Anybody else getting a sense of déjà vu? We only have a few minutes of footage, but it looks like Mr Roth is giving us the same basic film again. The set dressing might have changed but the essential plot is another rehash of the Narnia story. A plucky and/or innocent character is transported to a magical fairy tale land under the dominion of a card-carrying villain. There is a chase and an escape. The protagonist meets some ‘wacky’ supporting characters, raises an army, there is a battle, evil is defeated, and it ends with the inevitable sequel hook.
I actually
walked out of Snow White the Huntsman when
I saw it in the cinema. I am a sucker for heroic fantasy but a combination of
Kristen Stewart’s excruciatingly bland performance and the sheer mind-numbing, clichéd
nature of the whole thing was too much. It made Avatar look like ground-breaking story telling. Prequel, sequel,
reboot, reimaging; call it what you like, it’s the same film every time.
Everybody is just wearing different hats.
Come to
think of it, most of the changes that Disney made to A Princess of Mars when they adapted it as the much maligned John Carter seemed purposefully designed
to fit this formula. In the book, Mars is a world in decline; its ecosystem has
been devastated, forcing the various city states to fight constantly for ever
dwindling resources. Apparently this was too subtle for the film makers. There
simply has to be a card-carrying,
world-threatening villain, so the city of Zodanga is now responsible for all the
world’s problems, manipulated behind the scenes by the Therns. The director has
already made a children’s film with powerful eco-message, WALL:E. Why did he shy away from the same message in John Carter? I suspect it was to appease
the all-powerful formula.
Formula can
be good. It’s essential to some genres. Almost all detective stories share some
basic elements: a culprit, a detective, a mystery to be solved. It’s the
variations, or lack of them, that make an individual work good or bad. But
fantasy? Fantasy is supposed to be the one genre where rules and conventions no
longer apply. Even science fiction (of the ‘hard’ type, at least) is bound by
what is at least theoretically possible. Fantasy is only limited by the story
teller’s imagination. And modern special effects have given us an unprecedented
ability to put the limits of our invention on the silver screen. So why does
Hollywood insist on churning out the same story over and over and over again? I
suspect the answer is about box office returns. Innovation is risky. Innovation
does not test well in the focus groups. The movie-going public likes
familiarity; likes ‘brand recognition’. But then how did something like Inception, innovative and original,
become a hit? Hollywood should give the public more credit.At the very least, they should stop revisiting the classics! Does anybody really think that Sam Raimi is going to make a film on par with the original Wizard of Oz? We’ve got some pretty definitive versions of Alice in Wonderland and Snow White on screen. Let’s see some new adaptations; books we haven’t seen on the big screen yet.
What about a
film starring Fritz Leiber’s barbarian hero Fafhrd and his partner in crime, the
Grey Mauser? They’d be ideal for a swashbuckling heist film. Or a film of one
of the Chrestomanci books by Diana Wynne Jones; a dimension-hopping, Doctor Who-style
adventure with the titular wizard? Maybe look at the works of Tim Powers, a
personal favourite of mine, like The
Anubis Gates (time travel, Regency London and Egyptian sorcery) or The Drawing of the Dark (magical beer
and Arthurian legend in 16th century Vienna)? Or Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files; a noir detective
thriller with vampires and black magic? 
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