That Underdog Band Who is Low-Key Really Fantastic

Muse is that.

So before this week, I'd heard like maybe four songs by Muse through the span of my life. Uprising was on the radio quite a bit (and my dad really liked it), Starlight was also on the radio a bit (one of my ultimate favourites - it has a cool piano part and the lyrics are poetry), Madness (took me a bit to like it, but the climax is pretty good) and recently, Dead Inside (which is really awesome and dark and creepy and the climax of this song is honestly spine-tingling).

So I'd heard a very small portion of Muse's music. I'd liked all that I'd heard, but I hadn't really sought out anything more.

Then, as I was on one of my Internet strolls, I started, out of curiosity, to look up Project MK Ultra. This is related to the topic, I promise.

So Project MKUltra is a typically messed-up piece of history related to the Cold War, in which throughout the sixties and seventies, the CIA did a lot of top-secret experiments on unwitting participants to see if they could actually control people's minds. This is one of the creepiest things ever, and if you're not getting that yet, allow me to make this clear to you: THIS IS ONE OF THE CREEPIEST THINGS EVER. One infamous experiment involved the death of a bright scientist (they drugged him without his knowledge, and he jumped or possibly fell out a window. This is historical fact). There were a lot of other experiments like that, and they often ended similarly, which didn't stop the CIA from carrying on the Project for a pretty long time. Which is pretty messed up.

Anyways, as I was taking in all this strange-and-creepy-yet-true stuff, I stumbled across a comment that said, more or less, "Well, at least Muse made a cool song out of it."

Excuse me? Someone made a song out of this?

So, because I generally like Muse, and because I desperately needed to hear what kind of song could come out of something that's so wrong on a fundamental level that it would be hard to discuss normally, I looked up the song.

The song is freaking AWESOME.

The guitar part is addictive to listen to, and the lyrics are oddly poetic ("A universe is trapped inside a tear" always gets me. Always), and it has these violins playing for suspense as "They are breaking through...... now we're falling/we are losing control" happens and it's just such a cool song.

So later this week, I was having a problem. The problem was that I was sick and tired of all my playlists, didn't feel like making a new one, and needed something to play while I was doing my homework without me having to choose a song every three minutes, but also wasn't the same thing on repeat. My solution was to try something different and find an album on YouTube by a band I maybe liked (but not an album I knew by heart, like Bastille. I was looking for something different).

So I looked up a Muse album on Youtube, since I now liked five of their songs, and hey, that's pretty serious stuff. The first album that came up was an album of theirs called Resistance, which I clicked on and began to do my homework.

First of all: every song on that album is profoundly different in sound. This is a wonderful thing. It makes it very exciting to listen to.

Second of all: every song on that album is extremely similar in theme. This album had songs with titles such as Uprising, Resistance, Unnatural Selection (not to mention MK Ultra), and it became increasingly clear that most (if not all) of the songs had something to do with fighting against an oppressive society. Which is cool.

Thirdly: as I listened to the lyrics, I heard the words "You'll wake the Thought Police" in the song Resistance. Then as I listened to a song called "The United States of Eurasia", it suddenly became glaringly obvious that the whole album, in fact, was based on the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

And that's freaking awesome.

As you may know, I have a bit of weakness for artists who write songs about, well, anything besides romance. Romance, while probably meaningful to those who write about it, is horridly overdone for someone like me, who has no romantic life whatsoever and isn't particularly interested in seeking one out. I was happy enough to hear Muse writing about things non-romantic, like fighting an oppressive regime. I was both overjoyed and intrigued when I finally (and it took me way too long) understood that the oppressive regime they were talking about was, in fact, Big Brother and the Party. As you may have realized, I have an even bigger weakness for artists who write songs that are stimulating not only musically, but intellectually as well (remember when I realized that Bastille wrote songs about Icarus? And Pompeii? And Laura Palmer? And WRITING?).

And it's not only that they write songs about cool things; the songs are actually good. United States of Eurasia has a really cool interlude that sounds almost oriental before it returns back to the rest of the song, which sounds more than a little like Queen. So that's an odd mixture, and odder still, it works.

