Re: Best Sci-fi films never made

mike weber wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008 20:51:16 +0100, Graham Woodland
> <gray@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>> _Children_ is a much better finale for the series than _Second 
>> Stage Lensmen_ would have been, but it'd be a real comparative 
>> bastard to film.
> 
> Lot more internal monologing.

Less if you did it right.  But I'm not sure how you'd do it 
right.  _Children_ is compressed to a fault -- the final 
tempering of each of the girls is putatively as hair-raising on 
its own level as Kit's invasion of Eddore, but there's no room 
for it in the story, or even evident space for it in the plot. 
And the primary cast is so big: so much of the Children's 
characters is conveyed by direct authorial dump.  It's pretty 
*consistent* with what we see, but what we see isn't enough to 
build it by itself -- let alone get an audience to care at a gut 
level.  There are other similar cases of compression I could 
point to, but you get the point.

Surely, surely annoying voiceover will not be the solution?

You might need more narrative space.  Just possibly you could do 
that by backgrounding the red-herringish Black Lensman hunt and 
shaving the Kandron hunt to a summary whisker, replacing both 
with character/action stuff to root the girls' characters and 
rack up the rather underused menace of Ploor.  (Kalonians. 
Lyranians.  I mean, even a manky first-level mentality can see 
why the Eddorians short-circuit their appalling second-tier 
servants at every op****tunity, but come *on*!)  It'd still be 
damned hard to fit it all into a single film, though.

If you can't have a television series, making _Children_ the 
second *trilogy* -- after the barnstorming triumph of the first, 
natch -- might be a better way to go.

And you do get such a better class of raveningly coruscating 
effulgence on the big screen, too...


-- 
Cheers,

Gray

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