5 Recent Movies That Should Be Books
February 11, 2014 · from the Word & Film archive
We spend our days tracking books becoming films; today, the counterflow. Novelizations have a pulpy reputation, but some originals are so dense with implied backstory that they deserve the full literary treatment — not a tie-in, a real novel.
1. Inception — Nolan's dream-heist begs for the interiority only prose delivers; a novel could live inside the levels. 2. Her — Jonze's gentle apocalypse of intimacy reads like the outline of a great epistolary novel between a man and an operating system. 3. Looper — time-loop noir with a moral spine; give it to a crime novelist and stand back.
4. Gravity — ninety minutes of survival that a novelist could expand into a meditation on grief with orbital mechanics. 5. Pacific Rim — say what you will, but drift-compatibility is the best untapped SF premise of the decade; there's a trilogy in there.
The larger point: cinema has been strip-mining the shelf for a century, and the shelf is allowed to mine back. Until then, we'll keep logging traffic in the traditional direction — the catalog grows weekly.