Unnatural Selection has an awesome, intense guitar part, as well as some of my favourite lyrics ever, including, "I'm hungry for some unrest/I wanna push it beyond a peaceful protest/I wanna speak in a language they will understand" and, "Counterbalance this commotion/We're not droplets in the ocean". God, it's so awesome.

Resistance has one of the most powerful choruses, and it's cool because the singer actually interrupts the background singers to go into the chorus, like he really is resisting something, and he goes into the chorus with so much more power than in any other part of the song - you just imagine him, like, breaking down a door at that part, and it's with such powerful lyrics as well: "Love is our resistance!"

And of course Uprising is just really good, but I'm not mentioning that as much because I've known that song by heart for a solid three years if not longer.

I love discovering awesome new music. It's like finding a bunch of diamonds in a pile full of worthless rocks.

All in all it's super cool and I'm so happy to uncover a band that's actually worth buying the whole album.

Also they've inspired me to actually read 1984. Yes, listening to a rock band made me want to read. And a rather intellectual novel, at that.

Take that, rock-music-is-for-mindless-punks people.

Book-to-Movie Adaptations I'd Like to Make: The Vindico

So lately I've become extremely interested in adapting books into movies.

Not in a Books Rights Activist way, of course, but rather in a genuinely interested and curious way. Because it occurs to me that adapting books into movies takes a certain understanding of the story. A movie cannot, by definition, be exactly like the book, but one doing such an adaptation should have a decent enough understanding of the story the book told so as not to bastardize the entire thing.

For instance, the problem with the Percy Jackson movies is that the screenwriters didn't know where to stop with their changes. They completely lost the point the author was trying to get across and the movie turned a fairly witty and smart book completely mindless.

Now, on the other hand, the 1960s version of the Lord of the Flies must have been written by literally copying dialogue out of the book. I mean, word for word. But that didn't do any better, because books don't make movies, and the movie was horridly boring and slow (some would argue that the book was as well, but those people would be wrong).

And so the trick must lie in striking a balance of telling the story the book told, but feeling free enough to tell it in your own way.

Fascinating.

So I've been trying stretch these muscles by thinking of books that could, potentially, be good movies, and thinking of how I would do it, and what, if anything, I would change.

I'm going to start with The Vindico.

And I'm starting with The Vindico because there are so many ways that story could be told better. As in, better than the book did.

So The Vindico is a book I picked up in Chapters. It's set in a world that very closely resembles this one, except that the world is guarded by a league of heroes, aptly named... the League of Heroes. These are all people who have been born with superpowers and decided that that made then the chosen ones to protect the world.

Of course, there's also a league of supervillains, not-as-obviously named The Vindico. Only the name of their organization and their very intimidating villain names are not so much common knowledge - the general public would only really be able to say, "Wait, wasn't that that guy from that other incident?" instead of "Oh my god it's The Torturer!" (Seriously. One of the villains is called The Torturer. Why he's called that when the public doesn't know who he is is a question that has haunted me for a while now).

Anyways, there's been this ongoing war between the Vindico and the League, but eventually the Vindico decide that they're getting kinda old for this but they can't just give up, so they recruit (read: kidnap) a few kids with the idea of mentoring them into becoming supervillains and being the next generation.

These five kids are the main characters of the book. James, who is given superstrength by The Torturer; Lana, who is given super strength/agility by a villainess called Avaria; Hayden, who is helped by a villain called Leni to reach his full telekinetic potential (apparently telekinesis and telepathy can't be artificially given, so you have to already have an aptitude for it); Emily, who is mentored by a villain called Rono to be the techie - you know, he invents evil machines and whatnot, but otherwise, she doesn't really get any superpowers; and Sam, who is helped by a (canadian) villain called Sliver to help reach his full telepathic potential.

This book had so much potential.

But it was over-edited.

