http://www.cep.unt.edu/~hargrove/bombadil.html

Tom Bombadil definitely is a case of a character where visuals can’t capture what he’s meant to be very easily, and yet neither could exposition. He only makes sense (barely) in the total world-creating breadth of Tolkien. Though the Balrog is a good example on the other hand of a character whom we’re told is ineffable in some respect where some aspect of that was carried forward through an effective visualization. He wasn’t just a giant demon, I think.

The wise thing that the Narnia filmmakers did was to recognize that no matter what they did, a talking beaver was going to look funny, so they might as well run with that through exaggeration of character and through choice of voice-actors. Another interesting place where they faced an interesting challenge was that Lewis insists (repeatedly) that centaurs are very grave, serious, grand characters and that this is communicated somehow by their visual bearing. They tried pretty hard to pull that off with the main centaur general (who I think is an invented character not in the original book).

I suspect screen versions of American Gods or Anansi Boys, as well as all of Lovecraft, would suffer from a similar problem. I think a weaker version of this problem hit the Narnia adaptation. I kept thinking, I knew this book had a talking badger, but I had never thought how silly that would look. Sure, we can make a giant Cthulhu with tentacles, but we might laugh at it.

Of course, this may be a bit off-base, since the challenge of filming a Burroughs novel is only partially related to digital effects, and is also connected to the lack of standard narrative traits (character, plot, etc) in his novels.

I remember one shot in particular that showed the Enterprise “in orbit” around the sphere. The scale of the shot was just all wrong. The horizon was far too close, and there was a visible curvature to the sphere. That ignores, of course, the fact that that close to the sphere, the gravitational force on the Enterprise would approximate the force created by an infinite flat plate, making an “orbit” impossible.

Okay, yes, I’m nerding it up here beyond any reasonable limits. But my point is that the presentation you’re referring to completely failed, in my opinion, either to depict a Dyson sphere realistically, or to toss realism in the garbage and capture the essence of the thing.

Imagine this: a Dyson sphere built to the size of the orbit of Venus would be about 150 times the size of the Sun, and thus seen from Earth would subtend something like 75 degrees of the sky. What would it look like? Nothing. Just a giant black hole in the sky where no stars shone through. Or rather, that’s what it would look like for a little while, before the Earth was ripped apart by tidal forces.

If you were close enough to the exterior surface of a Dyson sphere (assuming you had some magical way to illuminate it) to be able to resolve features smaller than a planet, it would look like an infinite flat plain, stretching out to the notional horizon in all directions.

Not very interesting, in terms of movie special effects.

Interesting thesis about Ringworld’s sheer scale putting it out of reach of impactful representation. Though it seems to me that there are probably other ways of “selling” the concept and creating a sense of wonder (cue the John Williams music …) Star Trek: TNG pulled it off (more or less) with a Dyson Sphere in the episode “Relics.” And we see a fair approximation of the Ringworld in the Halo videogames. So I’m not convinced that size alone puts the Ringworld adaptation out of bounds.

I think “Ringworld” would be difficult to render on-screen because sight isn’t sufficient to really capture the idea. You could model the whole thing out mathematically, saying that your point-of-view is six feet above a structure with such-and-such geometric properties, and let the computer handle the rest. But I don’t think it would look very impressive. You could go shoot the whole thing on location and track in a dashed line in the sky and get the same results, because the darned thing’s too big to see.

Last night I was thinking about a book called “Ring” by Stephen Baxter. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it concerns an unknown and unknowable alien race constructing an objection millions of light-years in diameter and setting it rotating to take advantage of the frame-dragging effects at the center to punch a hole in the universe. Such a thing would be incredibly boring on-screen, because it’s made of loops of “stuff” that are as wide as a proton and twenty million light-years long. Even if you could somehow fudge that to make it visible (flashes of blue light faking Cherenkov radiation, maybe) you’d either be so far away that it would be invisible, or so close that you couldn’t see the large-scale structure of the thing.

I don’t remember the details of the book’s climax, but it has something to do with traversing the structure in a closed time-like path to avert some disaster or other, an idea so abstract I’m not even sure it can be visualized, much less visualized compellingly.

I can’t remember who said it now, but I once heard somebody describe Stephen Baxter as the greatest living horror writer, because his ideas are so unimaginably big they’re either totally incomprehensible (if you don’t get them) or they chill you right to the center of your soul (if you do).