My son alerted me to the new movie The Last Mimzy, which adapts Lewis Padgett’s Henry Kuttner’s “All Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”
The trailer is available at the movie’s official website.
It looks like an okay movie but I’m pretty sure it won’t ring my bell the way the story did. It makes explicit so many things which are mysterious in the story. Plus, I don’t think there’s enough plot there for a feature-length movie, and sure enough the trailer refers to something about “saving the future” which like, TOTALLY RUINS EVERYTHING is not part of the original.
In “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien has some wise words about words being the proper medium for fantasy (as opposed to drama). When I first read the essay, as a teenager, I was sure he was wrong about this, that it was only a matter of technology. Once special effects became convincing enough, I thought, fantasy would be as filmable as detective stories were. Now I’m not so sure. For one thing, there’s the uncanny valley effect–how something which is almost right can be horribly wrong. More importantly, an image that takes form in your mind will inevitably have more power than one which unfolds on a screen some distance away from you. The best thing about the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was the visuals, but they don’t mean anything to me compared to the visions of the Old Forest (of Isengard, of Minas Morgul, of Ithilien, etc.) that I see in my head when I reread the books.
But, to pause briefly from complaining, The Last Mimzy has already prompted the reissue of The Best of Henry Kuttner (as The Last Mimzy and Other Stories), and if the movie is successful it might lead to other good things. A multivolume edition of The Collected Stories of Kuttner and Moore? A feature-length adaptation of Fury? A Gallegher TV series? (Kuttner’s drunken inventor, I mean, not the watermelon-smashing comedian.)
Whatever it is, my son will hear about it before I do.
