield becomes completely owned and controlled by Mr Burns.  As its citizens imagine the horrors that are to come under his tyrannical rule and Lisa and Bart realise they couldn’t have picked a better time to leave, the unthinkable finally happens; Mr Burns dies.  What’s more, for some inexplicable reason, he bequeaths his entire estate and holdings (which now consist of the entire town) to the Simpsons.

Each one of the family react to being in charge of Springfield in a different way.  Surprisingly, it is Marge who embraces the power the most, seeing the opportunity to transform the town into the pure Christian place of morality and old fashioned family values that she always imagined she would grow old in.  By accomplishing this, Marge will have a legacy to be proud of rather than feeling she wasted her life as a homemaker.  Lisa now finds herself stuck in Springfield once again, unable to break free because of the commitment and responsibility she now has to make life in the town better.  Bart now has enough money and freedom to do anything he wants, provided he stays in Springfield but is that enough to satisfy him given that he hasn’t earned or achieve anything, that it’s merely been dropped in his lap.  Maggie, now the same age as Bart was in the series, is just as marginalised, neglected and lost in the shuffle as she’s always been with the only difference being she now has a voice to express exactly how she feels.  And Homer, unable to dissuade Marge from her crusade and charged with running the nuclear power plant, is totally isolated from his friends but caught in the dilemma of whether it is better to be liked or to bathe in money.

Of course the family succumb to their weakness and run Springfield into the ground through bad management at which point the unthinkable happens again; Mr Burns comes back to life.  In what turns out to be a ridiculous practical joke played by an old man in his last stretch of life (not to mention last stretch of sanity), Mr Burns sank huge amounts of money into the town, faked his death and left everything to the Simpsons all so he could amuse himself by watching them destroy the place.  As far as Burns is concerned, he is Springfield.  He made it what it is and is thinks it only fair that it should die at the same time he does, and only the Simpsons can stop him.

I’ll be honest with you.  This whole plot point exists for two simple reasons.  The first is that every person I talked to about the first film was disappointed by the complete lack of Mr Burns.  You can loose a lot of supporting characters (and the focus should be on the family) but Mr Burns is the consummate villain of the piece and he needs a grand send off.  The second is that I would just love the climax of the film to mirror the final level of Konami’s classic Simpsons arcade game in which the family face off against Burns at his manor, only to find him clad in a giant robot suit.  That would just be glorious.

However the Simpsons save the day, the important thing is that by the conclusion things don’t just go back to normal.  Mr Burns really is dead by the end and the kids really do leave Springfield.  Lisa heads for university but, having learned she will be far more capable of great things in her home town where she truly is its most special citizen, no longer has the urge to leave for good.  She intends to train as a veterinarian and return to Springfield to practice.  Bart is also able to reflect on his worth during a heart to heart with his usually callous idol Krusty the clown who runs of an extensive list of all the times the kid has saved his life.  Since Krusty has been chosen as the replacement host of  ‘The Tonight Show’ (a cheeky stab at Conan O’Brien given his ties to the series), Bart gets a job there and is able to leave Springfield having earned his accomplishments and a proud family.  In a particularly melancholy moment, Bart and Lisa leave 742 Evergreen Terrace and their teary eyed family for what will be a good few years at least and drive past all of the recognisable parts of Springfield.  They drive past the school, the movie theatre, the Kwik-E-Mart, City Hall, the church, Moe’s Tavern, the Mall (including Ned Flanders’s Leftorium) etc. and reflect that time is moving on.  Who knows what Springfield will look like by the time they come back?  As Bart and Lisa leave, Homer, Marge and Maggie sit on their porch and watch as the sun sets and one chapter of the Simpson family legacy draws to a close.

And um………yeah hopefully they’ll throw some jokes in there as well.  Sorry, I can’t write funny (that’s what the people who make the show are paid to do) but I really think a much better chance can be had at making a great Simpsons movie if its heart and theme are in the right place.  All comedy is very brittle, especially film comedy.  That film you belly laughed at so much when you saw it in theatres retains little of that hilarity when you pop the DVD in for the first time.  Only a very select few comedy films will remain as funny and fresh after multiple viewings and often they are the films which offer more than just laughs (see ‘Planes, Trains & Automobiles’ for example).  They provide heart and warmth and character development.  The Simpsons, at its best, gave us this in spades.  We need to see it again.

If we do, maybe, just maybe, ‘The Simpsons’ can end their legacy on a high note.

p.s. Despite what I thought of the first film, the promotional gimmick of transforming 7-Elevens into Kwik-E-Marts was transcendent genius.  When the second film gets made, all Burger Kings in the world must become Krusty Burger restaurants.............forever.

Memo To The Executives: Dune

Despite the fact that it has been adapted to the screen twice now, Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece ‘Dune’ is still considered one of the great un-filmable books.  It’s a story whose scope and sheer amount of plot and characters does not lend itself well to being adapted into a single feature film and yet that same epicness seemingly prevents it from being a viable prospect as a television series.

David Lynch’s much maligned, giant budget feature film from 1984 tried in vain to pack an almost literal adaptation of the book into a commercial running length of 2 and a quarter hours but does, in its defence, retain to this day a completely unique production design incomparable to any science fiction movie before or since, not to mention an excellent cast.  On the flip side, the television mini-series probably provided a better adaptation of the source material (because it actually did ADAPT it) but was unable to deliver any of the grandeur the story deserves and topped it off with some awful mis-casting and some horribly gaudy costumes.  Apparently the director of that show thought the best way to convey to the audience that a character is a mysterious alien was for them to wear a funny hat.

Now we hear news that director Peter Berg has left the ‘in development’ remake but don’t believe for a second that this is the last we have heard of Dune.  Myself and my podcast cohorts recently discussed whether Dune could be successfully adapted into a profitable, affordable, commercial film.  My comments at the time suggested this was just not a possibility.  Dune deals with themes of repression, tyranny, ecology, technophobia, revenge, in-breeding, religion and prophecy wrapped into a science fiction cocktail of the usual heroes and villains, spaceships, clashing armies and warring planets.  But, in my opinion, Dune is not a particularly human story.  It really boils down to a bunch of rather unlovable characters all trying to fuck each other over for their own selfish purposes.   This is not a story of friendship and sacrifice like Lord of the Rings and as such, I think it would be extremely difficult to make a film that a mass audience would warm to, embrace and watch multiple times.  Given this, maybe it would be a good idea to abandon the article right now.  But I won’t because, regardless of how successful any Dune film could be financially, I still think the book can be adapted into a fantastic science fiction epic up there with the very best and at the end of the day, don’t we care more about getting a great film than a successful one?

