Don't Fuck With My Giant Squid
So, some of you might be aware that director McG was apparently working with Disney on a new version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I was less than enthusuastic about this prospect--though it was not specifically because of McG, as I do not share many geeks' hatred of him. (For one thing, the man actually knows how to film an action scene so you can see what the fuck is going on)
No, my problem was that it was planned to be a prequel, an origin story of Captain Nemo. While there's nothing wrong with that idea on the surface (other than Hollywood's unfailing ability to utterly fuck up any prequel, no matter how great the potential), it would mean getting rid of my favorite part of the original film, which made me fall utterly in love with it as a child. The Giant Squid Scene.
Like mother's milk, it is.
However, it appears that McG's production has gone belly-up, and another studio has stepped in to do an actual remake/adaptation of the original novel--directed by Sam Raimi. Now, despite the fact that Spider-Man 3 was a complete trainwreck and I wasn't impressed with Drag Me To Hell, Raimi is still one of my all-time favorite directors. So, one of my favorite directors remaking one of my favorite movies--sounds great, right?
Well, except that rumor has it that ol' Sammy is also set to replace my Calamari with onion rings. Or is he?
The hubbub over the lack of a giant squid comes from a very confused quote from the film's screenwriter, Craig Titley:
"What was fun and interesting is the giant squid that we all remember from the '54 Disney film, in the book it was just sort of like a school of regular-sized giant squids as we know them...We couldn't use a giant monstrous giant squid in ours because Disney owned that. That was something unique that they created for their film. So I had to try to find something that was as exciting as that. What we came up with is this underwater sequence inside an ancient temple that has been flooded. Inside this temple, these guys are walking around underwater and see things zipping by. You find out it's a nest of 100 giant squids, as we know the giant squids, not the monstrous size, so it becomes a sequence sort of like Aliens."
What Titley means, essentially, is not that Disney owns the very concept of a "giant squid", but that Disney's film introduced the idea of the Nautilus being attacked by one massive squid. The scene in the Disney film is present in the original novel by Jules Verne, but there it's a whole school of giant squid (although they are bizarrely referred to as "cuttlefish", probably due to an error in translation), as you can see in this illustration for the book:
Pictured: Horde of giant squid and Ensign Redshirt.
Now, the giant squids in question are rather smaller than Disney's version. But they're still pretty damned big, and actually that's about the size of real-life giant squid. But there's always the alarming possibility that Titley is confused and when he says "a school of regular-sized giant squids as we know them", he might mean Humboldt squid.
"Captain, we're gonna need smaller harpoons!"
Humboldt squid are very large, yes, capable of being seven feet long--but nothing compared to true giant squid, which can be close to fifty feet in length. And while it would be entertaining to watch a bunch of Nemo's redshirts get torn to shreds by a school of Humboldt squid--and indeed the fact that nobody has yet tried to make a movie about schools of them eating people, especially after their highly publicized invasion of the waters off California, shows that Hollywood really is out of ideas--it just wouldn't be as awesome as seeing Nemo and his crew doing battle with a horde of giant squid atop the hull of the Nautilus.
"Oh, shit, it's signaling for reinforcements!"
But even if he isn't confusing "giant" with "somewhat large", Titley's statements fill me with an altogether different sort of dread. He is talking about Nemo's crew encountering the horde of squid in a sunken temple and fighting for their lives. Worst of all, he refers to the sequence as "sort of like Aliens."
Does--does he honestly mean that he's planning to write a version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea where the Nautilus itself is never attacked by a giant cephalopod? Really? When has that ever worked out?
"Hey, whaddaya know, I managed to star in a film that is worse than Jaws: The Revenge!"
Still, I'm cautiously optimistic and willing to give Titley and Raimi the benefit of the doubt. And I'm telling you right now, giant squid or no, if they convince Shah Rukh Khan to play Nemo, I'll go see that movie on opening night.
FUCK YEAH SHAH RUKH KHAN.
In closing, allow me to leave you with this mysterious picture I somehow uncovered while searching for images of the giant squid from Disney's movie. I have no idea what it is for, I just know that it's a poster of Godzilla battling Gezora, the giant cuttlefish (as in an actual cuttlefish) from Space Amoeba:
Damn, now I really want some Calamari.
