I'm starting to think Electric Dreams is getting an unfair beating. It's still very polarised out there, between those who love and hate it, there isn't that much middle ground. But that's the internet for you, it's where the middle ground goes to die. There's all the it's trying to be Black Mirror talk, which is plainly a red herring. It shares a similar aesthetic feel, but that's because that's the default aesthetic of now - I will write about this in a future blog post, with special reference to 1980's television studio lighting.
That said, Impossible Planet left me feeling some of that internet disappointment. The ending just didn't work and the outpouring of dismay on Twitter was fairly well justified - it was a really good story and it was changed by the adapter into a less good one. The adapter went for the addition of a love story, where the couple end up in some kind of group hallucination at the point of death - or is it all really real? If it were a 1950's B movie the words The End would come up and turn into a big question mark. It was nowhere near as satisfying dramatically as just leaving her to die alone with her android, and the crew missing that the planet is really Earth all along. The original story left us with empty lies and missed opportunities. Much more fun than a suggested have cake and eat it ending.
I've adapted science fiction before, with a stage version of The Time Machine (published script pending) and so I am at risk of being an hypocrite for attacking changes in adaptation. The writers were encouraged to do so, and with an hour to fill, something else probably needed to be added to the narrative. Probably. I'm not convinced that something else could have been done to fill the time, especially when the rest of the world was so convincingly created. So far the two universes created in the first two episodes have been realised incredibly well - showing us their world with as little telling as possible.
Let's address my hypocrisy for a moment. As I say, I did an adaptation of The Time Machine for stage this year and it's interesting looking back at my version, because I thought I'd changed quite a lot. It's a sod to stage because it's set in a world without language - or at least a language that is used. My version used storytelling and narrative tricks to get inside and outside of the Time Traveller's head to get round this, but in terms of narrative I only made three explicit changes. 1. I reset it in the present/slight future day - but as it was originally set in the then present/slight future day, that seemed fine. I'm sure some people cursed my name. 2. I ditched his excessive use of matches, which was never practical or plausible. A phone with a faded battery filled in for much of the necessary plot actions. 3. I made it so as the Time Traveller possibly never came back from his trip to the future. Now, there are similarities there to the ending of Impossible Planet, in that there was a hint that the ending wasn't necessarily real. The difference was that I changed a bleak ending to a bleaker ending. The Time Traveller was dead, and the story told was just a recording sent back in time, rather than he was somewhere in the future. The change to Impossible Planet was to take an ending that's bleak and uncompromising and making it... well... a bit mushy. And a bit mushy isn't really very PKD, which is why a lot of people went - oh, magic sort of happy ending, bleargh. All that needed to under cut this mush were brief snatches of the two sort of lovers suffocating, turning blue, coughing up dark liquids as their lungs collapsed. Just fractional cuts - from smiles to horror and back. Then everyone would have been happy.
The real shame was that, until that final drift of shots, it was a really great episode - silly red killer robot eyes aside. (I actually rather liked them, but they were silly.) But anthology / short stories stand and fall by the dismount. I think Asimov made the point about the short story that they're all about the idea - get in, get out and get out with a punchline. (I can't find the essay in question at the moment, but it was something like that. Or I've made that up and it's by someone else.) The previous week The Hood Maker did, to some degree, the opposite. Teep stories are always a bit of a sod, they don't really have anywhere to go, so any flaws in the narrative were forgiven because it ended on a nice bleak note of chaos. Whichever way that society was going, it was going via Hell.
And bleak is the operate word here. We are largely here for the darkness, not the light. We want the bleak and if you take it away from us without some payoff, we will be annoyed. And by we I mean me. There are always obvious problems with complaining about authenticity in adaptation. How proper are these adaptations. How much should we take with us when we cross over to a different medium? My primary complaint, as I've said, is not with the accuracy of the version, just that the new ending just didn't work tonally.
So, two down, and they have been different enough from each other, and generally good enough to make me keep coming back. I cannot fault the visual style, the scripts have been mostly tight, I am mostly happy. It's just that landing.
More thoughts will probably come after tonight. #ElectricDreams
Showing posts with label PKD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PKD. Show all posts
Sunday, 1 October 2017
Sunday, 24 September 2017
More Electric Dreams
It's been a week since my last post about the Channel Four series Electric Dreams and I've thought a bit more about that whole anthology series thing and how they are received. Electric Dreams seemed to get a rough ride last week - my damning praise of the opening credits aside - and that brings us back to Out of the Unknown.
I mentioned Out of the Unknown last week, a science fiction anthology series from the 1960's on BBC 2. What survives, because often little survives, are clusters of episodes from the four series - including their choice of an episode one. With the nature of filming schedules, the turn around of episodes and the general timing of things, their choice of the first episode was more constrained than maybe Electric Dreams was. Far fewer episodes were complete prior to transmission, so the choice was more predetermined, in theory. There was some disagreement about which episode should lead the series. But, to some degree, a dud was less their fault, more that of their schedule.
And Out of the Unknown chose a bit of a dud. No Place Like Earth based on the John Wyndham story isn't great. I have a fondness for most episodes, barring the final series which is pretty vile, but even I can't help but smile at the first episode and say... bless. The story is very out of date, even for the time, the production is a bit creaky and the script... often not the best. But there were Martian space dogs (actual dogs with extra furry costumes - one for the RSPCA) so it wasn't all bad.
Out of the Unknown grew to be a well respected series - a bit too adult and serious to be properly mainstream, but well liked. The first episode, however, was gently savaged.
The reason I ramble on about this is because Electric Dreams got a rather mixed response to its first episode. On twitter the reactions veered from hate to love and back again. The papers were largely... snooty I think is the best word. Not enough like Black Mirror, not quite up to date enough, too much money spent making it look grim etc. I thought it had a lot going for it, but I can't say it set my world on fire - why else would I write a blog about the opening credits?