Some of you might be in the dark as to what the story of Dune is (and that may very well include people who saw Lynch’s version) so let me try and summarise why it is such a tricky bugger to condense into a coherent film.  Dune takes place many centuries into the future in the aftermath of a universal purging of the sentient machines that humanity created to make their lives easier but led to their eventual enslavement.  The human race is now scattered over many planets, divided not by race but into royal houses, and all of them under the leadership of the Emperor of the known universe Shaddam IV.  With thinking machines outlawed, the three greatest powers in the universe are the Spacing Guild, which controls space travel, the Bene-Gesserit sisterhood, a mental training school for females, and the Choam company which mines the precious commodity which keeps everything spinning; the spice Melange.

For what is essentially a trippy little drug, the spice is able to do anything Frank Herbert needs it to do in the story.  It prolongs life, heightens senses and intelligence and, through the Guild’s monopoly on it, makes space travel possible.  The desert planet Arrakis, a desolate place completely devoid of water, is the only source of spice in the universe and a tempting target for those who would seek to gain a foothold in power, not to mention a good source of bait for those who would seek to stop the powerful in their ascension.  With this in mind, the Emperor devises a plan to destroy the house of Atredies, whose regent Duke Leto’s popularity within the other houses is beginning to have no equal.  The Atredies have also developed a secret combat technique involving high frequency sound as well as a secret army to wield it which makes them a serious threat to the Emperor’s power.  Shaddam IV secretly conspires with the Atredies’ long standing enemies the house of Harkonnen to vacate Arrakis (which they were overseeing spice production on), allowing the Atredies to take the reigns only for the Harkonnens to launch a surprise attack later on and grind them into the dust.

In the midst of this, the Guild, through the clairvoyance they obtain from their use of spice, have foreseen that it is not Duke Leto Atredies who is the threat but his son Paul.  The Bene-Gesserit sisterhood have been interfering with the marriages and resultant children of the great houses in the hope of selectively breeding the individual who will become the Kwisatz Haderach, the super being who will change the face of the universe (but will be under their control if all goes according to plan).  Jessica, the concubine of Duke Leto and member of the sisterhood, was given orders to provide only daughters to the Atredies (she can control that sort of thing apparently) but for her lover’s sake gave birth to Paul who it seems may very well be the super being they seek.

Thanks largely to a traitor in the highest ranks of House Atredies, the Harkonnens and their corpulent leader Baron Vladimir Harkonnen carry off their surprise attack, take back control of Arrakis, kill Leto and Paul and Jessica are driven into the deep desert of the planet to survive; an almost impossible task given the lack of water, the force with which the desert sands blow and the hostile life forms which inhabit it, most notably the giant worms which live under the sand and are attracted to all rhythmic vibration (which makes spice mining a constant problem).  They are rescued by the underground natives of Arrakis, the Fremen; a highly spiritual sect of warriors who settled on the planet long before the spice miners came but now live in the constant shadow of oppression because of them.  With the coming of Paul Atredies, the Fremen believe their messiah, their Kwisatz Haderach, has arrived and the time to take back Arrakis for themselves has come.  Paul meanwhile, with an army at his command and the secret weapon of the ‘weirding way’ (the sound combat which House Atredies was developing) to teach them, is determined to get bloody revenge on the Baron and the Emperor by stopping spice production on Arrakis and luring them to him.  The eventual cost of his actions will turn out to be astronomically high.

It’s not exactly G.I.Joe is it?  My ‘movie moan’ colleague Lou said that the best way to adapt Dune’s massive plot on film was to tell it as several films but frankly, I don’t think that would work.  Dune’s plot is the traditional three act structure with set up in the first, everything going to hell in the second and pay off (not to mention the majority of the action) in the third.  It would be dramatically and creatively unsatisfying to sit through a two to three hour ‘Dune part one’ that accomplishes nothing but set up names and concepts that we’d sure as hell  better remember in the next film lest we drown in confusion.

In my opinion, you tell Dune as one film and you do what any great literary adaptation does, you adapt it for the screen, to make it work as a piece of cinema, and if that means condensing several characters into one or losing them entirely them so be it.  If the Tolkien fans can stand to lose Tom Bombadil or Old Man Willow from Lord of the Rings then the Herbert fans can stand to lose Shadout Mapes (don’t even ask if you don’t know).  There are so many themes being dealt with in the story that trying to make a cinema hodgepodge of them all (as Lynch did) is going to fall flat on its face.  Whoever finally has the balls to take on this project and see it through needs to find the concepts in the story that appeal to them directly, that really inspire them to tell the story, and then to focus on those concepts exclusively.  For me, the most enticing element of the book is one of the things that Lynch’s version omitted entirely.  Paul Atredies may very well be the messiah the Fremen are waiting for, but he is not a believer in their religion.  He sees the opportunity before him to use and manipulate their faith to rebuild House Atredies power in the universe, enact his revenge and dethrone the Emperor.  Through taking the spice, Paul sees visions of the future and even before he goes down the path, is able to see that should he do all he aims, he will have his revenge but will have also fulfilled the Fremen prophecy beginning a jihad on the entire universe.  Paul (foolishly you can argue) takes that path and by the end of the book, he has destroyed the Harkonnens, supplanted the Emperor and controls the spice but his legend has grown so exponentially among the Fremen that he is powerless to stop them as they continue their own purge across the universe, resulting in the deaths of over six billion people.

This is the thread which separates Dune from so many science fiction stories which, for their complexity and themes, often do boil down to the white hats versus the black hats, the irredeemably good versus the irredeemably bad.  It’s important to embrace the moral ambiguity of the characters in Dune.  Don’t make Duke Leto out to be some kindly upstanding gentleman hero like the first film did.  It makes the Emperor look like an imbecile from the perspective of the audience if they know that Leto has no intention of dethroning him.  It legitimises the Emperor’s character and his fears of being overthrown if Leto is actually thinking of doing it.  It’s not that Leto is a tyrant, he just thinks he can do a much better job at running the universe.  The fact that he has such popularity with the other houses only validates this.

