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The 10 Best Sci-Fi Films Never Made
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So the news came out that the Half Life movie directed by Quentin Tarantino is destined to join the list of the greatest science fiction movies that were never actually filmed. It has damned good company ... #10.
The "Real" Alien 3
The most excited I've ever been about a movie was the moment I saw the first Alien 3 "teaser" trailer in 1991 (Teasers are shot well before the movie itself is finished filming.). It's the one that promised the aliens were coming to freaking Earth.
No, I didn't dream it. They really did show that trailer (they even have a copy of it HERE), having sent it to theaters before they had even started production on the movie. Visions of awesomeness flashed through my head, a Blade Runner-ish Earth with sprawling, filthy buildings, huge, flashing billboards with giant Asian women on them, eat-up flying cars whooshing by and steam always rising from the streets for some reason. Then, the aliens start breeding in the sewers until the creatures come boiling up out of manholes by the hundreds, to be cut to pieces by Marines with pulse rifles and maybe in the climax, the Army has to nuke the city ...
"This movie can't possibly not be awesome!" I said to my little friend John at the time. "This is gonna make Aliens look like ET! I hope it's directed by the guy who will in the future direct Fight Club!" A year and 30 fucking screenplays later (including this rejected script by William Gibson), they came up with the movie that killed the franchise, then squatted over the face of the corpse and farted. They had stumbled through concept after concept, built sets, torn them down, filmed scenes, thrown them away, fired directors and fired crew. When Sigourney Weaver held out for more money, they wrote scripts without her, when she came back, they did rewrites to cram her back into the story. Very late in the game, they brought in a young director named David Fincher--whose only experience was with Madonna videos--to start shooting after most of the budget had already been scattered to the wind like parade confetti. What squeezed out the other end of the development's digestive tract was a movie that, just seconds in, meaninglessly kills off the three characters Ripley spent the last film saving. The hundreds of aliens were replaced with one small alien dog.
The vast, futuristic landscape was replaced by one dim, dirty building. The frantic gunfights were replaced by scenes of identical, bald cast members staring quietly at the wall. The main character commits suicide at the end.
So what happened?
So, they settled for this stripped-down version on a budget of $50 million, filmed in an abandoned lead factory. Then, they watched as fanboys like me piled into the theater on opening day anyway. This is why they're rich film executives, and I live in my car. #9.
A More Faithful The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
There was a movie recently that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter, droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that made his novels great. That movie was Shaun of the Dead.
That movie was not, unfortunately, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a film that floated around Hollywood for about 20 years before it finally appeared in theaters as a flat, lifeless, Americanized lump that was mostly hated by people who liked the book and loathed by people who hated the book. Why? It wasn't funny. Forget the plot elements left out--you can't squeeze an entire novel into a 120-page screenplay. We'd have forgiven all of that if the movie had made us laugh. But, you knew from the opening musical sequence with the dolphins that things had gone awry. The type of person who would find the singing animals hilarious is not the type who would be on board with Adams' relentless, dark humor.
So what happened?
Hitchhiker's would have been a tall order for anybody, since most of the comedy was in the narrative language and descriptions, two things that don't come across on film.
No, this project needed a sharp eye, not somebody who would have Mos Def stiffly parroting passages from the book. It needed someone who would take the Douglas Adams attitude and run with it and take the movie we were expecting and give us something 10 times as insane. Tim Burton maybe could have done it (though I wouldn't have thought so until Willy Wonka), and Terry Gilliam as well. But from the budget of the movie, I'm guessing they couldn't afford either one of those guys. Me, I would have settled for Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright. Hell, he was even on set (playing a bit role as one of Deep Thought's technicians). They should have grabbed him and sat him in the director's chair. At least he had a TV show on his resume. |
Snowcrash was just a badass f*****g book
they should defiantly make a movie of it one day
I like Doug Adams' Hitchhiker books, and the only part of the movie I liked (other than Sam Rockwell) was the singing dolphins.
