I want to preface by saying that of course Guillermo Del Toro’s At The Mountains of Madness may suck. It may be truly awful. It may do the source material no justice, or even completely miss the Lovecraftian mark. All of that said, it’s not likely, and it certainly can’t be determined now because an early script puts “relatively little stress on atmosphere.”
Ghouls on Film’s Dejan Ognjanovic has apparently gotten his hands on the script and, while I take great issue with his declarative assessment of what the film will be based on a script from who-knows-when, that will be changed who-knows-how many times before production, it’s obvious he comes at from a place of genuine love for the source material. His overall attitude is that the film will play “like a Hellboy movie without Hellboy, with a light dose of Carpenter’s The Thing,” which is what a number of us are hoping for, methinks. He also mentions that the script reads like a definitive R-rated film, and is packed to absolute capacity with monsters of all kinds.
Unfortunately, Ognjanovic also believes that all build-up and atmosphere has been stripped from the story in favor of action, and pop-Lovecraft adventure. Complaints that the script focuses too much on acting and relegates the mythology to a few lines of dialogue could certainly be valid, but any determination that Del Toro won’t be bringing the atmospheric pain is premature at best.
There are a number of possible spoilers that I won’t touch on here, but Ghouls On Film goes into great detail, and you’re free to read more there. Until then, healthily keep your expectation in-check if you’re a hardcore fan of Lovecraftian canon as, at the very least, it seems Guillermo will not be slavishly devoted to the source material with his long-awaited crack at Cthulhu’s world.
(via Cinematical)
12 comments
I just re-read ATMOM in anticipation of this film. The movie has a great 3-act structure: the first act is a scientific Antarctic exploration set in the 1930's, setting up characters and showing great vistas of the boreal pole and whatnot. The second act they discover seemingly dead but perfectly preserved creatures apparently millions of years old and study them, completely baffled (though referring a little to frequently to their resemblence to stuff from the Necronimon). Then, in the third act, the monsters come to life, the explorers piece together what happened to the ancient civilization, and then there's a lot of running for their lives. Sounds good to me, right? Even for an expensive 3-D picture. I love del Toro, but he's certainly capable of ignoring and betraying his source material to his own preoccupations and not to the benefit of the final product (the Mignola-ignoring Hellboy 2). I certainly hope his adaptation is the first serious attempt to translate a Lovecraft tale to the screen and isn't some snarky romp through the wild world o' Cthulhu.
That picture makes me shit my pants
del Toro ddn't ignore Mignola in Hellboy 2, Mignola was sitting right next to him in all the pre-production meetings! He worked with the designers and creature creators to create everything. They both wanted to do something different, a completely different story, which is fine by me. The best way to not fuck up the source material is to just do a different story!
I'm not sure the source material really lends itself to faithful adaptation. The payoff of most Lovecraft is a face-to-face encounter with literally mind-shattering monstrosity. "Real" reality is finally opened to some semi-intellectual effete New Englander and it's a cold lonely and horrific place that drives you mad; the opposite of traditional Christian mysticism. It's like an inverted Meister Eckhart, not a story about big old weird things. Can you actually put an image on film that lives up to that? This adaptation makes me question whether or not del Toro understands Lovecraft at all. For the record, the successful adaptations of his work either play up a clever wit that wasn't present in the books themselves (Re-Animator; The Haunted Mansion) or jettison his plots and work with some variation of the main theme (Prince of Darkness; In the Mouth of Madness). The original Wicker Man is probably the closest in tone and form to a true Lovecraft film, and even that has weird harvest musical numbers and shit.
What Dev's Beard said.
Asking if Del Toro will going to go too crazy with the monsters is like asking if Christina Hendricks breasts are too big. That's the whole point.
V
SEE, man. His sensibilities can ruin shit. I don't want a goofy romp through a Lovecraft story, I want a straight-up Lovecraft story. I want bleak, dark ancient evil. Not a wild ride at the theaters. Fuck.
Yeah, could you give credit to the publishers/artists of illustrations you feel free to use? I for one would like to know exactly where this image was stolen from..
Lovecraft is notoriously difficult to adapt, and some of the best adaptations play a little loose with the source material. Del Toro has my trust, and even if he turns in something that's all action with monstrous horrors gobbling down scientists, I'm okay with that.
I also have apparently gotten my hands on this script… because you can download it from the internet.
I like GDTs Devil's Backbone, and most of Pan's Labyrinth, but I absolutely loathe the Hellboy films. I'd love to blame that on Mignola, since he's already on my shit-list for deciding to quit illustrating his own stuff, but the director is there to ensure they capture the feel, and with Hellboy he's completely failed in that regard. I have no doubt Guillermo is a real Lovecraft fan (just look at his visual style), but he's already proven that he can take a gothic setting which I love and make a loud, obnoxious, attitude-filled movie out of it. Unfortunately, I believe the script review may be closer to the truth than I'd like.
The purported early draft of the script is freely available at cthulhuwho1.com and other sites on the web.
So why would you only read a reviewer's comments, when you could read the same document he was looking at?
Try the above location, or do a Google search for others; and do your own review of the script which may, or may not, be the real thing.
CthulhuWho1
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