Based on Stephen King's very first novel, which he began at college in the sixties and eventually published in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
I read it 45 years ago, having already been partially fed it via intense, non-sequential gobbets by a Latin teacher who was clearly obsessed with it. An extreme authoritarian, I am certain he closely identified with 'The Major' and possibly anticipated this grim scenario more as utopia than dystopia.
In Prep school we'd long had a Latin teacher who could easily be persuaded to drop all the 'Sextus est in horto' bunk and just spend the lesson recounting the myths of the ancients in his engagingly camp manner.
But this one was driven by an inner mythology of a much darker variety and the only diversion we ever got were readings from this uplifting text where you 'got your ticket' if you proved inadequate to the task in hand. Every lesson came with its very own 'terrifying tomorrow'.
I'd been learning Latin fairly steadily since the age of five and I now associate this story fairly strongly with my decision to give it up prior to O level.
The source novel had a somewhat rumpled ending, perhaps a rather lame attempt to thwart the narrative's own predictability and the alternative fashioned for this adaptation is one of those you can see coming for roughly 350 miles.
Similar scenarios have been suggested to us periodically since this one popped into student Stephen's head. In a way, The Squid Game is the most recent. The trouble with the film is that it falls just short of sufficiency on many different levels, starting perhaps with budget, but also the dialogue, the back story and so on are not quite all there.
Possibly worth noting that this is one of those kinds of movies which may not get made once America is finally great again, because it was shot north of the border in Canada. (Spoiler: as were all but one of the participants in this event!)
No comments:
Post a Comment