It Can’t Be Done

Why? Why would you try to take not just one, but two “highly complex” novels and try to make a film out of them?

Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move through time. The tombs are guarded by a monster called the Shrike, which impales people on metal trees. The series is inspired heavily by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The cantos is highly complex, featuring multiple time-lines and characters whose behavior changes dramatically, which was a challenge to adapt and the biggest issue that was overcome before Warner Brothers picked it up.

Newcomer Trevor Sands has been hired to adapt the first two books, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, as one feature film with Graham King (The Departed, Blood Diamond, Bangkok Dangerous) producing. Apparently Sands won over the Warner Brothers execs by taking a selective approach to the two novels’ multiple points of view in a way that managed to coherently and unconfusingly tell the story.

At best that last sentence should end with “tell a very small subset of the story.” I say “at best” because experience dictates that the story the movie will tell will likely have no real relation to the story that the books tell.

I know that the “there’s too much story to adapt” reaction is cliché. I know that adaptations don’t need to be the same thing as the original and often shouldn’t be. I know bad adaptations don’t affect the original in any way. (Those would be the cliché responses to the cliché complaints.) I’m just tired of it. Why not adapt some short stories, or something where there’s a chance to fit in a decent portion of the original material. Bah. Humbug.

I now fully expect the announcement that Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle has been optioned for a 90-minute feature.