Chapter Eighteen:  Lights, Camera… Disaster!

The film began with an explosion.

This was already a change.

Purradise, the novel, began with Jasmine waking beneath a singing mountain to discover that her dead sister’s sword had moved during the night.

Purradise, the movie, began totally differently, with Brick Holland jumping through an exploding window while carrying a burning enemy soldier.

The soldier was not in the book. The window was not in the book. The enemy fortress was not in the book. Localad briefly wondered whether the title was in the book, then remembered that at least this had survived, although it was currently on fire.

Brick’s character was named Brand. A far cry from Jasmine.

The film opened with a fifteen-minute action sequence that did not exist anywhere in the book. An entirely invented prologue showing Jasmine's character, now named Brand and played by Brick Holland with the same bland facial expression he had used in his previous demolitions franchise, single-handedly destroying an enemy encampment before the title card even appeared. Apparently, this was included because Trent Vance's notes, somewhere along the line, had specified that "audiences need to see the hero win something in the first ten minutes or they check out."

Brand landed, rolled and delivered a line about destiny having a poor aim. The audience laughed. Localad could not object to this. It was a reasonably good line. But this just made everything worse.

Bad adaptations are rarely made entirely of bad decisions. They are made of hundreds of individually defensible decisions that gather together at night and form a terrible monster between them.

The first act moved with tremendous velocity and no detectable destination. 

Brand fought soldiers, monsters and even a staircase. He acquired the sword after three minutes of grief and six minutes of solid combat. His dead sister, sorry, brother appeared in various flashbacks whose principal function was to establish that he had once said, “You were always stronger than me brother,” a sentence that no sibling in all of human history had ever delivered without them immediately asking to borrow money afterwards.

The middle of the film was not much better. It moved with a hurried, joyless efficiency that Localad recognized, with a sinking feeling, as the fingerprints of a screenplay that had passed through at least four different writers, none of whom had spoken to each other about tone: scenes that established character in one register, followed by action sequences in an entirely different one, connective material that felt less like storytelling than the simple adding of transition effects inserted by someone dutifully checking items off a list.

The fallen order of knights too had their problems. 

Reduced from eleven distinct characters to a single composite figure named Ashwin, who now merely existed mostly to deliver some exposition now and then die within the second act. A death staged purely for maximum visual spectacle and almost no emotional weight, because the version of Ashwin on screen had been given, across four complete rewrites, none of the specific history that had made any of the eleven original knights matter in the book.

Ashwin entered beneath a dramatic soundtrack, explained fourteen centuries worth of mythology in just under ninety seconds and then unceremoniously died shortly afterward in a rain of luminous masonry.

Localad had spent six years developing those eleven knights.

Yet the film had spent less time on Ashwin's development than it had spent establishing the villain’s helmet.

The villain only had a helmet because marketing required a face for the audience, but the actor playing the villain was sufficiently famous enough that his face should not remain covered, so the helmet's visor opened repeatedly at moments of grave tactical inconvenience. The whole thing was an incredible farce.

Scene followed scene with the breathless competence of a well-rehearsed power-point presentation. Where every emotional pause was followed by a corresponding noise. And every silence was treated as a technical fault.

Sat beside Localad, Priya took one slow breath through her nose.

Desmond sat perfectly still.

The audience seemed to enjoy itself.

And that was the most bewildering part.

They were not fools. They were simply watching the film they had been sold: a large action fantasy with a famous star, efficient monsters and several other nondescript objects, all colliding at highly explosive and expensive speeds. It delivered what the posters had promised. But it was clear now, that the posters had only promised Localad’s title rather than his story.

And then came the Wound and the ending.

On screen it was no longer a pale tear sitting across the horizon, ancient and almost tender in its terrible persistence. It was now a rotating fiery vortex the size of a municipal district, surrounded by shadow creatures and prone to emitting lightning whenever the film's music required punctuation.

Brand fought this invented villain for a full eighteen minutes.

The steel of swords rang. Towers fell. A grotesque creature with six mouths and four tails died in a manner designed only to sell very small plastic versions of itself.

Then, it was time, at last, Brand raised the sword.

Localad had known, walking in, roughly what to expect. He had watched them film the shouted line himself, months earlier, on the soundstage for principal photography. What he had not fully anticipated was how the film would arrive at that line: not through Jasmine's, no sorry, Brand's, quiet, hard-won recognition that he no longer needed his dead sister's approval, but through an eighteen-minute battle against a horde of CGI shadow-creatures invented entirely for the film finale, culminating in Brand striking a killing blow against the film's antagonist.

