Adapting The Zero Stone to Film

It seems to me that The Zero Stone would be easily adaptable to film.  As such, I might make an attempt to write a film script about it, although it isn’t a novel that fills me with passion.  It is a fairly straightforward story.

Eet is a creature that would best be handled as CG today.  There was another minor non-humanoid character with four arms who could be handled as CG modifications to a human actor (he would make an interesting comedic cameo possibility).  There are humanoid natives which would either be CG or effects makeup, and a variety of creatures and plants, also CG.  It’s all starting to sound a bit like Avatar.

There is a fairly amount of telepathy.  However, most of it is verbal.  That could be recorded in the studio and treated with heavy reverb or whatever.  There is some mind reading, but almost none of it is described.  Instead, the fact of it is made evident through dialog.  There is one moment where two characters’ minds are linked, sort of like a Vulcan mind meld, and it would be treated similarly.

There is the Zero Stone itself, and it’s kin.  They don’t do much other than glow.  No problem there.

Spacecraft.  Lasers.  All standard stuff.  Some sort of primitive planet with religious zealots.

Off hand, there doesn’t seem to be any problem with the length.

Would it make a very interesting film?  The novel doesn’t make Murdoc Jern very interesting.  Perhaps a charismatic actor could make him more interesting.  The most interesting character in the novel is Eet, but Eet is not the protagonist.  More importantly, Eet is mainly interesting as a phenomenon, and he doesn’t have a very interesting personality.  On film, he could embody adorable cat characteristics, and that may have been part of the intention of the author.  He would have to be both cute as a cat and expressive as an actor.  Is the story, at the bottom line, an interesting one?  Its ending is not very spectacular.