When I was a nipper, I can remember being scared witless by the original BBC adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel, The Day Of The Triffids. I can remember John Duttine trying desperately to survive as large, mobile (and quite obviously made of rubber) plants menaced civilisation. Still, it was better than the film version, what had Howard Keel in it.
And in 2009, there’s a new version. Yes, The Day Of The Triffids has been remade. Again.
Needless to say, what with this being a modern day retelling, they had to include mobile phones, because when you think about it, mobile phones would tend to undercut the drama of the situation a bit. So, you have to admire how the producers got round that problem by, within a mere 24 hours of the big cataclysm happening, saying mobile phones couldn’t get a signal (as shown on Joely Richardson’s character’s phone, a Palm Treo Pro… hmm, the BBC like giving characters in their shows old phones instead of cutting edge stuff like the Palm Pre, don’t they)…
Wow, that is one seriously useless mobile network, if the cell towers stop working within 24 hours. What a cop out!
Anyway, the plot. Plants called Triffids. Carnivorous, ambulatory plants. That are intelligent. Kept in farms (did anyone think that was going to end well?), to milk them for biofuels, thus ending our reliance on fossil fuels (on a side note, that is a very clever way to update the plot of the original). Solar storm. Everyone in the world goes blind, except the people who, y’know, weren’t looking at the sun. Society crumbles. Eco-nutter releases the Triffids from one of the farms. Hell on earth, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, Eddie Izzard does evil.
So, what are my thoughts on it, now that we’re halfway through (with part 2 on tonight)?
Okay, first up. Eddie Izzard as a villain? Granted, he seems to actually now be able to act, but he’s too cuddly to do truly evil. Although he does tricksy really well. Actually, no, you know what, Eddie Izzard worked as a villain. He brings comedy baggage with him, which actually makes him doing evil quite chilling. I’ll tell you who doesn’t work, though: Dougray Scott as the leading man. Let’s not forget that Scott was the man who was going to play Wolverine. He has a certain air of an unsprung trap about him. Presumably the producers saw that, too, which is why he gets battered into unconsciousness, seemingly, every 35 seconds.
Given that he seemed to spend most of last night’s opening episode with the look of a stunned duckling about him, it seems a waste of talent. And the flashbacks he had every single time someone belted him in the head got tiresome after about the 7th time…
And there’s the big problem. The Triffids. They looked decidedly dodgy in places, with the obvious rubber replaced by obvious CGI, but that wasn’t the real problem. No, the real problem is much simpler.
Plants. Are. Not. Scary.
Oh, there were hints of scariness, don’t get me wrong, and there was one particularly effective scene right at the end, with about three billion (or possibly six, I may have over-counted them) of the malevolent magnolias approaching through the fog, which was rather creepy. But it’s hard to get really freaked out by something that you can beat by wearing a ski mask and wielding a machete. They are, quite frankly, a bit rubbish. Even with the whippy stinger things, they are still just Venus fly traps with a god complex.
Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure why the 1981 TV version scared me so much. I think I was scared of my nan’s yucca plant, which just looked alien and wrong (seriously, it had spiky leaves and a giant pink spiky flower, you can’t tell me that’s right). Maybe I’ve just grown past the age where it’s possible to be menaced by broccoli. Oh, but don’t think the entire concept of the Triffids is going to escape my ire, either. I’m prepared to accept that, as presented in the story, they’re a viable source of biofuels. I’m also prepared to accept that the devilish dandelions would be farmed for said biofuels. I’m not prepared to accept that the scientists involved wouldn’t have thought to remove their stingers to make them harmless, thus rendering the whole concept of The Day Of The Triffids, whether it’s the book, the film, the TV adaptation or the other TV adaptation, entirely silly.
That’s some monumentally bad plotting, when your story’s about ambulatory, predatory, intelligent asparagus menacing blind people, and that bit isn’t the silliest part of it…
[UPDATE: Part 2. It got better. A lot better. Central rule of drama, throw Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox at something, it WILL get seriously better... also, the marigolds got scarier...]
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