Another aspect you can play on, since the story really boils down to the clash between the houses of Atredies and Harkonnen, is that the royal families of both are very similar.  In the book, the Baron Harkonnen has two nephews by his side; Feyd and Rabban.  Rabban is left in charge of Arrakis after the Atredies are practically wiped out and then totally fails to stop Paul and the Fremen from stopping spice production, resulting in his execution.  Feyd on the other hand gets very little to do until the end of the story when, after the Baron is dead, faces off against Paul in a duel and promptly gets a knife through the skull for his trouble.  I really believe it will serve the story better on film to combine Feyd and Rabban into one character, who acts as a mirror image of Paul; both of them are the proud sons and heirs to an empire and both are forced into a confrontation only because of the aspirations and greed of their fathers and the manipulation of the Emperor.

While we are on the subject of combining characters, it would probably help the story on the Atredies side if it could combine some of their supporting players.  The traitor who helps the Harkonnens destroy the Atredies is Doctor Wellington Yueh, the royal physician who has supposedly been conditioned to prevent him every taking human life, which puts him beyond suspicion.  However, his reasons for betraying the Atredies are all part of an attempt to assassinate Baron Harkonnen to avenge the death of his wife by equipping Duke Leto with a poison tooth which he can use while being gloated over near death by the Baron.  It’s a nice idea but is a typical example of the over-elaborateness of the plot.  Besides which, it all amounts to nothing as the attempt to kill the Baron fails and Doctor Yueh is killed by the Harkonnens pretty soon after his betrayal. 

I think it would be interesting to give the role of the traitor to a different character, which may just allow for a greater pay-off; the Mentat Thufir Hawat.  Mentats are beings who drink a red juice by-product of the spice which increases their mental capacity to the point that they function as human computers, replacing the thinking machines that have been outlawed.  In the Lynch film specifically, Thufir is captured rather than killed during the Harkonnen attack so the Baron can make use of his services, but is injected with a poison (which requires him to milk a cat every day to get the antidote it produces) and a heart plug, making his life very easy to take.  It would make it especially potent for Hawat, having served House Atredies for three generations and being the one told by Leto to find the traitor, to be that person.  Rather than vanishing from the story after the deed is done, Thufir comes face to face with Paul in the climax and is given orders to kill him.  Just as in the book, rather than cutting him down, Paul thanks Thufir for his many years of service to House Atredies and grants him anything he would ask.  The resultant scene is actually my favourite in the entire story as it is one of the few which displays real humanity and pathos and I would love to see it play out with the added element of Thufir being the one who brought House Atredies down in the first place, the one who Paul should want to kill more than anyone.  With appropriate irony, it never made it into any version of Lynch’s film but you can watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ht-bR5Nb60

And if the hard core Dune fans reading this strongly object to changing the text, well first of all thank you very much for reading.  Secondly, if want a film version of Dune which keeps all the characters and tried to give them all something to do, stick with the David Lynch film, because that’s what happens when you’re stuck with that many supporting players.  I see no reason why (except that it could very well be about $200 million dollars down the proverbial drain) to take these sort of liberties with the story and have another crack at Dune.  If it doesn’t work, well nothing will have changed.  Dune will just remain un-filmable.

Another director will eventually be attached to Dune and the project will start to gain momentum again, you mark my words.  After all...........  

Memo To The Executives: Transformers 3

Get’s you in the mood doesn’t it?  Which is good for me because I can’t think of a franchise I care less about right now than this one.  I was never that invested in Transformers as a child anyhow.  I know the characters and the basic story pretty well and I know the animated movie backwards but I was always more of a G.I.Joe fan. 

I still have arguments to this day with Mr Jamie Williams about why the first film, which he hated, was so successful and well liked.  He maintains that it was all down to nostalgia while I say that it was because it was summer entertainment that actually delivered on its promise.  While Spider-man 3 failed to give us a proper Venom story, Shrek 3 failed to provide a single laugh, Fantastic Four 2 failed to provide Galactus and Pirates 3 failed to provide entertainment of any form, Transformers actually gave the audience a two and a half hour film about giant robots fighting each other.  It had some laughs, it had some great action, it had scope; it was just a fun movie.  I enjoyed it for what it was but will gladly admit that I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down impatiently waiting for the next instalment.

The film that Jamie saw in Transformers 1 was the film I regrettably saw in Transformers 2 (which he didn’t even see).  I’m not going to dredge up all my feelings on that movie in this article.  You can check out my initial review of it here.  Needless to say, I found the film so incoherent, so loud, so racist, so annoying, and so cheap that it robbed any interest I had in the franchise, as well as my money.  But can I afford to be so stubborn?  If I reach deep into my darkened soul and ponder, is there a possible Transformers 3 out there that could bring me back to the theatre to take yet another chance on the robots in disguise?  Would you be surprised if I mentioned using a certain planet eating robot voiced by Orson Welles?

Yes, I think they should bring in Unicron.  Yes, that distinguishes me from about 2% of Transformers fans who haven’t suggested he be in a third film.  But I’m not just saying to throw him in for the sake of it, because it’s the only way the filmmakers can top themselves in terms of scope.  Unicron would be the catalyst  for a plot which is the only thing I can think of that would get me vaguely interested in the next film.  We need to get the Transformers off the planet Earth and onto their home planet of Cybertron. 

I know the whole heart of the concept is that they are robots in disguise.  They are a race of aliens who find themselves stranded in our world and the white hats take it upon themselves to defend us from the black hats; an enemy we cannot possibly defeat by ourselves.  The problem with this concept is that for two films straight now, I have witnessed the might of the US military easily kill twice as many Decepticons as the Autobots have, leaving them to do nothing but stand around as window dressing.  Optimus Prime makes speeches to cynical government officials about the consequences of the Autobots leaving the planet in Transformers 2, only for everything he says to be undermined by the ‘Bayhem’ which follows.  I do not want to see humans fight Decepticons anymore.  Frankly, it completely undermines them as a threat and there is no way you can convince me that the human race can’t hold their own.

