When Guillermo Del Toro announced he was going to adapt this film with an R rating under James Cameron’s umbrella with Tom Cruise in the lead, I felt that I needed to read this novella for professional reasons.
Now that the project’s been scrapped, I read it mostly out of curiosity.
So here’s the twist: it sucks. Some of the ideas in the “mythos” are neat – the Shuggoths kick ass – but nothing effing happens and the writing is, for the most part, flat. It is all backstory. No interesting characters. No forward momentum. Two dudes walk in the snow, see weird shit. The end. The only cool stuff is crammed in to the middle, narrated to us by a character who suddenly intuits all sorts of shit he’d never understand if he was looking at a city of cubes with black ooze everywhere.
It would have been a crap movie, even with GDTs awesome monsters running around.