We have five main characters, but only focus on the three that happened to be involved in a half-assed love triangle. What about Emily and Sam, who were doubtlessly the quirkiest characters of the five (between Emily's blunt and matter-of-fact approach to the fact she's getting kidnapped, and Sam's young and adorable naivete about being an everyday hero), they definitely needed to be explored more. Instead we get a half-assed tragic backstory from Emily in which her parents don't hate her but don't really love her either, and Sam's biggest piece of growth is apparently that he... develops a crush on a girl who reciprocates. Like. There were so many other, more interesting directions you could go with that (especially considering he fancies himself an everyday chivalrous hero and then is kidnapped to be trained into villainy? AND THAT'S NEVER PLAYED WITH?!)

The problem is that in an attempt to trim the fat and be a more, sort of, "efficient" form of storytelling, the author gets into this habit of telling instead of showing. Sam tells us that he saw video of his mother not caring that he'd been taken, we're told that Emily's parents didn't love her, and perhaps one of the most irritating ones considering it's a major plot point, we're told how Lana and Hayden's relationship progresses, but we don't get to actually witness any of this.

Not to mention that there are a hundred plot lines that the author left completely untouched. Sliver hints that he's going to betray the Vindico, Leni hints that he plans to take over the world single-handedly (and kill Hayden in the bargain, apparently), the book begins to notice a change of loyalties occurring in James and Emily, the book hints multiple times at hidden similarities between Hayden, the carefree jokester of the group, and Leni, doubtlessly the cruelest and most evil member of the Vindico, and finally, Leni puts a bomb on the roof of Lana's parents' house.

These are all plotlines that the author began and never, ever followed up on.

And I just don't see why you wouldn't take advantage of all that. Those are all really interesting plot lines that the author put out and then decided to ignore. It's like offering someone an ice cream sundae, and then when they say yes, you go "Great!" and take away the ice cream and chocolate sauce until you only have a banana. Like, you said you were going to give me the sundae. Where'd the sundae go?

It would have made the climax a hundred times more exciting than it was.

And all those flaws is the reason I would really like to make a movie of this book.

Now the thing about this is that the movie would not be for what I affectionately call Books Rights Activists or purists or whatever. The movie would be my vision of the books potential.

So what I would do is, first of all, rather than tell the story mostly from James's perspective, which is what the author does, I'd focus more on Lana as the audience surrogate.

I choose Lana for a few reasons. First of all, I wanted to rule out Emily and James immediately, because in the movie I would focus a lot more on their conflict of loyalty (in which their mentors are some of the first to really take them seriously as people, which strengthens their loyalty to them, and by extension, their desire to actually become villains in spite of their mostly good natures). The conflict of loyalty needs to be seen and interpreted from an outside force in order for the audience to see it more than James himself does, because it's a gradual thing that James doesn't realize is happening (Emily is more astute about it, and realizes it more consciously, but that's not the point). That leaves Hayden and Sam and Lana.

Then I had to rule out Hayden, because Hayden has a hidden-depths storyline that also needs to be viewed from an outside force in order to fully appreciate. Hayden already knows that he has hidden depths, but it needs to be a relative surprise for the audience, and no one was more surprised than Lana.

Which is one reason why I prefer Lana over Sam, but the main one is that Lana simply has more to do with the story's end-game than Sam does. Lana's the one that first escapes the Vindico and triggered the mutiny against the villains, the first one to kill one of the League, etcetera. So, as much as I love Sam, Lana's the logical choice for an audience surrogate.

Secondly, we would get a lot more time with the kids and their mentors, so we really get a feel for the relationships there (as well as a way to gouge their progress as super-people, rather than the literary version of a training montage that the book gave us). For instance, Rono and the Torturer seem relatively supportive of their proteges, whereas Avaria and Leni apparently train their proteges by yelling at them and beating them. (The book is less clear about Sliver. Pretty much in general the book is unclear about Sliver and what the hell game he's playing. Apparently Sam is so unimportant that not even his mentor matters). This is so that we can set up the conflict of loyalties within Emily and James, while keeping the others more or less wholeheartedly loyal to the League.

All backstories - of which there are many - would be told either at the beginning of the movie as we're introduced to every character, or, if the backstory is particularly important, through flashbacks. The tell-don't-show approach to backstories got really tiresome in the book, and would doubtlessly be even worse in movie form.