So our story begins when Optimus Prime receives a message from the stars, from some of his fellow Autobots who were thought lost because they never made it to Earth.  In fact, they stayed on Cybertron and, through some dues ex machina (does it really matter?), have been able to rebuild their homeworld.  Optimus is now faced with the dilemma of what happens to his race.  Given that he has charged himself with defending the Earth from the Decepticons, can the Autobots afford to leave?  Would the Decepticons follow the Autobots off planet anyway and would that be the best option?  Haven’t the Autobots earned the right to return home?

Before any of these questions can be answered, Optimus is forced into a decision when the planet eater Unicron appears destroys the lifeless planets in Cybertron’s surrounding solar system, edging closer and closer to obliterating the robot homeworld once and for all.  Not only do the Autobots have no choice but to race for Cybertron to face off against Unicron but Optimus realises that their numbers alone will not be enough to destroy their adversary.  They must put aside however many decades of conflict and form an alliance with the Decepticons to win the day.  Megatron readily agrees to side with Prime and the audience is given the impression that the leader of the Decepticons has been rather humbled by his recent defeat and the death of his master The Fallen; that he might, just might, genuinely want to make peace with the Autobots as it will be a small price to pay for survival and the chance to return home.  Optimus, on the other hand, cannot bring himself to trust Megatron.  He launches this alliance faced with the outcome that the Transformers will either lose their planet and their lives to a seemingly unbeatable adversary or save it from Unicron only to be almost certainly betrayed by the Decepticons and see it enslaved or destroyed all over again. 

In the final face off, as Cybertron is minutes away from annihilation, both Optimus and Megatron team up to head inside Unicron and destroy him from the inside.  The comparisons with the animated movie are obvious but this film would have the chance to show the ending that I know a lot of fans really wanted from that show.  There really isn’t a problem with Optimus heroically sacrificing himself to save everyone else.  That is entirely true to his character.  It just would have been better if it hadn’t happened 25 minutes into the film, leaving us stuck with a bunch of entirely new toys, sorry, characters.  In this story Megatron, who has been planning to take back Cybertron for himself the entire time, realises that unless he makes that ultimate sacrifice, there won’t a Cybertron.  In a moment of final clarity, Prime’s mortal enemy throws himself into Unicron’s internal defences, essentially committing suicide, all in order to buy enough time for the greatest Autobot of all to make his way to the planet eater’s core.  Megatron’s act is not entirely noble though as he knows full well that Prime is going to die too, which is comfort enough to him in his final moments.  And die Prime does, destroying the core and tearing Unicron apart from the inside.  At this, the long end of the Cybertronian civil war, the noble acts of its two opposing leaders saves Cybertron, emphasises the pointlessness their fight was all along and ushers in a new era of peace between all of them.

You see what I’m talking about here?  It’s not deep and it’s not dealing with penetrating social commentary but it does at least provide interesting moral and ethical choices for the characters to face.  Most importantly, by cutting the series free of Earth, it cuts it loose of everything which has dragged it down.  No more college scenes with over-acting psycho tutors.  No more pot brownies and jock tackling with Mrs Whitwicky.  And no wedding scene with Shia and Megan.  Now I understand that those two can’t just vanish into thin air from the beginning of a third film, integral as they were to the first two.  By all means, have them in the first act set on Earth and then say goodbye to them when the Transformers leave for Cybertron.

I will say though, those ‘hood-nigga’ twin characters don’t even deserve that much.  I know Bay isn’t going to deliver a third film that is anything close to what I would like to see but he cannot possibly ignore the negative feedback on those characters.  I can’t imagine the man has big enough balls (and a small enough brain) to develop that idea any further.  Could you imagine the twins meeting up with their cousins Blingatron, Hiz-Zee and Hood and the amazing spectacle of all five robots combining to form Maximus Crib to fight Unicron in the finale?  No, neither can I so just don’t even have them in a frame of this film.  Don’t even explain where they’ve gone.  WE WILL NOT MISS THEM.  I don’t usually speak for other people but in this one instance, I think I can.

But I certainly can’t speak for you in any other capacity so let me know what you think.  Is it blasphemous to conceive redemption for Megatron?  Can Unicron and Cybertron be realised in live action?  Have I vastly underappreciated the comic styling’s of Mrs Whitwicky?  Most importantly, what do you want to see in Transformers 3?  As always, I can’t thank you enough for reading.

P.S. Despite the pattern I seem to be forming with these articles, I have no plans to write pieces on Jem, Voltron, MASK, Centurions, Inhuminoids, COPS, Robotix, Visionaries or My Little Pony.

Memo To The Executives - G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero

Why am I even bothering to pitch this one, you ask?  G.I.Joe will most likely not be getting a sequel.  ‘Rise of Cobra’ did not bomb but it didn’t exactly set the box office alight either.  Not to mention that there are probably very few people out there salivating for another film.

But dammit, I am.  The first film is undoubtedly going to make it onto my top ten favourite films of the year, not because it is one of the best but just because I had such a good time watching it.  Where Transformers 2 crashed, burned and wasted my time for an agonizing 150 minutes, G.I.Joe had a pulse; it had energy, action sequences where I could actually make out what was going on and it gloriously revelled in the kind of large scale absurdity that no action/spy films do these days, the rest of them so determined to be gritty and realistic. 

In all honesty, I think if a sequel really is going to be made then its going to be a step down in quality (and the series wasn’t on that high of a pedestal to being with).  My sadistic side wants to see the film made purely for the pleasure of seeing Christopher (never should have left Doctor Who) Eccleston and Joseph (eyebrows should have been given separate billing in the credits) Gordon-Levitt prance around for two whole hours in those ridiculous masks.  I want to see just how crazy this show can get.  But it’s my job on ‘memo to the executives’ to take things seriously and have an honest stab at how a sequel to G.I.Joe could, potentially, rock the lives of the kids who grew up with it.

Let’s start with the story threads the last film left us with.  Cobra Commander and Destro are incarcerated.  The Baroness is seemingly a normal person again having had her mind control thingy removed and despite these setbacks, master of disguise Zartan is now sitting comfortably in the oval office under the guise of the President of the United States.  Even in defeat, Cobra has taken over the country.  Despite what I believe is a blatant rip off of Mystique taking the identity of Senator Kelly in the first X-Men movie, there is a lot that can be done with the idea of a Cobra operative being one of the most powerful men in the world.

