The Tripods Are Coming.

Some of the first science-fiction books I remember reading were John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy, a fantastic young-adult series set on Earth—but an Earth that’s been taken over by aliens who stride about the countryside in giant mechanical tripods. These tripods have enslaved humanity by reverting our culture back to a medieval era, and—just to be sure humans don’t get too uppity—sometime around puberty, every teenager goes through a “capping,” a ritual in which a thought-controlling “cap” is implanted into their scalp. Meanwhile, rambling, crazed “vagrants” wander the countrysides between humanity’s villages—while they appear insane, they’re actually the only people who aren’t subject to the tripods’ rule. So these vagrants recruit youngsters to join their cause (e.g., effing up those stupid-ass tripods), and the books follow three young boys as they voyage to the hidden home of humanity’s resistance forces, venture into the aliens’ cities, and work to overthrow their three-legged overlords.

Anyway, they’re excellent books—I reread them a few years ago, and they were just as fun, smart, creepy, and weird as I remember them being when I was 12. And now, fresh after the bewildering news that his terrible film Knowing made a shit-ton of money over the weekend, director Alex Proyas is spilling details about the long-awaited tripods movie.

Proyas’ whole tripod-y interview is here, but the most interesting things in it are these: Proyas is planning on making the first book, The White Mountains, into a standalone film, and then hoping that it does well enough to justify adapting the second and third books; Proyas has changed one of the books’ main characters, Beanpole, into a girl; and Proyas is collaborating on the script with writer Stuart Hazeldine, who was also one of the masterminds behind Knowing.

In an attempt to get over my continuing astonishment at how bad Knowing was, I watched Proyas’ director’s cut of Dark City over the weekend. Thinking about Dark City—which, holy fuck, is still pretty great—and Proyas’ other films, I’m pretty sure the dude is only as good as his scripts: Dark City is pretty well-written, and he did a great job with that; I, Robot‘s script is solid and entertaining, and Proyas’ direction is the same; Knowing is just fucking stupid, and Proyas’ direction is embarrassingly cliched and lazy. (I’ll leave out any analysis of The Crow, which I’ve somehow managed to avoid seeing all these years, mostly because I’ve always feared that if I did see it, I’d black out and wake up in a Hot Topic somewhere, desperately smearing black eyeliner all over my face.) At his best, Proyas can be really, really good and really, really inventive; at his worst, he can be totally derivative and mediocre—so I can see his The White Mountains being nothing short of amazing, but I can also see it being dumbed down to something silly like Race to Witch Mountain.

Again, the full details are here (via io9), and that story also has some info about the BBC’s cheesy TV version of the books that aired in the ’80s. (Much like The Crow, I’ve always avoided that show, too, just in case I’d wake up the next day as the sort of person who wears Red Dwarf T-shirts and thinks Mr. Bean is funny.)

Also, because why the hell not, here’s the trailer for the direct-to-video The Crow: Wicked Prayer, starring Edward Furlong, Tara Reid, and that dude who plays Angel on Buffy. I somehow have seen this movie, which is yet more proof that I really need to stop going to Videorama while intoxicated.