My pitch for an Adam Strange film

I read with interest the other week that there is an Adam Strange film in the works. I rather like the concept of a normal human who is pulled away from Earth to fight fantastic creatures and villains on an arch-scifi alien world. If I were pitching that film I’d play up the displacement between Adam’s life on Earth and the outlandish world of Rann. We’d open with Adam Strange somewhere in small town America, sort of timeless, maybe the 1950s, maybe today. He’s a washed up field archaeologist who’s scratching a living investigating some sort of pre-Columbian site. On Earth the colours are washed out, the local town’s half falling apart, he’s driving a clunker, and nobody, not even Adam, really cares about his studies.

Rann, by contrast ran is the ultimate retro-scifi wonder land. Everything has fins and spires. It’s like art-deco has collided with the atomic age. The colours are vibrant, everything gleams with needless chrome. The alien monsters are improbable, the sky is slightly orange and there is more than one sun. Adam’s contact on Rann is the lovely Alanna and her scientist father. The atmosphere I’m thinking of is like the father and daughter from the Forbidden Planet. In fact the colours and look should closely follow that film. His purpose on Rann is to fall in love and save the girl from some evil. The danger could be a rival of her father, a particular monster, a threatened invasion, maybe even all three over the course of the film.

The key element and high-concept in the plot is the Zeta-Beam. It’s the teleportation plot device that shifts Adam Strange between the dead-end colourless Earth and the threatened utopia of Rann. In my pitch we’d never see Adam dematerialise – it would be as if the character has blinked and the world around him is different when he reopens his eyes. There would also never be any evidence on Earth that Adam has been away or has been seen dematerialising by anybody else. The shifts are so sudden that Adam could well be imagining the entire thing.

Is Rann real or is Adam slowly loosing his mind? His personal life on Earth collapses as he gives up on his job and surroundings – only Rann matters to him. We should really resist the urge to made Adam a dual Indiana Jones/Flash Gordon character, he’s only the hero on Rann. On Earth he’s nobody, maybe we should even drop the archaeologist career and leave him as something more mundane. Ben Kingsley as Alanna’s father is the easist character to cast and maybe Milla Jovovich for Alanna. The Rann characters are all played by non-Americans – it helps play up that displacement between the Earth which by contrast is very American, very safe. The emotional heart to the film in Alanna and Adam’s relationship as they get torn apart and reunited by the Zeta-Beam – the parallel with the recent Time Travellers Wife is obvious.