Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is heading from Arrakis to Rama. After he finishes up Dune: Part Two (which was greenlit after Dune: Part One’s commercial success), the director will take on a feature adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project is backed by Alcon Entertainment, the producers behind some genre shows you might have heard of—Prime Video’s The Expanse and Netflix’s The Witcher. Morgan Freeman is also a producer via his production company Revelations Entertainment, which previously held rights to the 1973 award-winning novel.
Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama involves a group of human space explorers flying toward Rama, a large celestial object hurtling toward Earth that humans think is an alien spacecraft, marking the world’s first contact with alien intelligence.
“This is one of the most intelligent works of fiction in the genre; it poses as many questions as it does answers, and is a work for our time,” Alcon co-CEOs Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosov said in a statement. “It’s perfectly fitted to our friend and collaborator Denis’ brilliant sensibilities and specifically to his love and passion for science fiction. We are also pleased to work with Morgan and Lori, who have a long-standing passion for this IP.”
It will still be a while until we see this adaptation in theaters, as Villeneuve still has to make Dune: Part Two. In the meantime, you can give Clarke’s novel a reread and speculate what Villeneuve’s Rama will be like.
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As I recall Rendezvous most of the plot involves solving technical issues. Not very sexy if extremely interesting to hard science fiction readers
@1: Villeneuve has been here before. The Arrival story had no action or explosions and mostly revolved around linguistic issues. Villeneuve took that and turned it into an excellent SF movie. He ha a lot more to work with here.
If Foundation can be made interesting, anything can.
I love Clark but I think this is actually his most overrated story by a long shot. And don’t even get me started on the Rama sequel’s, so bad
He could adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Did anyone ever manage to not tear those Disco-era cover windows?
I imagine it’s possible to make the travelogue that is RwR watchable, but it’s going to need to deviate from the book, which can be summed up with, “Big dumb object shows up, we visit it.”
What it needs is an Anthony Bourdain-like curmudgeon (or perhaps Stanley Tucci’s scientist from The Core can have another adventure), to find the fascinating in the stuff they trudge past. But if it’s just, “Well, we didn’t get eaten by that.” then it’s not much of a movie.
Loved the book, looking forward to the film¡
@6: Just checked my copy, it’s in good shape except for a small nick in the lower edge of the cover window. I think I bought it in ’74. No serious tears. :)
Love the story, and that is a good director for it. I love SF that isn’t based on guns, explosions and conflict. I just pray they ignore the sequels; the original left me wanting more, while the sequels left me wanting less.
Sadly, A Fall of Moondust never gets any attention in this context.
Cover window only lasted a few years: too many re-reads. But I still have it.
Yes, if Foundation can be hacked into some semblance of a story, then Rama has a chance.
And remember: Ramans do everything in threes…
I have to agree with everyone else. It’ll have to be a very loose adaptation as the book is fascinating and engrossing, but it is basically a quite dry travelogue that leaves Rama as mysterious at the end as it was at the start. The sequels are terrible and get progressively worse. Clarke has a really poor view of humanity in general, and I was often left scratching my head saying “Why would they do that?”. He seemed to forget it was a small closed system with finite resources and wrote it like a wilderness adventure with the strong dominating the weak and people generally being horrible to each other.
Wow Xmas has come early for me!!!
Dare I say it, are we entering a golden age of SF films comparable with the 50’s?
I have been waiting for a very long time to see Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama made into a motion picture, as has Morgan Freeman. And I can’t think of a better director to direct it than Denis Villeneuve.
Isn’t there a political subplot with the mercurials wanting to destroy Rama?
@11, I adore a A Fall of Moondust!!
As @13 said, the book “leaves Rama as mysterious at the end as it was at the start.”
That is the only thing I remember about reading it (once, when it came out). The impenetrableness seems very likely in first contact, but it sure doesn’t make a satisfying story. Should’ve been an essay.
Well, I also remember the tripartite nature of the alien things. I choose to believe they were rotationally symmetrical while not also bilaterally symmetrical (because I love that look).
How about they just design the alien sets and props and make it a VR walk-through?
Oi, #2, did the attempted assassination attempt on the heptalumps not mean anything to you?
#16 princessroxana: Yes, one of the primary suspense plots of the book is from the Hermians (Mercurians?) that are convinced that the alien craft is up to No Good. So they send a probe to the thing armed with a half-a-Gigatonne thermonuke warhead that the intrepid exploration crew must defuse, which would also be a prime hook for the adaptation. Because why else would you send a massive hollow probe umpty light years but to Doom Us All…?
Clarke being Clarke, Rama has its own agenda.
#7 joelfinkel: Agree, some scientist/adventurer/other talking head would be necessary to explain What’s Going On. But that should be trivial compared to the massive overhaul of characters/plot in Foundation.
@18, I also remember scenes of political debate among the planetary representatives of the solar system. The rep. from the most remote settlements, (Saturn? Neptune?) is humorously referred to as the ‘Ambassador from Outer Darkness’ and has been heard to ask plaintively ‘What about comets?’
@@@@@ 2: Seconded. It’s an excellent, yet essentially unfilmable story, yet Villeneuve pulled it off magnificently.
(I found that somehow he sapped all life out of Dune, but apparently I’m alone in that.)