What I would really love to see is a slight change in tone, edging more towards satire.  You got the feeling with the first film that it knew it was meant to be fun but it wasn’t always aware of how silly it was.  The cartoon always had that self awareness.  In one particular episode entitled ‘Cobrathon’, the Joes raided Cobra Commander’s secret stash of treasure rendering him bankrupt.  In order to raise five billion dollars to keep Cobra from sinking, the Commander decides to hold a telethon.  In the midst of all this, the Joes raid Cobra’s HQ, ‘The Terrordrome’, but instead of a fight against a million enemy soldiers they find a real estate auction going on.  That’s the kind of absurdity I want to see.

So imagine that with all his power and influence President Zartan is not only able to get Rex/Cobra Commander and Destro released but frame the Joes as a rouge outfit that launched an unprovoked assault on the MARS Industries weapons facility in order to steal its state of the art technology for itself.  Having blown the lid off of G.I.Joe to the rest of the US defence community and the public, they find it very easy to swallow the story they are being fed.  Meanwhile, since we were told in the last film that MARS makes 70% of the world’s weaponry, surely the war economy of the entire planet would collapse overnight if it went belly-up.  As such, the world powers are only too eager to apologise for the events of  the last film and hand over an entire private island (somewhere exotic like Palau for example) to Rex and Destro to rebuild their organization and get back making their state of the art weaponry.   Cobra Island is born.

From here, things can get really crazy.  MARS Industries is rebuilt into the Cobra organization and Rex and Destro realise that there won’t be any need  to plan nuclear assaults or schemes of world domination any longer.  The world has just been handed over to them.  They have the funds and the skills to continue pioneering deadly weaponry.  With a President already in their pocket they can influence policy and rig the elections to make sure they keep Cobra in office.  We could see a direct lift of that episode of the cartoon and watch Cobra’s first annual telethon.  We can start a scene from the outside of the Terrordrome as the camera closes in and hurls through its foreboding giant doors and ominous corridors.  Expecting to see Cobra soldiers doing drills or torturing prisoners or some such despicable act, we actually see a bunch of them sitting at desks with headsets operating a call centre for their legitimate arms operation:

“Good morning, you’re though to Cobra customer service line.  My name’s Gerry, how can I help you?”

“Yes sir, five trouble bubbles and a Neo Viper; would you like a receipt for that?”

“No madam, fuel is not included with the Cobra Rattlers.  I made that perfectly clear when you ordered them.”

“Congratulations, you’ve placed on order for $500 million dollars or over which makes you qualify for one of our free gifts.  You can choose from a nanomite needle starter kit or a chocolate fountain.”

Ok, I’m trying to be funny (with ‘trying’ being the operative word).  I’m not suggesting the next film become an all-out comedy but that it harness the biting humour of its source material, while also maintaining the wonderful character dynamics that we remember.  If you ask me, the relationship between Starscream and Megatron in Transformers cannot hold a candle to the power struggle between Cobra Commander and practically everyone in his organization trying to overthrow him.

While G.I.Joe, having been driven underground to escape arrest, can do nothing but watch in horror as the world turns to ruin.  Their only hope seems to be, as it usually is with successful companies, the greed, jealousy and ambition of the people within.  The Baroness is recruited by the Joes as a double agent, being their only hope of infiltrating Cobra Island.  But once she reunites with her old lover Destro, who secretly plots to overthrow Cobra Commander and take back the organization for himself, she begins to question which side she’s truly on.  Meanwhile Cobra Commander, being no fool, is on to Destro’s plan and has an equally sticky end planned for him.  And in the middle of it all Zartan, knowing he is the cog in the machine which keeps everything running, starts to have second thoughts of his own about whether he wants to be Cobra’s lap dog for the rest of his life or actually run the country himself.

Whether you liked or disliked the portrayal of the bad guy characters in the first film, I think it should be easy to mould them into something truer to the source material, with one exception.  The first film’s portrayal of Cobra Commander, or Rex the eyebrow raising doctor, whatever you want to call him, did not sit well with me.  The whole appeal of the character in the comic and cartoon was that you didn’t know a thing about him or his past, beside the fact that he was the leader of a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.  People like that tend to keep their identity hidden.  You could imagine anybody was under that mask.  You could create your own backstory for him.  The filmmakers felt the need to provide an origin for the character and tell us exactly how he became Cobra Commander.  The problem you now have is that the fans want to see a masked look that is faithful to the source material but the adaptation in the first film provides no logical reason for it.  What is the point of Cobra Commander wearing a mask encasing his entire head if Duke and the Joes now know exactly who he is and what he looks like?  I think I’ve answered my own question. 

Maybe some of you out there enjoyed watching Rex (the friend), Baroness (his sister) and Duke (her lover) play happy families in the last film and want more of it in the second, particularly the concept of how the relationship will now play out between brother and sister now that she knows the truth.  But I’d rather not.  Personally, I think this particular commander needs to be cut loose.  I would keep Rex as Cobra Commander for the first half of the film while introducing a mysterious masked character who acts as his own personal bodyguard.  Once Cobra’s world arms selling operation is in full swing, Destro makes his move to dethrone the commander and recruits said bodyguard to kill him.  Rex doesn’t see the enemy in front of his face and is promptly assassinated paving the way for Destro to take control of Cobra, but the bodyguard has other plans.  He assumes the mantle, identity (and costume) of Cobra Commander giving Destro the impression that it was Rex who managed to survive and kill his assassin thus stopping the planned coup.  Destro returns to plotting his next takeover assuming that the commander is unaware that he was the orchestrator.  Only the audience knows the Commander is now the very man Destro hired to kill him.  With this foundation, we get a new Cobra Commander, one whose face we have never seen, with no past and by the bodyguard allowing Destro to remain ignorant of the truth, we have no idea what his true game plan is.  And if the fans are still unhappy, I see no reason why the costume can’t be changed to the traditional blue duds and chrome face plate, and that they can’t get the best Chris Latta impersonator in the land (if there is such a man) to supply the original voice we all remember.

