After decades of promises, we may actually soon get a movie of Rendezvous With Rama. What’s been keeping you guys?
On the surface, it’s such a cinematic book. It certainly leaps out of Arthur C. Clarke’s bibliography: a straight, no holds barred, joyous leap into spectacle. It’s as if the brief was to up the sense of wonder of 2001: A Space Odyssey and amazingly that’s just what it does.
The trouble is, there’s almost no plot, and that’s always been the sticking point with the movie adaptations. There was talk of a movie as early as 2001, about the time the CGI was up to the task, but the thing was constantly shelved because nobody could come up with a worthwhile script. That wouldn’t be so bad — 2001 didn’t have much of a plot either, and did pretty well — except we’d been there before. Superficially, the 1984 movie of Clarke’s 2010 is much like Rama. Astronauts head off for a big abandoned object in space. They stay there a while exploring it. Then they come home. Nothing much happens in between.
In Rama, “nothing much happens” is not quite true. The book is full of action. And yet there’s nothing substantial to talk about except its big dumb object, a vast cylindrical alien habitat that comes drifting through the solar system. It’s all Clarke really cares about, though he bolts on all kinds of inconsequential episodes to up the word count. Is it enough to carry the film?
The discovery in 2017 of an alien intruder coasting through our solar system ought to make a Rama movie timely indeed. It also highlighted all our current failings as a spacefaring species. We didn’t actually detect ‘Oumuamua until it was already past the sun and heading outward. We have very little idea of its composition or shape. It could be a cylinder like Rama, or it could be a flat plate. We couldn’t even launch a probe to intercept it, let alone send people up there.
But could we send people up there, if we saw it in plenty of time — if it was exactly like the Rama of the book? All those billionaire space entrepreneurs strutting about with their tourism and colonization projects, and the answer is a definite resounding no. There’s no way we could go take a look at Rama. And therefore, we’d never know what was inside that intriguingly artificial hull.
But movies fantasize, and a movie about Rama could be set in an alternate modern day in which our space nerds all band together to hurl a group of humans on intercept. I would be much more impressed with the movie if that’s how it presents things.
Rendezvous With Rama has always been one of my favorite books, because I’m a sucker for sense of wonder. I’ve even created Rama-style cylinders of my own, most notably the Earth ships of A Thousand Years Of Nanking and Poems Found In The Wreckage Of A Multi-Generation Spaceship. The habit of Biome is a cylinder like Rama. It tweaks my imagination. But the book itself always disappoints me, every time I read it, since it’s not nearly as thrilling as the way I remember it.
Whatever movie is made of the thing must follow the basic trajectory of the book. An object is discovered moving through local space. A probe goes up, revealing it to be an artificial construct, a cylinder 20 kilometers across and 50 kilometers long, and light enough to be hollow. The spaceship Endeavour is sent to explore it, on a very tight window. By the time Endeavour makes contact the thing is within the orbit of Venus and there are just 30 days to perihelion, which will be much too close for the ship to stay there.
So they move in, they get inside, they explore, and then they hurry back to their ship and leave before things get too hot. And that’s basically that. Clarke’s famous slingshot ending (there are two more Raman ships heading toward the solar system) might have fueled a whole lot of book sequels which I haven’t wanted to read, but doesn’t really help the movie much.
Our first problem is our crew. In Clarke’s book, there’s almost no character building. Clarke, never really much of a people person, cared a lot more about his hardware than his human explorers. They simply facilitated the alien lost world. Moreover, Clarke unnecessarily throws in a slave class of genetically-altered super-chimpanzees called ‘simps’ in the Endeavour which have no purpose at all in the book — they’re never part of the plot — and would be an eye-rollingly bad addition to the movie.
What are Clarke’s simps for? I have the unpleasant suspicion that they are meant to contrast with the women on board the Endeavour. Clarke never thought much of women in space. Indeed, even though there’s a capable female member of the Endeavour’s crew, Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst, Clarke introduces her with a smarmy comment about what weightlessness does to human breasts. In the very same chapter as this he reveals the simps. He’s making a contrast, and not an endearing one.
Clarke’s sexuality is going to hover uncomfortably over the Rama movie because we cannot escape it in the book. The woman is a cipher. Much more interesting to Clarke is the boy Jimmy Pak (stop sniggering at the “packed” joke, guys) who is the only one to actually explore much of the ship, and at one point Clarke contrives to get him to strip naked.
It’s a tough call. If we can’t ignore the sexuality, we have to accommodate it somehow, and I very much doubt any filmmaker is going to express too much of Clarke in the movie. Queer space is going to turn away droves of potential viewers in all kinds of markets. I reckon that if we have any gay aspect to Rama it’s going to be that standard harmless science fiction standby, a lesbian scene or two.
