The Stand


Movies

Liberty's Edge

So, it seems The Stand has a director, Josh Boone (The Fault in Our Stars), and it's gone from three movies to three hours and the promise of an all-star A-list cast. Then again...Spielberg has been making The Talisman for 12 years now, so who knows what will actually happen in the next couple years.

At any rate, I usually re-read the novel every three years or so (it's one of my absolute all-time favorites), but I only recently re-watched the 1994 miniseries. It's probably been 15 or more years since I last watched it, and I was surprised, after viewing it on Netflix this weekend, how many scenes I was absolutely sure were in the movie that weren't--so much so that I spent no small amount of time looking around on the web to be sure I wasn't watching some truncated and poorly-edited version.

Something else I noticed was that the movie was actually quite a lot of fun, and very accessible--if you've read the novel. If you haven't, then despite its six-hour length, it feels like hours of scenes are simply missing: watching the movie with my brother-in-law this weekend, who's never read the novel and hadn't before seen the film, found him constantly peppering me with questions about why this was happening, and when that had happened, and what caused this character to do that and that character to do this...it was difficult, in a word.

So, I wonder how such a long and complex cross-country novel, with so many characters and subplots, could possibly be digested, effectively, into a single theatrical release.

What do you think?

Scarab Sages

Andrew Turner wrote:


So, I wonder how such a long and complex cross-country novel, with so many characters and subplots, could possibly be digested, effectively, into a single theatrical release.

What do you think?

Simple answer: It can't.

If they wanted to do the novel justice, they would make a big budget HBO series like Game of Thrones.

By only having three hours, you have to strip so much of the plot and characterization for time constraints that you gloss over or miss history, thoughts, and motivations of the characters, or you change the story and cut entire characters.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber

Some thoughts. First off, there was a time there in the 90's and into early 2000 when it seemed everyone was converting King's writing into TV Movies. IT, The Stand, The Langoliers, Rose Red, The Shining (the non-Kubrick remake), Storm of the Century, and Carrie (another remake).
Some of them I found to be quite good and did the right job of combining King's horror factor without being overly gory - which hits the right kind of creep when it comes to King's work in my mind.

So - that being said - I find that the Stand mini-series is still interesting and accessible even if you haven't read the novel. Maybe because I have watched all those movie versions - you kind of learn to see the patterns in King's work and characters to glean what is going on "in the background" as it were.

I agree that it is not a story that can generally be told in a single movie. The only difference I could surmise is that the world of media has changed a lot since King wrote The Stand. With shows like the Walking Dead and the Leftovers (not to mention the score of post-apocalyptic movies), audiences are more genre aware of that type of story. A movie might be able to assume the audience is familiar with certain tropes and ideas going in so that they stay on the main story.

But that is just a suggestion. Realistically I tend to agree that a long-series would probably work more effectively. King's more recent series - Under the Dome - proves you can make it work. It was supposed to be a mini-series, but got extended to a second season for a long-running format.


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It's going to be really hard to top Tim Curry as Pennywise.

Liberty's Edge

MMCJawa wrote:
It's going to be really hard to top Tim Curry as Pennywise.

It is getting a remake as well: here's the link, which mentions the hand-off to NLC and the plan to split the book into two films.

Dark Archive

Baaa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aaaBY can you DIG yo MAN!


He's a RIGHT-eous Man!


huh...somehow I kept mentally substituting "IT" for "The Stand" in my last post. Probably because I heard news about the remake for IT awhile ago.

Also probably because I found IT to be a better movie and I never read The Stand

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