3-Iron 3-Iron
Aug
29
2008

Trailer For Vonnegut Adaptation 2081

Posted by Todd Brown at 8:55am.

Posted in Trailer Alerts , Sci-Fi & Fantasy, USA & Canada.

Here in Todd’s personal literary world there a few authors who rise right to the top of the heap.  I’m a big fan of Haruki Murakami.  Looking forward to the new Neal Stephenson rather a lot.  But the big three here in Todd-land are Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut.  I came to Vonnegut the earliest of the three and have read every word the man ever published in his life and love just about all of them.  Vonnegut has, however, proven rather difficult to adapt to the screen.  Yes, there have been attempts, and a few of them have even been successful - I rather like the recent Breakfast of Champions - but his structural quirks and distinct voice generally make life difficult when people try to bring him to the screen.

Enter 2081, a new feature based on Vonnegut’s short Harrison Bergeron.  It’s the story of a future world in which everybody is forcibly made equal thanks to the efforts of the Handicapper General - a government officer responsible for removing or handicapping anything exceptional about any particular individual.  Beautiful people are forced to wear masks.  Athletes are forced to wear weights to slow them down.  It’s a civilization based around enforced mediocrity until, finally, someone rebels.

Given the length of the original story you’ve got to know that the feature will be greatly expanded and while I’m not convinced that the trailer particularly looks like something Vonnegut wrote it does have its own sense of style to it.  Check it below the break in the Twitch Player.

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Reader Comments

  1. rustdog 08/29/2008 @ 9:14am

    Sean Astin already played the title character in a made for tv adaptation.  It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.  Just plain silly.

  2. Peter K. 08/29/2008 @ 10:29am

    And it was shot at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library.

  3. impossiblefunky 08/29/2008 @ 1:40pm

    It’d be nice if this were taken from the metaphorical into the real with the way we keep leveling the playing field by digging the whole thing lower.  Kind of like the “dumbening” of the world discussed in Idiocracy.

  4. rustdog 08/29/2008 @ 1:46pm

    The concept is very much like Idiocracy but the actualization of the concept like in Idioacracy wears on you after 15 minutes. Sometimes material is just not adaptable to film.  What happens is, it becomes a bad SNL skit that runs too long.

  5. The Visitor 08/29/2008 @ 8:56pm

    Vonnegut rocks.

    my favourite is The Sirens Of Titan, and i pray no one decides to adapt it into a film.

    Vonnegut is unfilmable, period.

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