The climax would be morphed entirely in order to accomodate the plot lines that the book so short-sightedly discarded. It would address Sliver's questionable loyalty (he seems to be a work-for-myself character, rather than an homour-among-thieves character. This is interpretation from very little text), Leni's play for ultimate control, the question of Hayden's morality and James and Emily's loyalty. So, perhaps instead of rapidly switching teams as the teens do near the end (first they're anti-Vindico, then they're pro-Vindico anti-League, then they're anti-everybody, then they're pro-League anti-Vindico), it would be more along the lines of the teens temporarily choosing different teams from each other. Really, that's what I was looking for to begin with.

Sam's arc would have much more importance. Just, in general. Especially considering even in the book he saves their asses at the end.

Also, the love triangle would be down-played. When it comes to stuff like that, less is more.

We'd also need more world-building in order to fully understand the importance of the League and the Vindico, respectively.

Also, I feel like the movie would have to play up the Vindico's cruelty, in general, and their villainy. I say this (and this is partly related to the issue of world-building) because the Vindico is a group of six, where the League appears to have at least twenty if not even more. So why is the Vindico, like, a threat, instead of an annoying fly in the the League's face? Well, the answer would be that we'd have to see them doing something genuinely evil instead of something resembling a petty crime, which is what we get for most of the first half of the book. We need to play up the menace. That way, when the light-hearted moments hit, (which is an integral part of the tone of the book and not something I would change in spite of everything), mood whiplash can kick in and jar the viewer enough to stay.

I think Leni and Avaria's evil would be played up more. By the end of the book, they're the ones that the author clearly wants us to fear, so in the movie we'd have to give the audience reasons to fear them. The Torturer and Rono are interesting because they're fairly affable toward the kids in general, but positively gleeful at the aspect of tearing down the League, so I think we could treat that as a flash of darkness (a way to make James and Emily backtrack on their loyalties, perhaps?). The Baron appears to be more or less a blank slate in that he never really is outwardly violent toward the League, but he is an extremely active member of the Vindico and seems to be the mastermind. Yeah, I think I'd play him as a Chess Master who appears affable only because he treats his offense on the League like a game. So, while not frighteningly evil, someone to give the kids pause, for sure. As for Sliver, I think I'd play him more morally ambiguous than evil. He hints at betraying the Vindico, but for his own reasons rather than for the greater good.

Also, playing up the menace would have an added bonus of raising the stakes when the climax finally kicks in. What always bugged me in the book was that when the climax kicks in and the teens conduct their mutiny, they keep acting as if the Vindico would kill them if they had the chance, when there's really not a lot of evidence (except for a few tell-don't-show traits the author haphazardly plants) to say that they actually would. So if we treat the Vindico as if they're actually menacing, that'll raise the stakes when the teens ultimately betray them (although, as I said, that betrayal will go down a bit differently in my adaptation of this story).

And the thing is, the seeds are there. The author goes down a road for a bit where the Vindico are very strategically isolating the kids from their families and friends, and then subjecting them to such sleep deprivation that they can barely bring themselves to function, but are forced to because of the Vindico's orders (which they follow presumably because they're a menacing presence, though it's hard to tell). Those are ideas that I like, but the problem is that he plays it so low-key that it doesn't seem to factor in at all when the teens start actively making decisions. And that has to change. Even if the characters don't break, that's fine, but we need to understand that someone is, in fact, trying to break them. That way, when the characters do break - like Lana - it'll actually mean something.

See, I don't want to change things, per se, I just want to play a few things up and play a few things down.

Imagine it like this. I'm sitting at a mixing console in a recording studio. You know, that thing with all the slidey things that you slide up and down when you're adjusting the sound output? The book is giving me stuff, and I don't want to change what it is fundamentally, only slide a few aspects a few notches up and slide a few aspects a few notches down.

I think more or less I'd follow the same storyline, it's just that you'd get a lot more focus and elaboration on stuff that the book doesn't. I'd tell the story in a way that makes it seem, to me, as the one adapting, that the story's being fully told.

Make sense?

Okay then.

This is fun, I think I'll do this some more. It's interesting speculation. Maybe I'll even give it a shot with a book I really liked (rather than one I lament for wasted potential).

God, I'm a nerd.