Urban:
5. Akira
-Obviously, this one has been done before,,,,, as a classic anime film in 1988. However, that doesn’t change the fact that this would make an awesome live action film. The motorcycle fight scenes would be awesome and I would love to see the clash of western military-industrial complex against the sustainability theories of Eastern philosophy spelled out a little more clearly.
4. Snowcrash
-Wow, probably the hardest to film of any in this list. Neal Stephenson's digital world of the metaverse would be easy enough, same with the hyper-capitalistic world of couriers and burbclaves, but this story is extremely broad and its depth relies upon explanations of Chomskyan undestandings of language acquisition along with George Herbert’s Mead’s socialization of the self. To be completely honest, I only want to see this if it is done right,,,, and it would be really hard to do right.
3. Lost in the Cosmos
-Walker Percy’s last self-help book is more than a self-help book. The section, "A Space Odyssey II", tells the story of Marcus Aurelius Schuyler on his trip through space as he attempts to carry on humanity. When he gets back to earth, he is surprised to find out that not everyone has perished in nuclear calamity. A cross section of the human demographic still survives, and it is up to him to unite them. While this sounds a bit like Battlefield Earth, it is a lot deeper and definitely funnier.
2. Ender’s Game
-Orson Scott Card presents a great tale here, on par with Starship Troopers as far as source material for a film. The story would organize very well, by beginning with his training and then focusing on his war, the story could be shortened enough to include the interesting story lines about his siblings. One of those great books that would be a sure sell at the box office and could be extremely entertaining. The story is good enough to tell itself, even without the greatest writer/director team working on it.
1. Star Wars Legacy
-All of the interesting features of the original with even darker characters. Star Wars Legacy is a Darkhorse comic series tells the story of Cade Skywalker. 125 years after the events of episode VI, Cade has abandoned the order of the Jedi, but he still carries the Force as strongly as his ancestor Luke Skywalker. Unfortunately, Cade is also a drug user and has decided to take up a career as a smuggler (a la Han Solo) in order to support his habit. It’s a great story with characters that have a lot of different perspectives. It is like The Empire Strikes Back in every episode.
Excellent list. Great call on Star Wars Legacy in particular... the only way to handle a new story in an existing franchise is to set it far, far in the future, ala Legacy, or far, far in the past, ala Knights of the Old Republic, an excellent video game series for Star Wars. Legacy was able to succeed in part because it was not constrained by the vagaries of the films.
ReplyDeleteMr. Lucas,
ReplyDeleteI am actually going to disagree with you here. I think that prequel/sequels are best when they are closer chronologically to the originals. Obviously,in the case of Star Wars (which I will use for my examples) if the new films arrive 20 years after the originals, some adjustments will have to be made for aging and technology. That being said, keeping the same characters allows the viewers to more fully realize important changes that a film presents. For example, Yoda's lightsaber battles were easily the best part of I-III, because we were used to seeing him as old and worn down, more of a mental warrior in IV-VI. One could easily see, by looking back, how much the dissolution of the Jedi council had affected him. Similarly, because reader's are familiar with the character of Luke Skywalker, his presence is always looming (sometimes literally) over every frame that Cade Skywalker fills in the Dark Horse Series Star Wars Legacy.