Thoughts on the Upcoming Film Version of Without Remorse

I remember I was a relative newcomer to the techno-thriller genre when Tom Clancy's Without Remorse (1993) hit the stores.

Still, by that point I had already developed certain preferences. It seemed to me that Clancy was more interesting when he was writing wide-view portraits of geopolitical maneuverings involving submarines and space systems (like in, say, The Cardinal of the Kremlin) than when he was writing character-centered stuff where the "heavy artillery" is something carried in the hand (as in Patriot Games). And while this was long before I had grown cynical about prequels, especially the kind devoted to the "making of" some action hero (action heroes are wish-fulfillment figures, after all, and where their past is concerned less tends to be more), I still was not all that interested in a story of Clark's youth. Or intrigued by the associated decision to drop the genre's accustomed present-day emphasis to go back in time a couple of decades to the "last months of the Vietnam War" setting that seemed to me less appealing imaginatively than a contemporary scenario, the more so as, in the early '90s, the Vietnam theme seemed overfamiliar, even stale, as far as this sort of tale went.

I gave the book a chance, though. And it was more or less what I expected. It confirmed me in my impression that Clancy's always bloat-inclined novels bloated more severely and obviously when he was writing these more personal, smaller-scale stories than when he was writing the global scenarios, which at least had more threads to cut back and forth among, and material for interesting info-dumps, and bigger action. It confirmed me in my sense, too, that Clancy was prone to be generic when working outside the rather narrow specialty for which he is best known (as writers usually are). Still, it had its interesting bits, among them the way it worked as a sort of homage to the paramilitary fiction genre already in swift decline circa 1993, not least because of its combination of that genre's principal themes, even obsessions in one tale--the '70s fixation on special forces-trained vigilantes going to war with the Mafia on the streets of America, and the '80s fashion for stories about special forces raid into Southeast Asia to rescue Americans taken prisoner by Communist forces during the Vietnam War.

For the most part, though, I have not given the book much thought since, and was surprised to learn that Hollywood plans to have a Without Remorse movie out in September 2020.

This was, in part, because I thought Hollywood had cooled on silver screen adaptations of the Ryanverse. After all, there had already been two reboots which imagined a young Jack getting his start, first with Ben Affleck back in the 2002 The Sum of All Fears, and then Chris Pine in the Kenneth Branagh-helmed Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the latter backed by only a modest budget and given a modest dump-month-of-January release that led to a modest gross of the kind that does not have the Suits rushing to finance a sequel--which unsurprisingly meant that the other Clancy-based film projects were stuck in development hell the last time I checked, Without Remorse specifically included. Meanwhile the franchise seemed to be doing all right on the small screen with the Amazon Prime series now in its second season, so that I figured this would be the industry's emphasis for the time being.

But of course, that was an underestimation of its insane vehemence in exploiting any and every IP, especially anything action-y to do with the '80s, abiding by their preferred version of the old adage "If the millionth time you don't succeed, reboot, reboot, reboot again." We've just had Rambo 5 and Terminator 6, even though nobody asked for them, and Top Gun 2 is coming our way next summer, despite the extremely questionable timing for such a movie, as Scott Mendelson pointed out just a short time ago, if the film simply serves up more of the original in "a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise," it will "be both thin gruel and morally irresponsible considering the times we live in," but if it seriously examines what "overseas engagement" has meant in the decades since that original's release, it would probably offend "the very fans who have wanted this flick for 30 years."

Given the prevailing logic, more Ryanverse seems like a comparatively easy decision next to that.

For the time being not much seems to be available on the project. The word is that there has been filming in Berlin, but that may not signify much about the plot. (After all, these days film shooting locations are determined by the chase after government subsidy, and the German government has long been remarked for generosity here.)

Still, if the prior rebooting of Ryan is anything to go by, and there seems good reason to think it is, the makers of the film will have to set aside that homage-to-paramilitary-action-adventure aspect because it simply does not lend itself well to updating. (What real equivalents have there been to '70s Mafia-fighting and '80s MIA-hunting? None, because the genre sputtered out afterward.) Which makes me wonder what they will replace it with. Perhaps they have a concept. But then again perhaps not. After all, not having an interesting angle on the material never stopped a Hollywood producer from flogging an old IP one more time.

All the same, I expect I will be getting in another two cents on the matter over the course of the year.