El Reg reports
Ridley Scott has signed on to make Philip K Dick's Nazis-in-America story The Man in the High Castle for Amazon Studios, according to industry mag Deadline.
Scott's production firm Scott Free and X-Files writer Frank Spotnitz will make the alternate reality tale in which the Nazis won an extended World War II and are occupying the US in the '60s. The project was originally supposed to be made by Syfy into a four-hour miniseries.
The sci-fi author is clearly a favourite for Scott, who previously directed Blade Runner, and for Hollywood fodder in general. Two versions of Total Recall movies have been made, along with Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau.
The Man in the High Castle, a Hugo-Award-winning novel, is set in 1962 and tells the story of American life under Fascist rule while the Axis Powers Japan, Italy and Germany plot against each other.
The story is one of a number of new projects to be greenlit by Amazon Studios as video-on-demand firms ramp up original in-house productions. Netflix has enjoyed huge success with series House of Cards and Orange is the New Black which have racked up Emmy Award nominations and wins and Amazon has been racing to catch up with projects like Alpha House and Betas.
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At CounterPunch, playwright Chris Welzenbach makes it clear that almost all movies "based on" Philip K. Dick works have not been true to the author's originals.
He notes an exception before reviewing the latest try.
One bright spot is Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006), which closely adheres to Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel--a dark dystopic journey into madness. Linklater employs a technique called interpolated rotoscope to present the action from an animated remove and uses a subdivision pocked by neglect as the film's location, and does actually capture Philip K. Dick's nightmarish conception.
Now comes Amazon's "adaptation" of his 1962 novel, The Man In The High Castle, produced by Ridley Scott and developed by Frank Spotznitz. An alternative history set in 1962, The Man In The High Castle imagines a world where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won the Second World War and the former U.S. has been divvied up into the Pacific States, controlled by Japan, the Rocky Mountain States, ostensibly under Japanese control but where actual authority remains ambiguous, and the United States, composed of the midwest and the eastern states, that is firmly under the Nazi Reich.
In its original form, The Man in the High Castle is an intriguing examination of the I-Ching and the role fate plays in deciding human affairs. By contrast, Frank Spotznitz's television series is Spy v. Spy with swastikas and rising suns.
Spoiler alert: Welzenbach goes into great detail about the 10-part series and its differences from the book.
Previous: Ridley Scott Will Produce Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" for TV
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday July 29 2014, @12:46PM
"tells the story of American life under Fascist rule"
And how is this different from switching the channel to Fox News? Seems you could save a lot of production money there.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday July 29 2014, @02:00PM
+1 funny.
Oh for the mod points.
(Score: 1) by Adamsjas on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:10PM
Cute, but nonsense.
Once hollywood is done with this story it will portray the america we know today and equate it with the glorified nazi state.
Which is exactly the opposite of fox news which, if anything, glosses over american failures.
the film can't help but turn out to be a political hit piece. wait and see.
(Score: 2) by TK on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:31PM
I was really hoping to cancel my Prime membership in January.
After the Paycheck and Minority Report film adaptations, I had stopped looking forward to PKD movies, shows, etc. I'm hoping that after losing so much ground to Netflix, Amazon knows to leave well enough alone and let the creative types be creative.
There also seems to be a BBC miniseries in the works since 2010, [theguardian.com] and a SyFy miniseries in the works since 2013. [variety.com]
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:00PM
Scanner Darkly was a decent adaptation though. There's hope.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:03PM
Nope. They both passed on it in the end, so now it's gone to Amazon.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:14PM
Yeah. No. Fuck Ridley Scott. I saw Prometheus. I'm never paying a single penny to that cunt ever again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:07PM
Would it have been better if they had left it as the prequel to Alien instead of the movie before the prequel to Alien? Alien wasn't a masterpiece either, but its nice to finally get some information on the creators of the Xenomorphs.
(Score: 1) by ah.clem on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:32PM
"Fixing up" Philip K. Dick's writing since 1982 - Sorry, IMO a total asshat. Hopefully he keeps his shitty little "re-imaginings" off of "Ubik". Douche. Complete douche, and I'm usually not a negative person. IMO, he's just an arrogant little piece of shit with an overblown ego.
Read Dick to get the real story.
Sorry, but dilettantes fucking with good Sci-Fi just pisses me off.
(Score: 1) by PapayaSF on Wednesday July 30 2014, @02:11AM