Okay but really think about this '24' film adaptation for a quick minute
Who is this for? (Both the movie and this blog post)
Look, this has been on my mind for months since I read about it, until I realized that, yes, I’m going to post about this, especially since I’m a bit busy until I can finish my planned next post—if you haven’t heard the news, they’re adapting 24 as a movie. If you’re under age of um… 24, I’ll explain the show to you thusly: 24 was a middling “prestige”-lite TV show, one of a number of awkward shows that existed as we came out of the height of NBC’s “Must See TV” and into the so-called “Golden Age of Television,” the insufferable glut of schlock “serious” television that we are encouraged to consider important rather than just dead-eyed time-filler. There were other shows I’d put in this category—Lost, for instance, maybe The L Word and The OC, I don’t know, this is a rough idea at best—
Anyways, the show was about Kiefer Sutherland as this John-McClane-esque fed and its presented in this very Paul Greengrass style—in fact I’m completely convinced the phrase “Bourne trilogy meets Die Hard” was uttered several times during the initial pitch—but there was an ingenuous twist. The show was twenty-four episodes long, each an hour long, and a season would effectively follow the events of one (very busy) day. Pretty cool, right? And now they’re making that into a movie. Yes, think about that for a second. A show wherein the entire premise was that everything that happened happened in real time over the course of twenty-four hours. And it is called 24 because of this conceit. And they’re going to make it into a movie. Something which usually clocks under three hours. Unless it’s made by, like, Bela Tarr. Which this won’t be.
It’s incredible how many terrible shows they make nowadays that are effectively just shitty movies with hours and hours of padding, and yet they have the idea to come back to 24 of all things and decide that this one needs to be truncated. The entire point of the show is that it’s twenty-four hours in real time. It is not called 3. Or 2½. It is called 24. It’s not even clear if Kiefer Sutherland is going to be in it. Does anyone even remember the show all that fondly, and, if they do, would they feel as fondly about it if you just retained the setting, got rid of the central gimmick, and didn’t have the actor who played the main character?
I mean real people, not people from Los Angeles.