It is useless and truly beside the point, in a book of such compacted sweep, to condense the plot.
Still, the Jinling company, which hails from Nanjing and dates to 1955, takes certain liberties in condensing the plot to focus mainly on the young lovers.
That force is the weighty obligation of condensing a plot-packed, multigenerational doorstop of a novel — about big old, unruly Texas, to boot — into a work that floats through 3 hours 15 minutes of stage time.
And new material written to condense the plots and combine characters (by Paulette Kringslover, a staff writer on Fox's "Mulaney") has led to some wince-inducing couplets, such as: Escaping thus from nature's turmoil, We'll sail the stars to seek a wormhole.
Characters have been diminished and plot lines condensed from the more-than-500-page novel, but the bones of Mr. King's story remain.
With London and Robinson in Space, certain aspects of his work condensed – the somewhat antic plots of the early films had already given way in The Clouds (1989) to spacey travelogue, and the camera stopped moving so that the signature Keiller shot has ever since been a static linger that seems in its meditative way to last much longer than it in fact does.
After snarkily describing some of the preposterous action, he acknowledges, "Right now I can see that we are never going to get through at this rate, so I'll have to condense Mr. Saroyan's plot rather drastically".
It may be that condensing the complex plot of the Kate Atkinson novel on which the pilot was based into not quite two hours of TV was an impossible task.
Its plot, not easily condensed, involves Tesla, a hotel chambermaid named Louisa, her father and his best friend, a semi-functional time machine, a mysterious visitor from the future, and a white pigeon who is the object of Tesla's most ardent affection.
The plot was heavily condensed to fit the shorter running time of the film, with the main casualty being the removal of a subplot involving the journalist James Fullalove, who does not appear in the film adaptation at all.
