I don’t care what anybody else says: I really enjoyed the BBC’s new version of Day of the Triffids. So it did not stick slavishly to the original (which I am ashamed to say I have not read) or to the previous BBC adaptation – it did what a good science fiction re-make should do and took account of changes in scientific knowledge, technology and society.Of course the story is not about triffids. It is about human nature and how society might react in certain circumstances, which is what always makes this story so depressing because you have to suspect that people would actually behave a whole lot worse than even Eddie Izzard did in this two-parter.
What I really liked was the fact that the programme supported my own personal theory that every crisis is caused by the solution to the last one. A source of ‘free’, clean, renewable energy solves the problem of AGW but causes a bigger problem later on.
Mind you, the real problem was the mass blindness caused by the solar flare. You have to imagine that things would still be pretty bloody awful after that anyway, and before too long there would perhaps have been other predators to worry about, although you imagine the immediate risk of packs of wolves or feral dogs would be low if they had also been blinded.
If I had to complain about anything it would be the compressed timescale of the whoel thing. In the previous BBC adaptation there was a real feeling of time passed as characters spent months or years in one place, finding it increasingly harder to travel far as nature reclaimed roads.
At one point, towards the end, I was worried that they were working towards a Hollywood-style happy ending, with a solution to the triffid problem, but thankfully that didn’t happen.
I have read the book, many years ago, but never mind that TV adaptations change things around, I don’t actually want a strict re-doing of a book and tend to get a bit irritated at people who do – to me that’s like going to see a live band and complaining they’re not exactly like the record!
In the triffids case, the plants were extremely well done this time, as scary as in the book, which the 1981 adaptation didn’t manage. I liked the strengthening of Jo Playton’s character, and bringing Torrance so much more to the front of the story as a ‘baddie’ was an interesting variant. The only downside to me was the character of Coker was diminished a great deal, making him quite a weak person. He is much stronger and more leading in the book.
The timeframe squeezing seemed to be because someone had the bright idea that bleak wintry weather would be an appropriate look for the whole film without considering that it would monkey with our awareness of the passing of time….