But just a moment; we haven’t really talked about the Joes themselves yet.  Does anybody really care about the ones we got in the last film?  I shouldn’t think any audience is excited about the prospect of Channing (last choice) Tatum leading the charge of a bunch of characters only slightly less bland than him.  I’d like to suggest something drastic.  For the next film, why don’t we get an entirely new line-up of Joes and completely remove the team from the first film.  After all, G.I.Joe is a huge operation with a huge list of characters still waiting to hit the big screen.  I can think of nothing that will get the fans excited more than saying the team from the first film are on a mission somewhere off screen, allowing a whole new roster to save the country.  I suppose they could keep Snake Eyes but he has to lose that ridiculous rubber mouth.  But you can also pick from Flint, Lady Jaye, Shipwreck, Roadblock, Quick Kick, Lifeline, Dialtone, Gung-Ho, Wetsuit, Leatherneck or my personal favourite Beachhead, the ill tempered drill instructor.  This could be an element which makes the series stand apart from all other ‘team’ movies.  Rather than continuing to develop the characters you have and throw new ones into each successive film to appease the fans, switch the team around.  It isn’t as if there are any characters to develop from the last film anyway.

While having mentioned what to change, I want to make note of how much I enjoyed the action sequences of the first film.  It was amazing to find, after groaning through trailers and TV spots of those accelerator suits, that the actual Paris chase sequence with Duke and Ripcord running at super speed against the flow of traffic, dodging flying cars as if they were basketballs, was huge fun.  I want the scale upped in the next film.  I want aerial dogfights and kung-fu.  I want to see a massive free for all scrap on the deck of the Joes aircraft carrier the USS Flagg (the toy of the 80’s that no child could afford) where Shipwreck and Destro have a sword fight.  And I want to see the Joes make the final charge though Cobra Island’s defences and march on the Terrordrome.  When the chips are down, even in the face of a country which has abandoned them, the Joes never give up the fight for the US of A; hence the well earned subtitle ‘a real American hero’.

So what do you say folks?  Are you ready to cry “Yo Joe’ once more or am I just flogging a dead toy?

p.s. I don’t want any stupid ‘Black Eyed Peas’ techno rap song playing during the end credits either.  There’s nothing that says G.I.Joe less. 

Memo To The Executives: Star Trek II

Well I guess they can’t really call it that but then again, I’m not here to pitch film titles or query sequel numbering.  I’m here to throw a few ideas into the melting pot of what the sequel we must all be dying to see could be and I’m going to get straight to it.  It goes without saying (except that I feel compelled to say it) that this new series of Trek has gotten off to a rousing start but the best thing about it is that there is so much further to go.  The problem that faces the Bond series right now is that it seems an insurmountable task for any future film to be as good or better than ‘Casino Royale’.  Ditto for the Batman series coming off of ‘The Dark Knight’.  Star Trek wasn’t a perfect film but it’s flaws were easily visible and easily solved in future instalments.

Finding the story has to start with finding the villain.  We all know that Eric Bana’s Nero was the weak link of the first film, due to the fact that instead of being a really compelling character, he was a plot device.  The filmmakers needed to get Kirk and company out of the academy and into space quickly so the head of the Federation Council just spontaneously interrupts one scene and says Nero is causing some shit out there.  I wouldn’t say he was one note but he wasn’t particularly fascinating either.  We need something better this time around.  We need something different, someone who is really the driving force of the story.

Practically all of the bad guys from the previous films have been ugly alien renegades, all competing with Ricardo Montalban’s legendary performance as Khan to see who can take the crown of the baddest boy in Star Trek.  Not only do I not want them to resort to using Khan in a sequel but I think they really need to step away from that entire breed of villain.  If they use the Klingons or Romulans the audience is ahead of the story.  They know it’s going to come down to a duel in space between the Enterprise and the baddie ship.  The baddie ship will find a weakness in the Enterprise and temporarily gain the advantage before the good guys tech tech the tech tech and figure out how to defeat the villain in a way totally incomprehensible to us.  The baddie ship will get blown up and the Enterprise warps to its next adventure.  It’s by the numbers.  It’s a formula which defined the original series of films.  It needs an overhaul.  One of my few problems with the previous film was the Enterprise’s last minute escape from the black hole created when Nero’s ship is destroyed.  The audience is supposed to be on the edge of their seats, wondering how our heroes are going to escape.  Kirk tells Scotty to tech tech something in engineering and before we know what’s happened, the ship has escaped and we’re confused.

If you change the nature of the villain, you erase predictability from the film.  If Starfleet itself were the villain, you wouldn’t know how Kirk and friends were going to win.  Before you start having flashbacks of all the times in television and film that Starfleet had crooked personnel (which has certainly been done before), let me explain how this could really be interesting.

There are lingering questions left from the previous film.  Spock Prime (that’s Leonard Nimoy to you and me) is stuck in the altered timeline now, charging himself with preserving and rebuilding his race on a new planet.  It is abundantly clear that Kirk and young Spock are aware of this.  Scotty probably knows too (though I could never figure out if really knew what was going on).  But what anybody else?  I would imagine that it would be customary for Kirk to have made a full report disclosing the events that have transpired.  Did he lie?  Has he covered up the existence of two Spocks occupying the same time?  Does Kirk know that both Spocks spoke to each other despite the older one telling him that this could not be allowed to happen?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, the very existence of Spock Prime in this new timeline allows the next film to tell a story, not of time travel again, but of the long lasting impact that can result from playing with time.  The characters who became aware of their altered futures and hoped that the defeat of Nero would wrap up the whole episode will learn that, besides the issue of whether forthcoming events will play out differently or occur at all, nothing could be further from the truth.

Let’s just say that either a high ranking Starfleet admiral or maybe even the commander in chief captures Spock Prime having learned that he is from another time.  He gets Spock on a slab and uses one of those deus ex machina truth telling devices to get the Vulcan to spill his guts about everything; the entire history of the Star Trek timeline that we are familiar with.  Our villain would not be a tyrannical despot, merely someone totally driven by their duty to protect the galaxy and stay ahead of the dangers and evils out there in order to make sure that a catastrophe such as the destruction of planet Vulcan never occurs again, which has been a wake up call for all of Starfleet.  They see the opportunity in Spock Prime to have all the cards laid out on the table; our achievements, our enemies, our mistakes and make sure that Starfleet steers the right course from the get go.  They find out about the Genesis project, the trouble with the Klingons, the Borg invasion, and the Dominion war that will cost millions of lives.

Now if you were in their situation and armed with that knowledge, what would you do?  Would  you stand back and have faith that the universe will unfold differently in this new timeline, or would you do something, anything, to prevent the terrifying future you were privy to?

