THE PUPPET MASTERS
A film review by Wayne Throop
Copyright 1994 Wayne Throop
I had an odd sensation as I watched the movie version of Heinlein's THE PUPPET MASTERS. I'd just read the expanded book version a day or two before, and as I left the flickery, I didn't have a sense of whether the movie I'd just seen was any good or not.
As I say, an odd sensation. And not that I thought it was bad, or even that it wasn't good. Just ... blank. People with me, who hadn't read the book, said it was good. But (unusual for me) I had no sense one way or any other. I think what happened to me was, the automatic mental processes that normally work while I watch movies, and yield a "goodness" value, were busy analyzing issues orthogonal to any good/bad distinction (at least movie-wise). Not completely pre-occupied perhaps, but enough so to produce this odd sensation I mention.
Hence I can't really "review" it in the sense of recommending going or not going. But having just read the book, I *did* notice several points about the technical issues of book-to-movie conversion, which may be of some interest.
First, the obvious plot compression. There simply isn't even vaguely enough time to put all the book content into a movie. The scenes and subplots cut seemed to be reasonable choices. Much like how the "six days of the condor" became three days in the movie, the months of the invasion in the book became weeks. The vast Zone Red became simply a single state. No international implications. No hard-to-convince President. Several of the agents and minor characters are combined or eliminated. The usual stuff. Understandable.
A specific example of such an economy: the combination of Sam's rescue and the foiling of the plot to capture the president, blending smoothly into a modified interrogation scene, eliminating reams of Sam/Mary falling-out subplot, plus long hospital scenes, skeptical-president scenes, and researching-UFOs scenes. Fairly neatly done, I thought.
The "compression effect" is also somewhat amplified, because the book was told in first person, with mental self-dialogue and digressions incorporated. A *lot* of information of this sort was dropped, and some of the interactions were somewhat caricatured as a result to convey subtleties the book could convey because of its intimate relationship to Sam's viewpoint and observations. But again, not too badly done compromises with necessity, I thought.
The conversion from a setting in 2007 or so Furture History, with space travel throughout the inner system, and "aircars" as common as wheeled cars today, to a more-or-less-today setting, was also handled fairly well. Things that were done in "duos" transfer to either ordinary cars or helicopters, or private jets for longer range. Not too bad.
The mechanics of the PMs were also handled fairly well. The physical probe into the spine was a departure, but not an annoying one. In fact, giving them an interesting internal organ structure was rather nice, rather than simply being amorphous blobs. Though some of the leaps from vague supposition to foregone conclusion were a bit much, such as going from "What's this little thing? Oh, it must be an RF recognition signal" or "Gee they're touching tentacles? Oh, they are transferring memories by chemical cues, we should have guessed, ants do that!". The compression into a movie explains some of this, but the portrayal was just a little too glib, too "Dr. Zarkov," too "science oracle" for me. It stuck out as quite un-Heinlein-esque, who's books always portray a bit more sweat in the science, and a bit more skepticism, a bit less cocksurity.
And in fact, most of the remaining points that seem worth touching on are of this variety: alterations that aren't all *that* bad, but just aren't quite Heinlein standard "look and feel."
Examples. In the book, the major plot break comes with the discovery of one of the subsequent saucer landings, and the discovery (via "Mary"s childhood memories) of the vital weakness that could be exploited. The conversion of this to the movie exposed several un-Heinlein-isms, IMHO. First, the interaction of Sam with his father was made a bit too overt, too confrontational. The caricature to translate from the first person book perspective a bit too caricature-ish in this case.
This leads to Sam's "I'm going to rescue Mary," which is pretty much out of character, but leads us to an "infiltrating alien territory" scene with a similar dramatic function to the exploration of the damaged saucer in the book. But problems abound. The replacement scene has Our Hero (with red-shirted sidekick) going into totally occupied territory, and faking possession. The book treated that issue well, and rejected it as implausible. Especially when Sam prepares to commune with the central "mother alien" or "queen alien." The masquerade lasting as long as it did, and the implausibly ineffective pursuit when it was exposed were simply not up to Heinlein standard "look and feel" as I said.
Similar breaks from HSL&F pepper other modified scenes. "Sam! Kill him!" is gone. Sam's desperate fight to free Mary, and ultimately forcing him to sacrifice Pirate is gone. "Schedule Bareback" and "Schedule Suntan" are gone. Vigilanti patrols are gone. The death of Sam's father, and the reality of long-term infestation are gone. All replaced by less plausible, less gritty, vaguely more saccharine substitutes.
And there are a couple of cases where the Old Man or the PMs or both act uncharacteristically stupid when compared to the book, such as forgetting the cane, or having the apes show intelligence unprovoked.
But again, not *all* the modifications are inferior. The substitution of disease, for another example, and the foreshortened discussion of disease as the solution, the delivery, and the analysis of possible vectors, was all quite good. "Mosquitos" a bit lame, perhaps, but all in all, an actual improvement on the vague "9-day-fever" exposition, I would say.
So bottom line: is this a good movie? Should you spend your N bucks? As I said to start out, I think my subconscious mental processes were so busy analyzing minutiae of the "look and feel" that they just plumb failed to render up the usual and expected "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" signal. I'm simply not sure "in my gut" whether this is a "good" or "gripping" movie.
But it's certainly interesting in many ways, especially if you've read the book. And I didn't feel sick to my stomach as I did with the "weirding modules" and other nauseating modifications in the movie-ization of DUNE. So I guess on balance, I'd have to give it a somewhat abstracted, weak, wishy-washy sort of thumbs up. *If* you try it, you *might* like it.
--
Wayne Throop throopw%sheol.uucp@dg-rtp.dg.com
throop@aur.alcatel.com
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