Babel Clash

It’s sort of amazing, really. Imagine if fantasy movies were like SF movies. There are actually good SF movies that are not merely based on good SF novels. In the world of SF there is actual parity between books and movies. They can hang together. Have a beer, play Settlers of Catan, whatever. Sf movies sometimes actually advance the genre.

In the world of fantasy, this is not so. There are vanishingly few decent fantasy movies that are not based on decent fantasy novels, and even most of the ones based on decent books are unbelievably horrible.

Why should this be? With the obvious exception of Peter Jackson, really good directors don’t seem to be interested in fantasy. And the ones that are don’t seem to really get the point of it (I’m think of Ridley Scott’s Legend and Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur.) Imagine if a Neill Blomkamp decided to shoot a straight-up dungeon crawl. No soaring celestial-choir music, no cute-kid sidekick, no “clever” twists, just a buncha guys out to stab some monsters and take their treasure. Shoot it the way Tarantino would shoot a heist movie: gritty, real, sweat in their beards, blood on their armor.

How hard would that be? And how awesome?

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