Chapter Nineteen:  The Critics Weigh in

Localad, himself being unable to sleep, read most of them before dawn, in the specific, self-destructive way that people read reviews of things they already know they are not going to like reading about.

Localad read the first review at twelve-oh-seven.

He read the twentieth at three-forty.

He knew this was not sensible, but neither is repeatedly pressing a bruise yet humanity has maintained this odd practice with a great dedication.

The major movie trade publications were polite in the manner of diplomats describing a coup. By industry standards, gentle.

A good serviceable if unremarkable entry in the fantasy genre, one wrote, elevated somewhat by committed practical effects work and undermined by a script that never seems to trust its own source material, occasionally haunted by the more interesting story beneath it.”

Another praised the practical visual effects, Brick Holland’s physical commitment and the catering van being visible in no scenes whatsoever, before concluding that “the screenplay never trusts silence long enough to discover what it might contain.”

Localad read that sentence four times.

A stranger had understood in thirteen simple words, what the studio had spent eighteen months avoiding in several thousand meetings.

Then, the audience-facing reviews, less bound by any professional restraint, were considerably less gentle and a lot less diplomatic.

A widely shared piece on an entertainment site ran under the headline "PURRADISE" IS A SOULLESS CASH-GRAB THAT BETRAYS ITS OWN SOURCE MATERIAL, and the article inside it, which Localad forced himself to read completely despite every instinct telling him to close the tab, laid out in careful, damning detail every major change made from what the writer described as "the surprisingly moving, quietly devastating novel this film claims to be based on".

Someone, somewhere, had clearly tracked down early excerpts, had read whatever fragments existed online from Localad's years-old forum posts, had done the work of comparing Jasmine to Brand, the eleven knights to Ashwin, the unresolved Wound to the exploding vortex, and what the book had promised to what the film had delivered, and had found the gap between them not merely disappointing but, in the writer's own words, an act of creative violence performed with excellent production values, against a story that really deserved so much better than a demolitions-franchise star and a shouted thesis statement standing in for twenty years of grief.

Localad read every word.

He felt ashamed of how relieved he was.

Localad had not written that sentence. He had not written most of what the reviewer praised as evidence of the book's quality, hadn't authorized the excerpts, hadn't asked anyone to defend him. 

And yet reading it, at three in the morning in a hotel room two thousand miles from home, he felt something crack open in his chest that had been sealed shut, carefully, for months. The specific relief of being seen, finally, by a stranger who had somehow understood what had been lost, when he himself had been forbidden, by a signature on a restraint clause, from saying so out loud.

Being publicly defended is not the same as being restored, but after months of having his perceptions softened, translated and placed into meeting minutes, the blunt recognition felt like oxygen.

The internet of course, divided itself into its preferred shape: camps.

One camp actually enjoyed the film and resented being told their enjoyment required a defense.

Another camp had read the excerpts and regarded the movie as evidence for an all-in parliamentary inquiry.

A third camp had seen neither film nor book but still managed to possess strong opinions about both, which is the one of the internet’s largest and best-funded traditions.

Mrs. Alvarez telephoned Localad at six in the morning Los Angeles time.

“They ruined the woman,” she announced.

“Good morning.”

“She was a woman for a reason you know?”

“Yes, she was.”

“And the knights. Where were all the knights?”

“Well one of them survived the consolidation.”

“That is not survival. That is a soup.”

Localad closed his eyes.

In the background, he heard the Meridian Cove diner opening, crockery moving, someone asking for coffee. Home now existed at the other end of the call in nothing more than ordinary sounds. And for one single moment there, he could have sworn he’d even heard the dulcet tones of his own shop’s doorbell.

Mr. Okafor came on briefly.

“We saw your name,” he said.

“It was small, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but we knew where to look.”

The film's opening weekend numbers arrived on Monday, three days later.

They told a story of their own: solid, respectable, entirely unremarkable, well below the "tentpole" ambitions Trent Vance had been chasing since that very first meeting eighteen months earlier, and considerably below the projections the studio had built its eight-figure streaming deal around.

They were not catastrophic. Catastrophe would have had some grandeur. They were respectable, soft and insufficiently enthusiastic, the commercial equivalent of a doctor saying that one should perhaps sit down.

The film earned much less than had ever been projected. The studio blamed mixed reviews, competitive scheduling, audience fragmentation and several other mixed nouns that had not attended nor been invited to the premiere.

No official statement made, dared even consider or blame the possibility that people simply did not love the film enough.

Industry analysts, quoted in their trade press papers, attributed the softer-than-expected opening to "a mixed critical reception" and "a crowded release calendar," neither of which, Localad had noticed, had mentioned the specific, vocal online backlash that had followed the trailer's release months earlier and had continued, unabated, through the film's opening weekend. 

A slow-building current of disappointment from people who had read a book that no longer existed in any recognizable form outside of a drawer in Localad's childhood apartment.

Trent issued an internal memorandum describing the result as “a platform-adjustment opportunity.” Somewhere, a hostage negotiator suddenly felt plagiarised.

Desmond called before the headlines did, his voice carrying a strain Localad hadn't heard in it before, not even during the worst of the rewrites.

"The numbers aren't good," Desmond said. "I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from a headline. The studio's not thrilled. There's talk of the sequel being scaled back, maybe shelved entirely, depending on how the second weekend holds."

“Cancelled?”

“No one says cancelled this early.”

“What do they say?”

“Paused pending strategic re-evaluation.”

“That sounds a lot healthier.”

“It isn’t.”

Desmond went silent.

"So, are you calling to warn me, or to ask me to help fix it?"

"Both, honestly," Desmond admitted. "I don't have a good pitch for you right now. I just didn't want you finding out from Twitter."

Localad thanked him, hung up the phone, and sat for a long time in the quiet of his apartment, thinking about the review he'd read three nights earlier, the one that had understood, better than almost anyone in the entire eighteen-month process, exactly what had been lost. And thinking, too, about the restraint clause sitting in a drawer full of legal documents he'd signed, the one that meant he, of all people, the person who understood the losses most completely, was the only person in the whole world, that was contractually forbidden from actually saying so.

It prohibited him from disparaging the film, its producers, financiers, creative personnel and any other closely affiliated entities involved but whilst it was remarkably comprehensive in its scope. It did not however, prohibit the film from disparaging itself.

“Are you sorry it failed,” Localad asked, “or sorry for what it became?”

Desmond took sufficiently long enough to answer, that the answer became quite trustworthy.

“Both,” he said. “But not equally.”

After the call, Localad sat beside the apartment window.

The city stretched out beneath him, as bright and busy as ever and utterly uninterested in any kind of private grief. Unless of course, it could be sold and packaged before lunch.

Online, strangers said the book deserved better.

The book itself remained unpublished.

For the first time in all of this, that fact seemed less like a historically verifiable truth and more like a mistake.

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