First Star Trek XI Trailer

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I think you're being a bit harsh. In Star Trek or Star Wars, if you encounter an electronically locked door, you shoot it with your blaster/phaser and the door opens. If it is unlocked and you want to lock it, you shoot it with your blaster/phaser.

Where's the inconsistency there?

Yeah, it never fails to annoy me that trashing any electronic component always causes it to fail in whatever way is most convenient for the plot. I don't know why they bother reprogramming anything, they should just shoot it and everything will work exactly the way you want it to. It's the goddamn cowboy method of story exposition where the writers are just too lazy to actually blow the doors open with a shaped charge.

 

[Bludd]

To be honest, I think that most of the modern Space opera style books, (notably from Reynolds, Hamilton and Asher) would simply be too dense for a film as they run to hundreds and hundreds of pages and have such convoluted storylines. It is no surprise that many of the successful SF films are based on books by Philip K. Dick as his books were rather slender tomes, as was typical in the era when they were written.

In fact, I'd say that Century Rain would be even more dense than most of the other books by Reynolds!

A well-funded mini-series on the other hand could be very good but there would seem to be little chance of that happening despite some of the dross which does get commissioned.

I'd love to see such an adaptation of an Ian M. Banks book - Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games, perhaps? Not gonna happen though, unfortunately.

OK, maybe a miniseries would be a better way of doing Century Rain.

Schismatrix would also be a good miniseries.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds could work as a film, it is more contained. Maybe two films?

 

[Mariner]

The one hope I can see for some intelligent SF is that, with the ever-increasing power of 3D rendering (or rasterising!) technology, CGI-based series might become more of an option. I'm not talking about any attempt at true realism but something a bit more rough and ready but still pretty decent looking might be possible.

Whether or not any such series would ever be commissioned by any network is, of course, a different matter. I'd imagine the Japanese would be the best bet for this kind of thing but personally, I've always found most Anime plotlines a little incoherent and rather cliched and don't see any reason why this would necessarily change.

 

[WhiningKhan]

The one hope I can see for some intelligent SF is that, with the ever-increasing power of 3D rendering (or rasterising!) technology, CGI-based series might become more of an option. I'm not talking about any attempt at true realism but something a bit more rough and ready but still pretty decent looking might be possible.

Yeah, like Clone Wars.

...


On the general topic of SF and movie adaptations, I don't know what to think of the (once again) upcoming Foundation. There are some elements in it that have potential for a good old-fashioned space opera, but I just hope they won't pull an "I, Robot" -style blasphemy out of it.

 

[MfA]

Foundation is an incredibly bad series of books for a movie adaptation IMO.

They should stick to novellas ... novellas are just the right length for movies. Longer stories have to be butchered, shorter stories have no real plot but only a tweest (and I think 2 hours is too long for just a tweest).

PS. LotR worked because lets face it, his prose is needlessly dense to start with

 

[Mariner]

Yeah, like Clone Wars.

...

Well, obviously anything involving George Lucas kinda takes the "intelligent" part out of the equation immediately, doesn't it? Don't I remember reading somewhere that George himself suggested lots of changes to the CW movie and TV show as well? Admittedly, I've never seen any of them so can't comment too much.

Some of the Star Wars universe books are actually quite entertaining. Of course, the reasonably detailed canon for the SW universe these books had developed immediately went out of the window as soon as George started work on the Phantom Menace and sequels.

I'd better stop now because criticising Lucas is like shooting fish in a barrel...

 

[homerdog]

Has anyone ever read any of The Lost Fleet novels? From what my dad tells me it pays a good amount of attention to the science aspect of science fiction. E.g. ships can't detect other ships approaching at > the speed of light, hence attackers have a major strategical advantage. Stuff like that I can get in to.

 

[Mariner]

I read the first two of them then, to be honest, gave up on the series.

The various space battles with the advance planning required for near light-speed battles were well conceived (although it beggared belief somewhat that the hero of the books from the past understood these tactics, whereas the modern day dudes were clueless), but I found the rest of the storyline and characterisation somewhat lacking to say the least.

In the end, I decided my spare time was much better spent reading other stuff!

 

[Snyder]

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds could work as a film, it is more contained. Maybe two films?

I always thought that would work great as a three-parter.

Spoiler

1: From the beginning to when they leave the solar system
2: The journey until before "first contact"
3: The rest.

 

[Mariner]

As with Century Rain, I feel Pushing Ice would have too much to fit in. A (mildly) simplified Revelation Space could work, I feel.

Chasm City is my favourite of his books but that could never, ever be filmable!

 

[Bludd]

Unless as a full-blown TV series with multiple seasons.

 

[hoom]

I'd love to see such an adaptation of an Ian M. Banks book - Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games, perhaps? Not gonna happen though, unfortunately.

Yeah, CP would be superb if done right & I think the book is really simple enough to fit in a movie.
Would probably have to chop out the Eaters & the Damage game but I think that'd be ok.

 

[homerdog]

I read the first two of them then, to be honest, gave up on the series.

The various space battles with the advance planning required for near light-speed battles were well conceived (although it beggared belief somewhat that the hero of the books from the past understood these tactics, whereas the modern day dudes were clueless), but I found the rest of the storyline and characterisation somewhat lacking to say the least.

In the end, I decided my spare time was much better spent reading other stuff!

Thanks for the input :smile:. I'll read one and see what I think.

 

[Davros]

best trek movie evar...

 

[nintenho]

^It might actually be, I especially liked the casting decisions for Scotty and McCoy. The problem is that you can easily see where they cut an hour out from the movie.

Apparently one major segment that they had to cut was where:

Spoiler

After the Kelvin crashes into Nero's ship, the ship is weakened enough that some Klingons can capture the ship, they then imprison Nero and his crew for two decades (that's where he was while Kirk and Spock were growing up) and then that's why right before the Enterprise first goes into space, you see Uhura talking about a Klingon distress call that she picked up.

And yet they kept the painful child actor sequences. I'm guessing that there'll be a Director's Cut DVD that has everything pasted back in.