Susan Cooper movie

[wombat1138]

Already in post-production. (IMDB has sidebar link to some photos, including Christopher Eccleston in costume as The Rider.)

Comments

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

I must be the only fantasy reader on Earth who not only hasn't read, but isn't particularly aware of Susan Cooper. I've heard her name (and that of The Dark Is Rising) here and there, but know nothing about either beyond the fact that they exist. I'm gonna assume that this is something I should rectify.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Dunno about *should*; I didn't particularly get into them in elementary school, and even though I'm re-reading them right now, they don't grab me on a visceral level. (Ansible has a one-patagraph pillory (http://news.ansible.co.uk/plotdev.html) of the series in a discussion of various Plot Devices Gone Wrong.)

However, eeedge and many of my other friends loved them, so I figured the film's existence might be of sundry interest.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

...wouldn't a sword of crystal break really easily? (Crysknives, of course, not actually being crystal.)

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

...maybe? (Though of course it is magical crystal with various supernatural bonus features, so ordinary rules don't apply.)

The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl) and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass. In one of her stories, Tanith Lee describes dagger-sized glass knives as undetectable Renaissance murder weapons-- stab your enemy, break off the handle, pound the blade all the way in so it disappears into his body, and heigh-ho, supposedly no obvious wounds-- but she may've just been making that up.

Alternately, "crystal" might be interpretable as any natural crystalline stone-- quartz? diamond?-- but yeah, diamond at least is relatively brittle and subject to shock-fracturing, hence its facetability. I have no idea of the stress capacity of gigantous natural spear-like crystals (http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/crystals/mainframe3.html) (though the ones shown are made of selenite, which is a fairly soft stone; still, wouldn't want to have one of those things jabbed at me).

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

The Aztecs kinda had obsidian swords and obsidian is just natural volcanic glass, although those weapons seem to've been more like a broom handle studded with outward-facing razor blades, rather than one big chunk o' glass.

That's just it, though. You would know better than I, but I'd think the lattice structure of almost any crystal, if formed into a single big chunk, would make it (somewhat) easy(ish) to fragment with a hard side blow. Unless I'm completely wrong, natch. I wouldn't want a diamond stalactite to fall on me, but I wouldn't want someone to whip the edge of a sheet of paper across my throat, either.

Whether fictional or not, the Lee glass dagger seems to make sense, since it's meant for assassination rather than dueling (I guess). I could once have sworn I'd heard about ice bullets being used as even less detectable murder weapons during the Cold War--freeze some water in a bullet-shaped mold, very quickly shoot your target, sneak away--but apparently MythBusters debunked this (http://www.tv.com/mythbusters/ice-bullet-exploding-toilet-who-gets-wetter/episode/285545/summary.html).

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

If the "crystal" is really glass, then its internal structure isn't terribly well organized-- it's amorphous so it doesn't have a definite cleavage plane, but that just means that when it's whacked, the pieces that come off tend to be curved rather than straight. (The same thing is true of "cryptocrystalline" materials, which are sort of glommed together from a lot of individual crystals that're randomly aligned and teeny enough that they might as well be amorphous-- I think flint works that way.)

Supposedly, certain rare types of jade are nearly crystal-clear and colorless; those would make pretty nasty weapons, since iirc jade has a sort of "felted" internal structure with flat plates interwoven with each other, making it extremely resilient. (There are anecdotes that in the big 1906 earthquake out here, one collector of Asian artifacts lost all of the ceramics when they smashed off their shelves onto the floor-- but everything made of jade just *bounced*.) However, I don't think jade fits terribly well into Cooper's idiom in this series.

[eeedge.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that I'm probably going to see it anyway. Sounds like they've messed up a lot of it, and it worries me that the official website lists it as "properties" in the URL. But these were some of my favorite books years ago (as wombat1138 mentioned), and I will see how they are butchered...

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

I will see how they are butchered...

From various places around the web:

"Hero Will Stanton (newcomer Alexander Ludwig) is now 13, not 11, and he is an American living in a small northern English village, instead of a native-born Brit. The character of the Walker (Jonathan Jackson) has been made younger-appearing and given a new story arc involving the loss of his soul";

"The film also adds several action sequences, including a chase in a modern mall and a fight among snakes in a medieval church, leading to the discovery of a secret crypt"; and

"[Gregory] Smith is playing [Will]'s older brother, an edgy young man with piercings and tattoos who questions their father's authority."

*hears faint echoes of screaming from way off thataway*