This means we’re going to need to realign the crew a little. Here’s a full list of every Endeavour member that Clarke names in the book. There are others, but they’re even more faceless than most of these:
Commander William Tsien Norton
Lieutenant Joe Calvert, the pilot
Lieutenant Commander Karl Mercer, life-support officer
Lieutenant-Commander Jerry Kirchoff, executive officer
Technical Sergeant Willard Myron
Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst
Sergeant Ravi McAndrews, simp handler
Boris Rodrigo, comms officer
James Pak, junior officer
Sergeant Pieter Rousseau
One woman, a whole bunch of men, and mostly (but not exclusively) white-sounding names. We’re definitely going to have a more integrated and multi-national crew, with a bunch of Asian people. Almost certainly some Japanese or Chinese members, and at least one Indian member as a nod to Clarke’s own adopted home. In fact, let’s just go ahead and make Jimmy Pak an Indian actor. Maybe even a girl. I bet she doesn’t strip naked.
One more of Clarke’s traits should be noted here, which is that he always, throughout his entire career, hedged his spiritual bets. Clarke was a devout theist who pretended to be agnostic. In this case, we have mention of ‘The Fifth Church Of Christ Cosmonaut’ which Clarke refuses to ridicule. The movie is going to have to toe a very careful line with this, because we’ve already gone down this route in Prometheus and the results were not pretty. Best to avoid the whole area, but I bet it doesn’t.
And while we’re here, there’s an added complication. Our progress through Rama is interrupted with long, irrelevant chapters concerning a ‘Rama Committee’ based on the moon, which meets to cogitate about the intruder. Clarke mostly wants to pad out his story to 70,000 words, but he’s also making an uncomfortable point. The Rama Committee suggests Clarke believes that space exploration cannot be left to astronauts. It must be governed by a clique of scientists such as himself. Let’s assume all this is jettisoned in the movie, or it will get very tedious indeed.
Finally, Clarke throws in the titbit that our hero, Commander Norton, has two wives, one on Earth and one on Mars. Some of the chapters are verbal reports he sends back to them. This is simply a method to try to vary the narrative, not altogether successfully, but it’s also something we should jettison. Norton shouldn’t have a wife at all, and he certainly shouldn’t repeat the calls home that we already saw Heywood Floyd sending in 2001 and 2010.
Where’s the plot, then? Rendezvous With Rama is episodic and largely ineffectual, which means that a faithful movie adaptation is also going to be episodic and largely ineffectual, and the further we stray from this faithful adaptation the more the fans are going to squeal. Certainly I would also squeal if the movie moves too far from its original premise, and I really wish there was a better plot to the book. Indeed, I reckon the best thing Rama has done for science fiction is make generations of writers so dissatisfied with it that they’ve created their own versions, as I did.
The Endeavour heads off to intercept. We are bound to have a sequence of scene-setting when we get to know our crew, just like every other spacesuit drama. This is simplicity itself. They bang around the ship, they interact, we get to know their dynamics, job done.
Eventually they arrive at the object, giving us our first sense of wonder moments. They set down at the hub of the sunlit “north” face. They find a six-pronged wheel embedded in the surface, turn it, and open an airlock door. They enter, and eventually find themselves in a vast, completely dark cylindrical space with curved end walls. Flares show it to be 16 kilometers in diameter, 50 kilometers long, with all kinds of inside surface features. It appears to be a tomb (a term Clarke repeatedly uses), dead 200,000 years at least. The rest of the book is basically an account of their brief exploration of this interior space.
Technology has improved greatly since the book’s release in 1973. The slow descent and reveal that Clarke describes is not how we’d expose the secrets of Rama today, let alone in the future. We’d send in drones, we’d have laser mapping, we’d maybe even have intelligent robots. Much of the problem with the movie is going to be how we square these abilities with Clarke’s inching through darkness to reveal things only as the humans encounter them.
I don’t know the answer here. Rama is all about that reveal. Rob us of the human exploration and you rob us of the wonder. My suspicion is that it will work only if there’s some kind of calamity on board the Endeavour and all their gear is destroyed. Now we have a completely different dynamic: a stranded crew in an alien vessel. That’s going to be a tough sell.
In effect, nothing else happens except the awakening of Rama from its long sleep. What we seem to experience in the book is that when the space habitat comes close to a star it warms up, and in the warming up it bursts into brief life. Its frozen atmosphere turns back into gas. Things begin to grow. But actually, it’s nothing of the kind. Rama does awaken, but it only awakens in order that what seem to be maintenance robots of various kinds can do some housekeeping. If there is biological life on board the structure, we never meet it because it never awakens. We can only assume that Rama has some far distant destination, it hops from star to star to get there, and each time it reaches a star its automatics activate to ensure it’s all functioning correctly. We witness (but do not interact with) one of these times.
