Upgrading Their Plots
Everyone who writes does so for their own reasons. I got into it because I got tired of coming to the end of an article or story and thinking, “I could do better than that.” (OK, to be honest, my friends got tired of me saying that and told me to put up or shut up.) I don’t write much any more, but I still have that reaction.
For example, Aliens 3 was on the other day. It sucked. The first two films were great, but the third just felt tired. You know what would have been a better plot? Ripley discovers that there’s a third stage in the aliens’ lifecycle, one that’s intelligent and civilized. They drop eggs on a new planet, wait for stages one and two to wipe out everything dangerous, then poof, out comes Stage 3 to give you paved roads and quantum physics and what-not. The tension in the film would be whether or not Ripley could leave her “unfortunate” early experiences behind and connect with the third stage aliens or not, which would have been very topical for an American film as communism came to an end in Europe.
And what about Battlestar Galactica? Lots of great writing in the first two seasons, but come on, the ending? They walk away from hot coffee and decent medical care to breed with Australopithecines and make us? Bah. Bah, I say, and double bah. You know what would have really rocked? If they’d found the two-thousand-year-old hulk of the Galactica in orbit around Kobold, and spent the next two seasons figuring out how it—how they—have traveled back in time, and whether the past was written in stone, or if they could change it somehow. If nothing else, it would have been a much better use of the black hole that the evil Cylons’ base was parked in front of at the end of the series…
What makes this more than just sour grapes is the prospect of actually being able to make “my” versions of these movies. Digital animation continues to go from strength to strength. Ten years from now, studios will be able to reverse engineer digital actors from old footage; not long after that, I expect technology to reach the point where dedicated amateurs can sample and remix film, just as they now do with music.
So, what would you re-write and re-make? A Terminator 3 in which Arnie plays the (human) scientist chosen to carry on with Miles Dyson’s work, and John Connor tries to stop him? What would you do first?
You must read (maybe you have?) the short story “Queremos tanto a Glenda” (“We Love Glenda So Much”), by Julio Cortazar. I have a copy in Spanish but it would be of little use to you…
William Gibson actually wrote a (much better) script for Alien 3 – http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/Alien3.txt
Your point almost seems to be that fanfic and its original sources are going to become less and less distinguishable over time.
I agree, your versions are superior. However I’m afraid that there are a couple of problems with them.
1) They sort of take the story into a different genre which might be part of the attractive since doing the same thing again is repetitive but doing something different is bad for the bottom line since people know they go to see aliens to see monsters popping out of the ceiling to eat people with their little mouths.
It’s the kind of stuff that I only see working in books.
2) The only problem is that while you make interesting scenarios with premises full of questions it is still a chance that answering (or not) does questions satisfactorily is impossible, you might be painting yourself into a corner, so to speak.
I would still want you on the writing board of any of these movies, they suck.
I’m a big fan of the comic author Warren Ellis, mostly for the fact that his SF tends to _start_ at the point most others finish. What’s interesting (to me) is what happens _after_ first contact / the singularity / etc.
Right now, I’m both enjoying and struggling with ‘Defying Gravity’, struggling mostly because it’s not moving fast enough, and because the constant flashbacks make it feel like the astronauts never actually left… For something about a six year mission through the solar system, I would’ve liked a lot less focusing on past bar experiences the crew had…not to mention the hamfisted references to the non-human life form that they keep awkwardly working into conversation…
The scariest thing about Aliens3 is that it was such a godawful experience of studio interference for David Fincher that immediately afterward he was inclined to never make another film again…and who would we have to document the rise of Facebook without him?
I agree that the second two years of Battlestar Galactica should be purged from the universe and replaced with something else, but I *don’t* think that another time-paradox is necessary. There were lots of interesting questions that never got answered — where were all the cylons coming from? Why did they have a hierarchical system? How did they send a radio signal (or an electrical signal, in the episode where an 8 puts a cable *directly into her wrist vein*) from a body which is all-biological? Why do cylons, with their clearly superior technology, cling more strongly to myths and religion than the humans they seek to squash? What DID all the cylons on the “newly” colonized post-nuclear 12 planets DO? Did they all just wander around saying “hello” to identical copies of themselves? What about cylon culture, art, government, technology?