tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Sunday, February 22, 2004 «
Gibson Aliens
I've tracked down the (alleged) script of Aliens 3 by William Gibson, which was apparently labelled 'unfilmable' at the time. Reading it now, it seems eminently possible to create, but then again 14 years have passed, and computer generated sets and stunts have come on a long way in realism and affordability.
It's difficult to tell if it's really written by Gibson, touches like "artfully ragged concrete Disneyland" and "oily forest of steel" sound like how he was writing at the time. Reading how a man best known for highly stylish, intellectual science fiction takes on what's basically a high-class B-movie series is interesting. This is post-Mona Lisa Overdrive, but well before Virtual Light, a stop-gap moment for a different media than he was known for.
There has been talk of some of Gibson's stories being turned in to films for several years now, but apart from Johnny Mnemonic which, lets face it, could have been a hell of a lot better. I'm actually not disappointed that he didn't get sucked in to writing films, although he did do an X-Files episode. One of the reasons I like his writing is that he's very good at painting the picture of a society and leaving large amounts to the imagination of the reader. Lots goes unsaid in his books and it's up to you to fill in the blanks as you see fit. That's not the way Hollywood has been working over the last several... well... many years, and I'm glad that so far he's managed not to get caught in the process where original scripts are ground down in to just another pap movie.
It's difficult to tell if it's really written by Gibson, touches like "artfully ragged concrete Disneyland" and "oily forest of steel" sound like how he was writing at the time. Reading how a man best known for highly stylish, intellectual science fiction takes on what's basically a high-class B-movie series is interesting. This is post-Mona Lisa Overdrive, but well before Virtual Light, a stop-gap moment for a different media than he was known for.
There has been talk of some of Gibson's stories being turned in to films for several years now, but apart from Johnny Mnemonic which, lets face it, could have been a hell of a lot better. I'm actually not disappointed that he didn't get sucked in to writing films, although he did do an X-Files episode. One of the reasons I like his writing is that he's very good at painting the picture of a society and leaving large amounts to the imagination of the reader. Lots goes unsaid in his books and it's up to you to fill in the blanks as you see fit. That's not the way Hollywood has been working over the last several... well... many years, and I'm glad that so far he's managed not to get caught in the process where original scripts are ground down in to just another pap movie.