No, my problem was that it was planned to be a prequel, an origin story of Captain Nemo. While there's nothing wrong with that idea on the surface (other than Hollywood's unfailing ability to utterly fuck up any prequel, no matter how great the potential), it would mean getting rid of my favorite part of the original film, which made me fall utterly in love with it as a child. The Giant Squid Scene.
Like mother's milk, it is.
However, it appears that McG's production has gone belly-up, and another studio has stepped in to do an actual remake/adaptation of the original novel--directed by Sam Raimi. Now, despite the fact that Spider-Man 3 was a complete trainwreck and I wasn't impressed with Drag Me To Hell, Raimi is still one of my all-time favorite directors. So, one of my favorite directors remaking one of my favorite movies--sounds great, right?
Well, except that rumor has it that ol' Sammy is also set to replace my Calamari with onion rings. Or is he?
The hubbub over the lack of a giant squid comes from a very confused quote from the film's screenwriter, Craig Titley:
"What was fun and interesting is the giant squid that we all remember from the '54 Disney film, in the book it was just sort of like a school of regular-sized giant squids as we know them...We couldn't use a giant monstrous giant squid in ours because Disney owned that. That was something unique that they created for their film. So I had to try to find something that was as exciting as that. What we came up with is this underwater sequence inside an ancient temple that has been flooded. Inside this temple, these guys are walking around underwater and see things zipping by. You find out it's a nest of 100 giant squids, as we know the giant squids, not the monstrous size, so it becomes a sequence sort of like Aliens."
What Titley means, essentially, is not that Disney owns the very concept of a "giant squid", but that Disney's film introduced the idea of the Nautilus being attacked by one massive squid. The scene in the Disney film is present in the original novel by Jules Verne, but there it's a whole school of giant squid (although they are bizarrely referred to as "cuttlefish", probably due to an error in translation), as you can see in this illustration for the book:
Pictured: Horde of giant squid and Ensign Redshirt.
Now, the giant squids in question are rather smaller than Disney's version. But they're still pretty damned big, and actually that's about the size of real-life giant squid. But there's always the alarming possibility that Titley is confused and when he says "a school of regular-sized giant squids as we know them", he might mean Humboldt squid.
"Captain, we're gonna need smaller harpoons!"
Humboldt squid are very large, yes, capable of being seven feet long--but nothing compared to true giant squid, which can be close to fifty feet in length. And while it would be entertaining to watch a bunch of Nemo's redshirts get torn to shreds by a school of Humboldt squid--and indeed the fact that nobody has yet tried to make a movie about schools of them eating people, especially after their highly publicized invasion of the waters off California, shows that Hollywood really is out of ideas--it just wouldn't be as awesome as seeing Nemo and his crew doing battle with a horde of giant squid atop the hull of the Nautilus.
"Oh, shit, it's signaling for reinforcements!"
But even if he isn't confusing "giant" with "somewhat large", Titley's statements fill me with an altogether different sort of dread. He is talking about Nemo's crew encountering the horde of squid in a sunken temple and fighting for their lives. Worst of all, he refers to the sequence as "sort of like Aliens."
Does--does he honestly mean that he's planning to write a version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea where the Nautilus itself is never attacked by a giant cephalopod? Really? When has that ever worked out?
"Hey, whaddaya know, I managed to star in a film that is worse than Jaws: The Revenge!"
Still, I'm cautiously optimistic and willing to give Titley and Raimi the benefit of the doubt. And I'm telling you right now, giant squid or no, if they convince Shah Rukh Khan to play Nemo, I'll go see that movie on opening night.
FUCK YEAH SHAH RUKH KHAN.
In closing, allow me to leave you with this mysterious picture I somehow uncovered while searching for images of the giant squid from Disney's movie. I have no idea what it is for, I just know that it's a poster of Godzilla battling Gezora, the giant cuttlefish (as in an actual cuttlefish) from Space Amoeba:
Damn, now I really want some Calamari.