That moral question would be at the heart of this story.  It would allow each character in the film to have an opinion and would especially hit a nerve with Kirk and Spock whose current destinies owe themselves to the altered timeline which caused the loss of their parents.  Everyone in the audience can relate to this dilemma as well, even on a small scale.  We’ve all, at some stage when life is most uncertain, wished the cards could be laid out for us, that we could know what was going to happen and do something about it. 

Our Starfleet admiral bad guy of course, refuses to take any chances with humanity’s future.  From here the story can go in any number of directions.  I think it is important to stay away from Klingons or direct references to events of previous films.  But, for example, if Starfleet decided to mobilize its fleet and invade the Cardassian homeworld in order to either exterminate or scatter them, all to prevent their eventual alliance with the Dominion in the previous timeline, then it starts to turn into the exact opposite of what it should stand for.  It becomes a fascist military machine, feeling the need to conquer and dominate the other species of the galaxy in order to protect the unforeseen and unprovable future.  Who knows where it stops?  It was Mr Jamie Williams who suggested to me that maybe Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) could end up a villain in the sequel.  Maybe his brutal torture at the hands of Nero in the last film has had some lasting psychological damage.

The very concept that Starfleet’s decisions are now based, not on gathered intelligence, but clairvoyant predictions that cannot be proven is exactly what leads the gallant crew of the Enterprise to oppose and fight back against it.  Before you get visions of previous Trek films where the crew did become renegades a few times, this would be a bigger picture.  Starfleet itself would be split in two with Kirk leading not just his crew but a whole slew of star ships against the tyranny now happening, and not just Starfleet but alien races as well.  And it isn’t a battle between the white hats and the black hats.  The lines have become blurred.  As the dark twists of the plot unfold, I’ve love to see the cinematography and colour palate of the first film‘s Enterprise, all flawless white surfaces, slowly twist and morph into something grungier and moodier, more akin to the dark red lighting of ‘Wrath of Khan’.  I think it would be especially groovy if a villainous character from the previous films actually turned up in the new one cast in a heroic light.  Imagine Kirk fighting side by side with a Klingon armada and the great hero of the battle, who maybe saves the lives of countless Starfleet officers, turns out to be Commander Kruge or General Chang.

The decision of the Enterprise crew to stand against their superiors will come to them lightly.  Each character will have to wrestle with the dilemma of choosing the right course of action.  I think it would be particularly potent to see Spock wrestling with the choice, just as he continues to wrestle with his emotional and his logical side.  You may remember a scene in ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country’ where Spock shared a private conversation with his young Vulcan protégé Valeris regarding the upcoming peace treaty with the Klingons.  With Valeris frightened about how this turning point will change the future of the federation, Spock tells her to have faith that the universe will unfold as it must, to go with the flow, to trust in fate.  She naturally replies “is that logical?”.  I think the Star Trek fans out there especially would get a great buzz from seeing the young Spock go through the same dilemma that Valeris did, only he won’t make the same mistakes.

So actually having Starfleet itself as the villain accomplishes several things.  As I said, it provides an unpredictable enemy and thusly an unpredictable film.  It also allows us to really see Starfleet in detail and how it works.  One of my favourite elements of the original films was how they really created an ensemble of Federation characters who we got to know over the course of the series; the commander in chief, the Federation president, the ambassadors, the admirals, and the captains.  I really want to see that return in this series.  The plot I propose may even provide a story that is so large that it can’t be all wrapped up in a neat little bow by the end of the one film.  It might take several movies to tell the story.  If that is the route the filmmakers go then I would advise them to take a page out of the original films, II, III & IV which told one large over-arching story but each one stood on its own legs, dealt with its own individual themes and did not require the viewer to see all three to understand what was going on.

I think this is one of those rare cases where we don’t have to worry.  I’ve been saying since the first film came out that JJ Abrams Star Trek made the kind of ballsy choices that geeks like me groaned at when we first heard them and were proven totally wrong.  If I were a studio executive and he pitched a reboot that actually kept the continuity of the previous series and involved time travel, I would have thrown his pitch right back at him.  I would have been just as misguided as the studios who we make fun of for turning down movies that eventually become huge hits.  That’s the lesson that Abrams Star Trek taught me; to keep an open mind.  As long as he is involved I think he’s going to come up with something better than anything we can imagine or I can pitch.  I’ll wait however many years it takes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Star Trek is playing at my local IMAX, back by popular demand, and I have a ticket.  See you next time.

Memo To The Executives: The Fourth Bourne

On this week’s instalment of ‘memo to the executives’, let us throw a pitch at the potential fourth outing for Jason Bourne.  The Bourne series has been one of those rare film series that maintained a high level of quality through a trilogy of movies, which has endeared it to myself and countless spy/action/adventure junkies around the world.  But while another outing for James Bond is always certain, and Jack Ryan now finally appears to be returning to the silver screen, Bourne part 4 still continues to be in limbo.  We have no real concrete evidence that a script is being written and director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon continue to vaguely allude that they might be interested in doing it. 

I am personally very much game for another Bourne film for several reasons.  Firstly, this is not a situation where we are waiting anxiously for the final chapter of the story, desperate for the loose ends to be tied up.  If a fourth film failed to match the quality of its predecessors, the trilogy would still stand undamaged and we can pretend another one never happened (kinda how I look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).  Secondly, I am not one of those people who believes if you love spy movies, you can only love either Bond or Bourne.  They are completely different animals, I love each one and there is plenty of room in multiplexes for both (though if the franchises ever went head to head in the same release season, it would be something to see).  Thirdly, though Robert Ludlum wrote the three Bourne books that were adapted into films, Eric Van Lustbader has written four more with a fifth currently being worked on; The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal, The Bourne Sanction and The Bourne Deception.  I don’t think the later books give the filmmakers story ideas to mine (the films were never really adaptations of the books anyhow) but it does give them a few titles they can use.

Finally, I did feel that the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum was slightly anti-climatic.  I understand that seeing Bourne floating in the sea was meant to mirror the opening scene of the first film but just felt that, given this was the grand finale of essentially a three movie story arc, we deserved more closure.  I do care about this character and I want to know where he is going next.  Bourne’s life, even when he was in control of it, has been defined by relentless death and destruction.  You just can’t just switch that off, even if you walk away.  Is he trying to live that life of seclusion and isolation again, only this time without someone to share it with given that his girlfriend Marie was murdered?  Will that satisfy him?  Is he still plagued by flashbacks, visions and nightmares?  Does Bourne even really remember everything?  Can he finally live a life as David Webb, his supposed true name?  These are unresolved questions left from the trilogy.

