One of the most exciting announcements we made last year was the purchase by Warner Bros. of the rights to Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. The first two novels in the sequence, the Hugo Award winning Hyperion (1989) and its sequel Fall of Hyperion (1990), are intelligent, literary SF at its very best, and perhaps the closest that any author has come to achieving the sheer scale and quality of Frank Herbert’s otherwise peerless Dune Chronicles.
Tempering our excitement somewhat was the news that Warners plans to produce a single movie from the plots of these first two novels in the series. The possibility of anyone writing a script that bears the remotest resemblance to these two novels and does justice to Simmons’ intricate and sprawling plot frankly beggars belief. The success of such an undertaking clearly hangs on the ability of the screenwriter to synthesise such a huge amount of complex material into a coherent whole, and the ability of the director to give it life without creating a monster.
Early last year very little was known about the project – no director had been announced, and no writer, although it was rumoured that Simmons might himself pen the script. On his website Simmons announced, "Yes, … there is a Hyperion movie in the works. It has been optioned by a top-notch studio, is slated to be directed by a top-name director, and already has the involvement of a top-flight movie star."
Well, the “top-name director” is Scott Derrickson (The Day the Earth Stood Still) and the screenwriter is Trevor Sands (...). The best that can be said about these appointments is that neither of them has done enough to properly judge their merit for such an undertaking. Derrickson has four movies under his belt, most recently the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which has a rather generous 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (the site that measures the percentage of positive reviews for a movie). As for Sands, well he doesn’t appear to have had anything in production since 2002 and prior to that only one other writing project in 1994.
Still, while neither Derrickson nor Sands has demonstrated the ability to pull this off, they haven’t proven that they can’t do it either. So let’s think of these two optimistically as a clean canvas on which an incredible work of art can be painted.
The alternative is too depressing to contemplate.
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