I blame Danny Boyle. He started 28 Days Later with a guy waking up alone in a hospital in a deserted London. It was a brilliant device, because you unfolded the scenario at the same time as the protagonist. You recognised his confusion and fear, shared his bewilderment and identified with his struggle for survival. Also Cilian Murphy was (they tell me) fit as hell.
The trouble for anyone making Day of the Triffids today is that this scenario originally came from Day of the Triffids. John Wyndham doesn’t seem to be as read as he used to be so I guess the makers must have thought that they couldn’t use it for fear of looking like they were copying.
Instead, we were introduced to the story by means of a voiced-over backstory of where the triffids came from. They were farmed as an alternative to fossil fuels by ‘Triffoil’ and had saved us from global warming and… let’s stop here for a moment.
I don’t know if you saw Bonekickers. I’m assuming that if you did you recognised it to be a new televisual low. It was wrecked almost from the outset by the fucking dreadful premise of its first story. A religious sect was planning a suicide attack related to some artefacts connected with the Crusades. The twist? It was a Christian sect! You see what they did there? You thought Muslims were the crazy ones didn’t you? Ha!
There must be a module in the scriptwriting GCSE that is titled something like: “people can only relate to a story if it is ironically tied into a concern of the day.” I’ve got an alternative suggestion that is titled: “bollocks.”
Here we have a big industrial concern inadvertently causing disaster. Sound familiar? You might be thinking of the corporation in Alien. Or the corporation in Robocop. Or Cyberdine Systems. Or the housebuilders in Watership Down. It’s the fill-in-the-blanks method of storytelling. Everyone knows that corporations are evil, so we can just pin it on them and have done.
So it’s an overly-familiar backdrop to the story. But we’ve also seen these characters doing the same things in the same kind of scenario before. The hard-bitten scientist. The mysterious outsider. The beautiful blonde. The cold-blooded military/government figure who won’t heed the warnings of our heroes. They are such common tropes in sci-fi these days and Triffids made no real effort to get beyond them. I’ll not be watching the second part, but I will give you a fiver if there isn’t some kind of religious messianism in it. A cult or something. You know the drill.
But if the clubbable, soft-left environmentalist subtext and cardboard cut-out characters were all too subtle for you, the whole production was designed with morons in mind. Here’s a free tip to TV producers. A dramatic scene is dramatic because of the events portrayed. Underscoring the most dramatic bits with music and lighting can be effective, but if you do it in every single bloody scene then you just end up with the dramatic equivalent of those 70s rock songs that have a guitar solo after every single verse. I swear that half the budget must have gone on bastard violinists fretting away through every sodding minute.
Here’s an example of kind of opportunities the screenwriters missed. The scene where the chick’s dad was getting eaten by a Triffid was the first time we really got to see a triffid in action. It was also a great chance for us to get to see the direct emotional effect of the events. Instead we got some screaming and shooting wildly and… again, you’ve seen it before. And done better.
Now I’m not a screenwriter, but it’s obvious they did this because they need their central characters to be free from any connections so they can run around and save the planet. But just imagine how they could have used the scenario. If her dad was alive but blind… what would she do? How much could you have wrung from the scenario if she’d have had to take her blind dad with her or stay with him instead of running away with the chiselled jawed scientist.
Oh fuck this. I’m off for a biscuit.