Round 1.3 [Liber XII v. Rasputin the Translator] posted by kza

Ah, there’s nothing like a heartfelt apology first thing in the morning! Gets the blood moving!

I’m not quite ready to put this round to bed just yet. I’m definitely leaning one way, but I want to talk it out some more. Due to the weird circumstances, I feel the need to defend both ideas like they’re both gonna get the axe if I don’t try hard.

Liber XII: It’s funny to me that you don’t think the description lends itself to plot easily — to me, it’s one of the most straightforward of the ideas (guys and planet get along > planet goes bad > planet starts killing people > survivors fight back > someone, probably a survivor, wins). Actually, though, this dovetails with something we’ve talked about before, how I like to work from the inside>out and you like to work from the outside>in. You have all these good questions (Why would it have to be huge? Would these monks have advanced vacuum tube technology that needs constant tending?), yet, I read them and think, “I don’t really care at this point”. But (and correct me if I’m wrong) you need this — you need to be able to see it in kind of an objective way, as real thing, that a movie “just happens” to capture a small part of. While I, on the other hand, want to see it as the simplest possible expression of a general, common, dramatic idea — to me, this story is only really different from Rachel, My Dear in the details. It’s about a character fighting against an environment that is conscious and evil. (Maybe you have a different take on Rachel, My Dear, but that’s Round 7.)

But again, while this story idea could be a lot of different things, to me it’s a pretty straightforward action flick with some cool ideas and cool visuals. It’s Die Hard on an evil sentient planet. If that isn’t interesting to you (and I don’t blame you if it isn’t), then it either needs a big infusion of Something Else or it should probably be canned.

Rasputin the Translator: This one definitely isn’t an action flick, although there should probably be some action sequences. This seems like a political thriller to me… except, no. You can probably attach a lot of tags to it, but right now it they slide right off. I like that, but that can be problematic as well. If it’s neither fish nor fowl, there can be confusion as to the direction it’s supposed to go, or what the tone is, and, going back to your favorite bugaboo word, genre, when the genre is agreed upon, there’s an agreed upon set of conventions and ideas to calibrate the new story against.

Another funny thing: you didn’t see the story in Liber XII, but while I see the possibility of a story in Rasputin, I’m not sure what it is, exactly. I can’t do that x>y>z thing like I did above. The description of it makes me wanna see it — but if I saw it in a theater, that means I didn’t have to do the hard work of building and revealing the mysteries :-) To me, this one looks a lot harder than Liber XII, but, of course, that’s because I like to have a dramatic skeleton to fall back on. The question of scale is an important one, but not nearly as difficult or important in the scheme of things, imo. (Or put another way: I know I can handle it, no prob. I know you know you can, too :-)

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