My questions prior to watching the next episode tonight are:
Was The Hoodmaker indicative of the quality of the whole series or is this first episode a one off?
Will the rest of the series be written off, or will the modern fast moving world allow it time to grow?
Was Twitter right, and it's both terrible and amazing at the same time?
We'll have some clues shortly, as, with the anthology series, you're only ever as good as your next episode.
I mentioned Out of the Unknown last week, a science fiction anthology series from the 1960's on BBC 2. What survives, because often little survives, are clusters of episodes from the four series - including their choice of an episode one. With the nature of filming schedules, the turn around of episodes and the general timing of things, their choice of the first episode was more constrained than maybe Electric Dreams was. Far fewer episodes were complete prior to transmission, so the choice was more predetermined, in theory. There was some disagreement about which episode should lead the series. But, to some degree, a dud was less their fault, more that of their schedule.
And Out of the Unknown chose a bit of a dud. No Place Like Earth based on the John Wyndham story isn't great. I have a fondness for most episodes, barring the final series which is pretty vile, but even I can't help but smile at the first episode and say... bless. The story is very out of date, even for the time, the production is a bit creaky and the script... often not the best. But there were Martian space dogs (actual dogs with extra furry costumes - one for the RSPCA) so it wasn't all bad.
Out of the Unknown grew to be a well respected series - a bit too adult and serious to be properly mainstream, but well liked. The first episode, however, was gently savaged.
The reason I ramble on about this is because Electric Dreams got a rather mixed response to its first episode. On twitter the reactions veered from hate to love and back again. The papers were largely... snooty I think is the best word. Not enough like Black Mirror, not quite up to date enough, too much money spent making it look grim etc. I thought it had a lot going for it, but I can't say it set my world on fire - why else would I write a blog about the opening credits?
My questions prior to watching the next episode tonight are:
Was The Hoodmaker indicative of the quality of the whole series or is this first episode a one off?
Will the rest of the series be written off, or will the modern fast moving world allow it time to grow?
Was Twitter right, and it's both terrible and amazing at the same time?
We'll have some clues shortly, as, with the anthology series, you're only ever as good as your next episode.
Sunday, 17 September 2017
Do Opening Credits Have Electric Dreams?
Visually I thought the first episode of Electric Dreams (Channel Four) was excellent - not so much because the aesthetic was particularly original* (hints of Blade Runner with a fair dash of High Rise etc) but because the visual world told the background to the story. Yes, there were the odd clunky lines about violence in the city kicking off sometime, but that happens when you're cramming so much information into a one off. But they didn't need to say much more than the detail that was vital to the plot - the background of the world, the green rain, the general decay etc was a complete world and didn't need more words. Good on them.
Money was spent, money was well spent, intelligently spent.
Until we come to the opening credits.
Money was spent. But it's a bit of a mess.
But.
I don't think it was ever going to be any other way, because this is an anthology series and anthology series have weird, largely unsatisfactory, opening credits - and so Electric Dreams is part of a long and noble tradition.
Take some of the earliest science fiction anthology series - Out of this World (ITV) and Out of the Unknown (BBC). Credits were montages of science shots, faces looking strained, falling bodies, anything that looked odd - mixed together into a weird mush. Electric Dreams had more to go on in terms of theme, so there was some unity to the images picked, but it might as well have been a deliberate homage to these earlier shows. It probably wasn't, but it didn't half look it to me. Except that the earlier shows (and there are countless other examples from other genres - Scorpion Tales is my personal favourite) were working on no money and spliced film, and so retain some inventive charm, the montages of Electric Dreams just bounce off one as another not quite good enough CGI blob.
I understand it's difficult to create a good credit sequence for a show that is different every week. The best solution is the Inside No.9 or Black Mirror route - a brief ident, a sting, cut. But I can bet the makers of Electric Dreams didn't want to look like they were influenced by Black Mirror at all. Especially as they would argue, strongly, that Black Mirror was more influenced by PKD than the other way round.
One day I will write the definite guide to the art of the credits sequence in British science fiction - there will be an entire chapter on the effective use of tympani in theme tunes - but till then, let this serve as an introduction.
*As if being original really matter, execution people!
Money was spent, money was well spent, intelligently spent.
Until we come to the opening credits.
Money was spent. But it's a bit of a mess.
But.
I don't think it was ever going to be any other way, because this is an anthology series and anthology series have weird, largely unsatisfactory, opening credits - and so Electric Dreams is part of a long and noble tradition.
Take some of the earliest science fiction anthology series - Out of this World (ITV) and Out of the Unknown (BBC). Credits were montages of science shots, faces looking strained, falling bodies, anything that looked odd - mixed together into a weird mush. Electric Dreams had more to go on in terms of theme, so there was some unity to the images picked, but it might as well have been a deliberate homage to these earlier shows. It probably wasn't, but it didn't half look it to me. Except that the earlier shows (and there are countless other examples from other genres - Scorpion Tales is my personal favourite) were working on no money and spliced film, and so retain some inventive charm, the montages of Electric Dreams just bounce off one as another not quite good enough CGI blob.
I understand it's difficult to create a good credit sequence for a show that is different every week. The best solution is the Inside No.9 or Black Mirror route - a brief ident, a sting, cut. But I can bet the makers of Electric Dreams didn't want to look like they were influenced by Black Mirror at all. Especially as they would argue, strongly, that Black Mirror was more influenced by PKD than the other way round.
One day I will write the definite guide to the art of the credits sequence in British science fiction - there will be an entire chapter on the effective use of tympani in theme tunes - but till then, let this serve as an introduction.
*As if being original really matter, execution people!
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