Damn, dude. The point about artists' angst: definitely cogent. But hell, surely there are other wellsprings of creativity and forcefulness than one's fading memories of being a child surrounded by giants with total power over one's resources and daily schedule. There must be something to be said for maturity and wisdom. Ol' J. Tolkien did all right for hisself in his later years. Lucas just never, you know, matured or gained wisdom. --And, also, is a douchebag.
gotta say, pretty good article. i really liked the comment about starcraft being about mineral mining haha funny stuff. but star wars. not only did i get mentioned (gee who saw that coming here) but it took up 3 out of ten spots. but i gotta give credit cuz three sequels was actually a good idea. might be a pretty good story continuation. if at least to see mark hamils character getting a f*****g hair cut finally. and good idea about the matrix too.
i meant related to those, gotta remember the key part of my statement ha
i skipped right to the comments just to say if star wars (or any of it's equally as overrated sequals) is on this list, or at least the top five, i'm shitting in my disc drive and emailing to cracked.com
It makes me sad they never made the Alien 3 they promised. Aliens on earth would have been f*****g amazing. Unfortunately, we got to see that in the two s****y AVP movies. I couldn't even see a goddamn thing that was going on in AVP2.
to be fare , there are a few hundred star wars sequels.they're all just books
#4 is interchangeable with Warhammer 40,000.
great article.
In fact, they did make at least one movie out of a PC game, long before "Doom" - and as you can see from that, the Cubs approach to "Doom" was inevitable based on how the studio approached 1999's "Wing Commander" - in which Jurgen Prochnow and David Warner (substituting for Malcolm McDowell) are forced to share the screen with Freddie Prinze, Jr...
Thanks David, I always wondered why the Matrix sequels sucked so much. It's the same thing that happened with Kill Bill. The studio gets the idea that a movie is long so why not split it into two? That logic works with Chico sticks, but not stories. Good article man.
I liked the hitchhicker guide to the galaxy movie, obviously not as much as i liked the novels but i liked it anyways, and i know alot ot ppl who did liked it, i guess it wasnt gread on USA but on other coutries it was great, like that movie about explosions on a tunnel with ppl trapped in it with lots of fire
Hitchhikers was a huge letdown. I tried hard to convince my husband that douglas adams was funny before we saw the movie.
bullshit..that's your opinion..do a search on google.
khaosky
dungeons and dragons was made, with billy from the new adventures of superman. and how long has that been around? movie was as good as you think it is.
cheyenne
hitchhikers guide was the most retarted movies of all time
melody
i love sci fi
Starcraft
I'm a Blizzard fanatic and I can tell you the only way there will ever be a good Starcraft movie.
1) If Blizzard controls it. Not writes it and releases it to some studio. Hollywood must not be involved. At all. 100% Blizzard.
2) if Blizzard takes their dear sweet f*****g time like they do with everything to make the m**********r perfect.
3) If there are no big name actors at all.
4) The CGI will take a fuckton of money. Only Blizzard will be willing to put the money into the movie that it needs.
So, in essence it will never be done. I personally don't care. Give me Starcraft 2 and I'll be happy. Hey, guess what Blizzard is making RIGHT NOW!
Also: To all the people talking about Starcraft and Starship Troopers. I don't work for Blizzard, I don't know what the development for the original game was like, but Starcraft took exactly 3 ideas from Starship Troopers: Space Marines, "Bugs" (Zerg), and "Skinnies" (Protoss). They then took those things in a radically new direction that is simply amazing. There was no Kerrigan in Starship Troopers, there were no Dark Templar, there were no Zerglings, there were no thick southern hicky accents that make the Terrans hilarious (If you haven't, click on one of the characters with a voice actor. A Vulture, a Seige Tank, a Dragoon. Keep clicking. Keep clicking. Listen. Hear that? That's comic gold.)
My points: Starcraft the movie will and should never happen unless Blizzard does it, and they make games, not movies, and Starship Troopers was an influence, but Starcraft took the three races and made them infinitely better, with deep, engrossing storylines and characters that Robert Heinlein never dreamed of.
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stephanology
Re: Hitchiker's Guide
That was another example of waiting for an author to die so you can jump in and crap on his genius. Douglas Adams was courted for years by film studios, but he never could find a situation that he felt would work for Hitchiker's Guide. (He'd had a bad time in the video Game industry, and BBC tv, saying only Infocom's text game actually did justice to Hitchiker's.)
However, he had the bad sense to die, and lo and behold, within a few years, a film version emerges, and they have a halfway decent opening weekend, and ruin the good name of the franchise. A similar situation is going on with Dr. Seuss, whose stories now have dick jokes in them. When they start in on Charles Schulz, I'm taking my crossbow to Hollywood.