Fans of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke were buoyed in December by the news that French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve had been tapped to direct the forthcoming adaptation of Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvous With Rama.

Considered by some to be among the front-runners for the Academy Award for Best Picture at next week’s Oscars ceremony, Villeneuve’s excellent track record with science fiction includes the underrated Arrival (2016), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and last year’s critically acclaimed box-office smash Dune. This makes him perhaps the most sought-after director when it comes to sci-fi movies, and securing his services for Rendezvous With Rama – which famously spent most of the 2000s and 2010s in development hell – was widely seen as a coup.

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But it’s not just Villeneuve’s involvement that gets us excited.

The Source Material Is Excellent

     Gollancz

If it never quite achieves the heights of 2001, Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama gets close. Set in the early twenty-second century, the film concerns the efforts of astronauts to intercept Rama, a mysterious, cigar-shaped object hurtling towards the inner Solar System. On their arrival, the astronauts discover that Rama is an enormous alien spaceship in the shape of a cylinder, complete with a breathable atmosphere, land, and waterways inside.

If Clarke’s somewhat thin characterization left something to be desired, the sheer visceral appeal of exploring a new world in the confines of a spaceship was alluring to sci-fi fans. The novel won a slew of awards on its publication, including science fiction’s highest honor, the Hugo Award, in 1974, and several sequels followed in collaboration with American author Gentry Lee. While it’s far too early to speculate about the beginnings of a Ramaverse, it is clear there is ample scope for expansion.

Hollywood Does Well With Clarke Adaptations

     Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The quintessential Clarke adaptation is, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood as Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, the crew of the Discovery, a spacecraft bound for Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black monolith orbiting the planet. While some commentators at the time criticized the film’s glacial pacing and inscrutable ending, the film has stood the test of time, frequently appearing on critics’ best-of lists.

Less well known is Peter Hymans’ 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), the adaptation of Clarke’s sequel to 2001, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982). The film benefited from intelligent, understated performances by Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren in the lead roles, with John Lithgow, whose stock had risen following his turn in the box-office hit Footloose earlier in the year, supporting as jovial engineer Curnow. Nominated for five Academy Awards, the film enjoyed modest success at the box office. If its Cold War-era subplot – an increase in tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over an armed confrontation in Honduras – did not initially seem to have aged well, it gains in credence in today’s polarized world.

2001 and 2010 brought Clarke’s visions to life in a series of stunning vistas that were utterly unlike anything seen on screen up to that point. Moreover, 2001, in particular, had a lasting influence on the science fiction film. Kubrick’s insistence that all the sets be destroyed to prevent them from being recycled for use by other film productions did not stop later designers and directors from copying the austere, hi-tech aesthetic that characterizes the living quarters of the Discovery. Expect more spectacular visuals in a Rendezvous With Rama adaptation.

Fans Finally Get To See an O’Neill Cylinder in Action

     Paramount Pictures

Not excited? You should be. The idea for an O’Neill cylinder dates back to the early 1970s with Princeton professor Gerard O’Neill. During a physics class in 1973, he set his students up with the task of designing a habitat designed to house large numbers of people. The result was a proposal for a massive, hollowed-out cylinder with living space on the insides that rotates along its long axis to provide artificial gravity. It has become a much-loved staple of science fiction fans everywhere and famously formed the central concept of Michael J. Straczynski’s long-running television series Babylon 5 (1994-98) (soon to be rebooted by Warner).

However, almost fifty years after the idea came to prominence, big-screen depictions are still startlingly rare. In the pre-digital era, this is hardly surprising. The extreme difficulty encountered in rendering such a locale in a believable way dissuaded most directors from even attempting it. But today, as the fleeting depiction of such a cylinder in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) showed, presenting an O’Neill cylinder in a believable way in film is well within the capabilities of special effects designers. Seeing Rama from the inside will be a real treat.