willow_red

I just watched one of the crappiest movies based on one of the best books I've ever read. Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg is without question my favorite Asimov novel and a great science fiction story. Granted I'm not a fan of Asimov's writing style, though having a co-author makes it much more readable, but I digress. The story is about an alien planet near the center of the galaxy that orbits one sun, but has 5 others that are close enough to cast daylight at all times. The people of this world have an inherent fear of the dark because their planet does not experience night. They believe the universe to consist of 6 stars and one planet. However, there is evidence that something happens every couple thousand years to plunge the planet into darkness. Science and religion collide in attempts to preserve their culture through the night and into the next day. This book is a fascinating study of mass hysteria and the different approaches to trying to save the world. I re-read this book most recently in 1999 and found it to be eerily reminiscent of the pre-Y2K paranoia that was rampant at the time. Not bad for a book based on a short story written in 1941.

The movie, on the other hand, bore little resemblance to the book beyond one or two character names and the occasional reference. Yes, it had the whole 6 suns, rare darkness thing going on, but that was about where it stopped. I knew this movie was going to be bad when I rented it, but I think it's one of those situations where someone says, "ew, that stinks," and you have to go and take a whiff of it yourself to make sure. The only actor whose name I recognized was David Carradine. That should tell you something right there. According to the DVD, the female lead was some girl who was a Power Ranger. They over-simplified the science vs. religion conflict to something that can best be summed up with a Buffy quote: "Note to self: religion, freaky." The religion was turned completely evil and out to get the scientists. They tossed in a character with freaky powers for NO APPARENT REASON, and snakes. Lots and lots of snakes, king cobras all, mostly rubber or bad CG. Clearly, no one involved in this film had read more than the dust jacket on the book, or had the slightest clue about, well, anything. I had hoped that one of the special features on the DVD would have been an emphatic apology from the director, and a doctor's note saying what he was doped up on at the time. Oh, and this piece of dreck came out in 2000. It would have been timely, if it hadn't sucked donkey balls.

This will be the last time for a while that I rent a movie based on a book. Now, I have to go watch ANYTHING ELSE so I can clean out my eyeballs, which currently feel quite dirty.