Rather than simply have Bourne recruited back into service to stop some terrorist plot which only he can deal with akin to a Rambo movie, I’d like to see a certain amount of mystery built up in the first act.  As the new film opens, we see news reports on a series of murders that have been occurring across Europe; a few dead policemen on a sidewalk, a few dead guards at an embassy, a few dead tourists in a park, from Switzerland to Germany to France.  What links the killings is they appear to have been perpetrated by a man answering to the name of Jason Bourne.  We of course, and the CIA, recognise the trail that is being blazed across Europe as the same journey David Webb took in the first film to regain his memory.  Is Webb trying to create more bad press for the CIA?  Is he sending them a message to come back after him?  Has he had a complete breakdown (plausible as he has not been seen since he encountered Dr Albert Hirsch at the Treadstone facility in New York)?  Or is the CIA’s doing, having someone imitate Bourne in the hope of flushing him out of his hiding spot?

For much of the first act of the film we wouldn’t know.  We don’t see this Bourne the news describes and we don’t see David Webb either, leaving us unsure as to what is going on and putting us into the mindset of the one character who is determined to find out the truth, Nicky Parsons (Julie Stiles).  You may remember the scene between Bourne and Nicky in the café in the third film where he asked her why she was helping him.  Nicky replies “It was difficult... for me... with you. You really don't remember, do you?”.  Obviously this implies a past relationship between the two characters which she clearly hasn’t forgotten about or repressed.

So Nicky sets out to locate Bourne/David Webb and we follow the first part of the story through her perspective as she searches for him and the manhunt beings once again.  We don‘t know where Bourne is.  We don‘t know where we‘re headed.  We are hooked.  It’s a risky move as I’m sure plenty of people in the audience would rather we get straight to the Matt Damon shaky-cam ass kicking but I think it makes more sense to shake things up and defy expectations.  You only have to look at franchise statistics of the past to see that if a film series doesn’t jump the shark by the second or the third movie, the fourth will almost certainly be a disaster of epic proportions (yes don’t wave exceptions in my face, I know Rocky IV and Star Trek IV are awesome).  This is because these kinds of films are built on a certain set of rules, a certain style of filmmaking and a central character that can only develop so much and by a fourth film you are almost certainly going to be out of tricks.  The Bourne Ultimatum, good film though it was, spent a good portion of its running time paying homage to events from the previous two movies.  Even though it was intentional, it left me with the feeling that the fourth outing would really have to be something different to work.

Mainly, I’d like to see a film where Bourne faces off against a singular adversary in a personal way.  Though there have been assassins chasing after him in all three films and Karl Urban’s character in the second one had some small edge to him having killed Marie, the baddies have mostly consisted of various corrupt or misguided American intelligence operatives.  Once Nicky tracks Bourne/David down, she realises that of course he isn’t this killer that shares the name but he is aware of what’s going on and convinced that whatever the reason for this copycat, the best thing to do is stay hidden and ride it out.

As much as he doesn’t want to listen, Nicky convinces him that he won’t have a life as long as the Bourne legacy is one of senseless death and David Webb isn’t going to exist until Jason Bourne is put down for good.  So they head off on the trail of the killer, retracing Bourne’s steps from the first film since that is the pattern he seems to be following and finally able to be one step ahead.  When they finally confront the killer, they soon realise the shocking truth……

The killer is the real Jason Bourne.

We were told quite clearly that Jason Bourne is a code name that was given to David Webb but where did it come from?  You don’t just pluck a name like that out of thin air.  I think it would really shake things up to discover that the code name actually comes from a real undercover CIA operative, very similar in training and resilience to David Webb, who was supposedly killed in action a decade ago.  The real Bourne was the best covert operative they had and after his untimely demise, the more unscrupulous elements in the agency felt the need to find an effective way to duplicate that level of agent; hence the beginnings of the Treadstone project.

But now the real Bourne is back from a very long sleep, completely out of synch with reality or sanity; a deadly living weapon trained to kill anything in his path and seeing nothing but enemies everywhere.  Having followed the breadcrumb trail that was left for him to get back in contact with his superiors, he is starting to piece his memory back together but the appearance of David Webb changes everything.  Not only is the real Bourne alone, half dead and partially sociopathic, but now he finds that somebody else has taken his name, his identity and his life.  The real Bourne has been forgotten and forsaken.

David Webb tries to convince Bourne that he doesn’t want that life; he can keep it.  But Bourne sees no choice but to kill David to take back his life and thus begins the fight that will be the hook of the film.  It’s Bourne vs. Bourne.  I am sure you’re all thinking of images in ‘Face/Off’ or ‘Total Recall’ as you read this but I’m obviously not saying that Matt Damon would be playing both parts.  There is no outlandish cloning or elaborate plastic surgery going on here.  You just need to get a really great chameleon character actor who can play the wide range of emotions that the real Bourne will have to go through without just coming off as some whacked out loony.  It has become a running joke between Jamie and myself on our podcast that we want James Marsden to be in everything but I think he would be perfect for this part.  I also thought he would be perfect to play Jack Ryan in the next film outing for that character but that’s clearly not going to happen so either let him play the baddie in that movie or in this one.

When all is said and done, this isn’t just a gimmick or marketing hook for a fourth film.  There are themes to be played out here; material that will bring Matt Damon’s character full circle.  By going head to head against the real Jason Bourne, David Webb is deciding how the rest of his life is going to play out.  He can either submit and die now, content that he died as the man whose memories he had been chasing all this time.  Or he can fight back and in defeating his opponent, will fully assume the mantle of Jason Bourne once and for all.

To bottom line it, either Matt Damon gets a great death scene and a new actor gets to continue in any future instalments (with the torch having been passed) or it is the real Bourne who dies and Damon returns to the CIA of his own free will, accepting that David Webb is truly no more.  From now on, he will only ever be Jason Bourne and gears up for any future films.  Either way, I think Bourne 4 could work as a final send off or as the start of a new line of sequels to go up against the Bond films.

But who cares what I think?  What do you think?