A character who did not even exist in the book at all, added, Localad would later learn, specifically to give the marketing department "an actual face for the villain" that the trailer could then sell.

He knew the line was coming. He had heard it on the soundstage. Knowing that a blow is coming is useful chiefly because it gives one time to tense up somewhat incorrectly.

Turning to the camera, sword raised against a churning fire-vortex Wound, purely to shout the line that had once, in Localad's original manuscript, been a whispered, private thought, unspoken even to the reader, delivered instead in narration so quiet it barely registered over the sound mix.

“I DON’T NEED YOU TO FORGIVE ME ANYMORE!” Brick shouted into the vortex. The words struck the theatre walls and returned them with interest.

In the book, that thought was never spoken. Jasmine understood it privately, because the whole point was that freedom did not require an audience.

In the film however, freedom required a full Sensurround sound system, where moviegoers could literally feel their seats and the theatre walls vibrating around them.

Brand drove the sword into the earth. The Wound exploded shut. The dead sister/brother appeared in the sky, smiled and vanished. A choir attempted to further lift the building.

The audience cheered. The whole theatre around him cheered. Actually cheered, a ripple of genuine applause moving through rows of countless executives and invited press who had never read the book and had no real context for what the moment was supposed to truly mean, responding, entirely reasonably, to the film they had actually just consumed.

A competent, loud, but forgettable action movie that delivered exactly the "big-big" feeling that Trent Vance had asked for in that very first meeting, eighteen months earlier, in a glass-walled conference room that Localad had walked into, believing his story was strong enough to survive contact with an industry that obviously knows better.

Localad didn’t cheer. He sat in his seat, not clapping. Bemusedly watching the crowd around him. He felt no real anger at first. Anger would have brought warmth. What came instead was a clean interior coldness, the sudden drop in temperature of a room after someone has removed all the furniture and the people who'd lived there.

The credits rolled.

As contractually promised, his name appeared beneath “based on the novel by.” It was placed lower down than that of the visual-effects supervisor and just above the animal-welfare disclaimer, although there had actually been no real animals beyond those generated by computer. So it could be safe to reasonably assume, that they, were presumably, beyond the need for any real welfare.

He felt something in him go very quiet and very cold, a feeling that had nothing to do with disappointment, which was too small a word for what had actually just happened, and everything to do with a more specific, total grief. The grief of watching something you truly loved being worn as a costume, by something that had never really understood what it was for.

Priya squeezed his hand once, gently, and said nothing, which was, he thought later, exactly the right thing to say.

It was one of her finest arguments.

At the after-party, champagne moved through the lobby in formation. Movie executives congratulated one another with the moist enthusiasm of people who believed the opening weekend would provide a moral vindication.

Trent Vance found Localad beside an ornamental wall of flowers.

“How are you feeling?” Trent asked.

The question had clearly passed legal review.

“I’m still identifying the category for feeling.”

“The room responded incredibly well.”

“Yes, it did.”

“We preserved the emotional thesis.”

Localad looked at him. “Did we? Did we really?”

Trent’s face performed concern without admitting any kind of liability.

“In a cinematic register.”

Desmond arrived just seconds before Localad could test whether the nearby floral display would successfully support Trent’s full weight.

"I know," Desmond said, before Localad could say anything at all. "I know what you're feeling. I'm not going to pretend I don't."

Localad turned on him.

"Then why did you let it happen?"

Desmond's face did something complicated. Not defensive, exactly, but not entirely honest either, the face of a man who had made a series of choices over eighteen months that had each seemed, individually, defensible, and had woken up tonight to discover exactly what they had all just added up to.

"I didn't let it happen," he said. "I was just part of the machine that did it. Those aren't the same thing, but I understand if that distinction doesn't feel like much comfort right now."

“Well, that distinction must be very comforting for you.”

“No,” Desmond said. “But it’s accurate. Comfort left months ago.”

There was no defense in his voice and that deprived Localad of the pleasure of rejecting It.

Localad left the after-party within the hour. He left very early. Early enough for it to have been registered.

Back in his hotel room, he removed the studio supplied 'midnight authority' suit, and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time before he called Marjory, needing, more than anything, to hear a voice that belonged to the life he'd once had before any of this tragedy had started.

She answered immediately.

“Well?” she asked.

“They closed the Wound.”

There was a pause.

“The idiots,” Marjory said softly.

And because she understood exactly what that meant, Localad finally began to cry.

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