The Tesseract

The Tesseract was Alex Garland's follow-up to The Beach, and is about a sailor, a group of pirates, a nurse, some street children, and a psychiatrist in Manila (only the sailor was non-Filipino). Somehow this turned into a confused movie about drug runners, an assassin, a British psychologist, and a bellboy in Bangkok. Thanks, Oxide Pang. The book is a look at the interconnectedness of life and the butterfly effect, while the movie... well, it touches on the same themes, but without half the talent. Maybe if the other half of the Pang brothers were involved. Well, no. Mostly internal books with insane amounts of flashbacks, multiple looks at the same scene from different perspectives, and a look at the slums in a third-world country just won't translate well into a film. Also, a lot of characters were merged, names were changes from one character to another, completely unneeded flashy camera tricks, Matrix-style gunfights, and the story was turned into an action film. Although Garland's novel (and The Beach, for that matter) could make a good movie, with some good set pieces for action (the shootout in the hotel and subsequent chase could be utterly brilliant if well-filmed), this was pretty much doomed from the start. Making a lot of what was hinted at explicit was no good, let alone silly monologues. And man, Bangkok Dangerous was a far better film about violence in Bangkok. I am not looking forward to the remake with Nic Cage (although that is directed by the Pang Brothers, it has Charlie Yeung (from Fallen Angels, among others) as a Thai). Or the remake of The Eye with Jessica Alba.

And hey, I finally planned this out well. I finished the book on Saturday (during a delicious tekka don), and got the movie from Netflix the next chance I could. Now, if only I would rewatch The Third Man (and I even own it), so I could talk about it, since that so desperately screams for a movie-book comparison.