Taika Waititi’s Klara And The Sun Looks Nothing Like Its Source Material
Is this really the story you want to play for laughs?
Taika Waititi has stayed booked and busy, but it’s been two years since his last sci-fi feature. The New Zealand director has helmed commercials, music videos, short films, and feel-good family sports movies, but he hasn’t dabbled in sci-fi features since 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
Thankfully, that’s about to change. While we await his Star Wars movie that’s been in the works for the better part of a decade, Waititi is releasing his adaptation of one of the most beloved sci-fi novels in recent years: Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. However, our first look at the movie has fans wondering if this pairing is a good idea at all. Check out the trailer for the film below:
Klara and the Sun follows Klara (Jenna Ortega), an “Artificial Friend” adopted by a menacing mother (Amy Adams) for her daughter Josie (Mia Tharia). When Klara learns about Josie’s difficult life, she tries to get the sun to help them. The trailer makes this seem like a bright-colored dystopia, highlighting the uncanniness of the AFs and their store manager, played by Natasha Lyonne in a frizzy red wig.
However, this cheeriness is rubbing some fans the wrong way. Ishiguro’s original novel seems childlike and simple at first, but eventually morphs into a meditation on humanity, artificial intelligence, and the power we place on faith when we have no other power in the world. This trailer doesn’t seem to contain any of that nuance, instead focusing on Klara's faceplanting into tall prairie grass and exploring the cheery dystopia.
Set to Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve Got You, Babe,” we see Klara face every problem with a big naïve grin, even when we see her journey to the “Sun’s house” to ask for help for her family. Much time is spent painting Amy Adams’ Chrissie as a villain, something especially highlighted in the final few seconds of the trailer, where she’s seen shoving Klara back in her box while saying, “You’re not the droid we’re looking for!”
Taika Waititi’s next movie is sparking discourse among fans of the source material.
So is this movie going to be full of sight gags and Star Wars references? At the very least, it appears as though Waititi is aware of the book’s true depth. “The more you read the book and the more you’re trying to delve into the relationships, the more you unlock and the more complicated it gets,” he told Vanity Fair.
In fact, it seems like Waititi anticipated these critics before the trailer even premiered. “At first, when I was writing, I was like, ‘Make this a Taika film and full of dumb f*cking robot humor.’ And that didn’t really work when I was writing it,” he said. “It took away from the book, and I’m like, ‘Why am I adapting this really amazing book and then trying to break away from it?’”
But is being aware of a problem enough to avoid it? That’s the big question. Some of this tone could be chalked up to a more lighthearted edit of the trailer, but from what we’ve seen so far, the pairing of the showrunner of Apple TV’s Time Bandits with a Nobel Prize-winning author could be just as mismatched as it sounds.
