THE PUPPET MASTERS
[Spoilers]
A film review by Peter J. Scott
Copyright 1994 Peter J. Scott
Heinlein fans don't come any more devoted than me, so I had some trepidation about going to see a Hollywood interpretation of one of the works that mean a lot to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find about as faithful a reproduction of the book as one could hope for given time, movie reality, current fashions. When I heard several lines of dialog that were almost verbatim early on, I figured that the writers had at least some respect for the origin; if this has been another one of those films where all they do is take the title and one idea from a book and then do their own thing with it, I would have written angry letters telling them to take RAH's name off it. But I won't.
[Spoilers follow. Also much *personal opinion*.]
Given the two-hour limit, any novel has to have drastic surgery, and attempting to cover everything in a complex book just by going faster won't work (c.f. DUNE). I would have liked to have seen the bareback Congress, that scene would have worked; but I think they were right not to try to show the vigilantism; for one thing, RAH covered this in rapid narration, which is too boring in a movie, and showing it makes for too much quick cutting between characters and settings you've never seen before. I suspect there were some controversial edits, since 1) there seemed to be something missing in between the chase of Miss Haines and the presidential arrival, and 2) the TV news of rioting was pretty brief and isolated, so I suspect there was more filmed around those scenes. (Anyone know where there might be published a "Making Of" story?--I've already read the posting earlier in rec.arts.sf.movies.)
Also, movies emphasize visual and action sequences more than books by their very nature; while so many authors' novels reveal them to be frustrated screenwriters in disguise, with lengthy blow-by-blow fight descriptions, RAH focussed more on ideas, thoughts, and emotions, spending pages on fascinating dialog, while a fight scene would last a couple of sentences. In the movie business it's the other way around, because even die-hard intellectuals will get bored otherwise. So that emphasis was to be expected.
I was in much the same place as throopw%sheol.uucp@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop):
> 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.
It didn't grab me emotionally, and I'm not sure whether that was the fault of the movie, the book, or what I was thinking while watching it. On the plus side, Donald Sutherland as the Old Man worked for me - and that's a tough set of expectations to live up to. It would have been easy for the movie to have been embarrassing to watch (and I'm still quaking at the thought of Tom Hanks as Valentine Michael Smith), but it wasn't--in the end, I was happy that RAH's name was on it, and I'd like to think that he would have been too.
-- Peter Scott, NASA/JPL/Caltech (pjs@euclid.jpl.nasa.gov)
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