How’s the movie going to make sense of that? The answer is, it cannot, because it would rob the plot of necessary closure. We must meet the Ramans. We must encounter another species like ourselves. There must be that communion across the stars otherwise the moral of the story — I dunno, cosmic brotherhood, say — will be lost.
The obvious answer is for the movie to go dark, but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen. Dark is Alien or Event Horizon. Dark is the vibe the book gives us in all its early scenes, in which we explore Rama by flashlight. Dark is the creepy unknown. Dark has true danger in that hollow tomb.
But Clarke’s book doesn’t maintain the dark, and the moment the lights switch on in Rama we’re somewhere quite different: explorers in Eden. The pivot is jarring enough in the book. It would be ruinous in the movie. Now we’re in light. Light is Mission To Mars or The Abyss. Light is friendly aliens. Light is, let’s be honest, a comedy vibe very closely akin to that of Evolution, which includes scenes of alien awakening and development very similar to what we see within Rama. And surely we can’t go there, either.
There are sundry minor perils of the Verne school — the space equivalent of Journey To The Center Of The Earth. As the atmosphere heats up, we get hurricanes. (I’ve never quite understood this. I’m not at all sure why the atmosphere inside a spinning cylinder must rotate, except perhaps from being paddled around by structures on the inner surface of the rim. But I’ll bow to the experts.) Jimmy Pak goes off along the weightless hub in a sky-bike, crashes, and has to find his way back. I’m fairly certain this would need to become the bulk of the movie if it was faithful to the book. And I’m absolutely sure he wouldn’t be alone, enabling bonding and cuddles. There’s a thrilling sequence when the others rescue him from tidal waves on the Cylindrical Sea.
The rest is all scene-setting. We explore various enigmatic structures and learn little about them. There are all kinds of weird robotic creatures, which Laura dissects and which the explorers name ‘biots.’ They’re not hostile in the book. Indeed, the biots don’t intervene even when the intruders begin vandalizing the place, cutting open one of the buildings and tomb-raiding inside. The absolute worst aspect of the book, in fact, is this vandalism. Rama must surely have anticipated meddling aliens invading its precious ark. We really ought to have been summarily destroyed the moment we start leveling our cutting gear at their structures. And good riddance.
But even before the ship’s closest approach to the sun, the Raman day is over. It’s getting too hot. The lights dim, the biots all self-destruct, it’s time to go. Our heroes hurry back to the Endeavour and blast off in time to see Rama plunge into the sun itself to make a course correction and then shoot back off into the depths of space. And that’s the end.
Our movie can’t do that, surely. Our movie must have a swing-by of the sun that at worse traps our humans inside Rama until the vessel is sufficiently far away from the sun that they can leave. We can’t encroach too much, for example, on the Sunshine scenario. And that means our movie must have a much more logical Raman day: it warms up as the ship approaches the sun, and it cools down again as it moves away.
And yet — where’s the danger? Where’s the suspense?
We’d have to graft on all these things, and it’s going to be unpleasant. The simplest answer is conflict. Two competing crews, one American and one Russian. Political shenanigans like those we saw in 2010. I dunno, space pirates maybe, or a rival alien species that has squatted inside Rama since its previous star swing-by. There are many things you could graft on, meaning that Clarke’s novel is simply the stage setting for whatever quite different movie you decide to tell. In the final analysis, the problem with Rama: The Movie may well not be its cast but its conflict.
My feeling is that if you throw enough talented writers at Rama you’ll get an exceptional solution. My fear is that the movie makers won’t, and we won’t.
There is, I should add, a built-in conflict in the book, though it seems shallow and unconvincing even to Clarke who set most of his works against a simmering political climate — that’s the case even in 2001, where the Ruskies are being fed disinformation. Clarke clearly understood that Rama lacked excitement, so he shoved into its closing chapters an entirely irrelevant plot about a missile fired toward Rama by Mercury, whose militant colonists see the alien intruder as a threat. Acreages of the last third of the book, which ought to be spent on the interior of the vessel, are instead wasted on intercepting and defusing this missile.
Let’s assume the movie will not be crass enough to do the same.
Header: AI doesn’t know the book. It’s the best of all the options I got when I typed in “Movie poster style image of future astronauts standing inside a huge alien cylinder spaceship like Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous With Rama’.” What the hell’s up with their faces? And why are they all Caucasian? You pesky AI.
active maas 