My Thoughts on “Paradise Lost 3D”

Even though my brother, and maybe a few of my college professors, call me the “worst English major ever” (I think it was when I compared South Park‘s ‘Simpsons Did It’ episode to Thoreau and Emerson’s ideas of originality that sealed the deal), I did appreciate John Milton‘s Paradise Lost and other epic poems that we studied. I was amazed at how grand and vast everything seemed in its description of Lucifer, Death, Sin and the battle between Heaven and Hell. I was giddy like Brick Tamland from Anchorman when I would describe it to people.

There were angels and demons and a man on fire and I killed a guy with a Trident!

Epic poems like this, The Iliad, and Beowulf are ripe for film adaptations, right?

I thought so until Troy  and Tristan and Isolde. While Troy was a noble effort it fell far short of the potential that The Iliad carried with it and, to me, that would be even easier to capture on screen than the likes of Paradise Lost. Alex Proyas (I, Robot, Knowing, Dark City, The Crow)  was recently brought on to bring Paradise Lost to the big screen and it is even rumored to be in 3D. While I enjoyed Dark City, and to some degree The Crow, I don’t think that Proyas can pull off an epic of this magnitude. There are very few directors who I think would even be able to come close to something like this. Some might argue James Cameron, but not me. James Cameron  would probably try to turn this into an Avatar action- type story with hardly any inkling of the depth or religious symbolism that the poem had.

Now I can be the King of Hell too!!!!

Personally, even in my “worst English major ever” opinion, this is a bad idea and that this is one epic poem that should be left alone and untarnished by Hollywood.

I am kind of a purist when it comes to that stuff, though. What are your thoughts? Who would you want to see direct this? Is Proyas a good choice? Or should this even be brought to the screen at all?

~Chris