Saving the planet from ecological disaster is all very laudable, but be careful what you wish for. In this two-part Anglo-Canadian production of John Wyndham's 1951 sci-fi novel, the voracious man-eating plants called triffids had been artificially cultivated as a fuel source, so successfully that triffid oil had enabled the world to wean itself off fossil fuels and thus curtail global warming. The story didn’t bother itself with those pesky climate change deniers.
However, nobody had foreseen the freakish intervention of dazzling solar flares which struck most of the global population blind. One of the by-products of the ensuing pandemonium was the escape of the triffids from the huge farms maintained by corporations like TriffOil, and before you could say “I’ll have mine on rye with horseradish”, the blasted things were roaming the countryside devouring people.
This theme of the double-edged nature of science running up against mounting climatological paranoia was a promising one, but disappointingly it vanished as soon as the hungry plants were on the loose and gobbling up the populace. Having established that leading protagonists Bill Masen (Dougray Scott) and Jo Playton (Joely Richardson) had survived the immediate crisis with their eyesight unimpaired, the narrative became a saga of the survivors’ fight for survival, as they tried to work out to how to stop the triffids while also avoiding the malignant intentions of Torrence (Eddie Izzard) and his proto-fascist private army.
It worked well enough as a survivalist drama along the lines of War of the Worlds or 28 Days Later, without ever managing to step up a level to become the alarming warning to viewer-kind that it had briefly promised to be. Wyndham’s fable had been converted into an above-average screenplay by Patrick Harbinson, whose credits include ER, Millennium and Law & Order, and this gave a high-calibre cast something chunky to work with. Ms Richardson, as radio broadcaster Playton, comfortably pulled off the strength-in-adversity thing, though she didn’t get to share any scenes with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who played a demented nun buying off the triffids by feeding them the weak and vulnerable members of her timorous flock.
The big surprise was Dougray Scott, who has somehow got away with a career as an expressionless lump of granite making primitive Scottish grunting noises. Here, he looked like a new man, imbuing Masen’s gruff determination with a believeable undercurrent of humanity, while also being fairly convincing as an expert in triffid science. Brian Cox played his hitherto-estranged dad, Dennis, the venerable Triffidologist Emeritus now pursuing his urgent quest for a triffid-nullifying solution inside the electrified perimeter of his splendid country home. Cox rarely lets you down, and he brought gravitas and a tangible hint of remorse for the time lost between himself and his son to the role, right up to the point where his lovingly hand-reared laboratory triffid wreaked a terrible vengeance. Blighter.
A word of praise too for the mercurial Eddie Izzard. Having managed to drag himself unscathed from the shattered wreckage of a crashed Boeing 747, he went on to overcome the grave handicap of being given a character without a history or any credible motivation to make Torrence deplorably evil and treacherous. You could see his triffid-infested fate coming about 30 minutes into part one, of course.
As for the triffids themselves, they looked suspiciously like houseplants from Homebase with a few added tentacles and a purple hoodie stuck on top, being wheeled around on trolleys. But I'm no scientist.
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