Clive Cussler reportedly hated every minute of the 1980 film adaptation of his 1976 novel Raise the Titanic! and swore to avoid selling the movie rights to any more of his adventure novels. By 2005, though, when Paramount offered him a star cast and buckets of cash for his hit 1992 novel, Sahara, he gave it one more shot. The writers changed so much of his story that Cussler vowed (for the second time) never again to trust a single soul in the movie industry, and as I recall that horrible movie today, I don’t blame him.

I first watched the film in 2005, before I had ever picked up a Cussler novel, and I recall disliking it immediately. The thought of watching two treasure hunters—who happen to be American, but by no means southerners—-powerboat down an African river to “Sweet Home Alabama” makes me laugh even now, just thinking about it. And many years later, now that I’ve come to know Cussler’s characters so well, I can’t begin to imagine how Matthew McConaughey reminded anyone in casting of Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, or how whiny Steve Zahn is supposed to portray the barrel-shaped, curly-headed Italian, Al Giordino. And casting Dwight Schrute as Rudi Gunn? Come on! I’m all for artistic interpretation, but in this case, I’m up in arms for Cussler’s rights as an author. Don’t mess with his creations.

While the film follows the same characters in the same setting as those in the novel, the stories are really quite different. In the novel, Cussler melds four strong storylines into one full tale, without forcing the pieces to connect in unnatural ways. Kitty’s disappearance ended up saving Dirk and Al’s lives; the gold mine was an inhuman side-project of the enemy; the detoxification plant involuntarily threatened to kill all humanity for the sake of the mighty dollar; and the lost Civil War ship was simply a side-project that had very little to do with anything. The disconnected nature of the book was, in retrospect, quite refreshing—not because I like chaos, but because it lent an air of (moderate) believability to the tale.

Cussler makes an appearance in this book as an old prospector, and Dirk and Al endure more pain here than in many of Cussler’s most recent installments. The villain in Sahara isn’t the world’s most evil guy, but rather just your average unethical businessman passing himself off as a philanthropist, but who actually prefers to poison villages, hoodwink nations, and torture former-employees as they dig up gold from the ground. Not so strange at all.

Perhaps my enjoyment of the book comes thanks to my hatred of the movie and love for Cussler as an author, but so be it. I’m not sure what happens to movie rights after Clive Cussler passes from this earth, but if Hollywood starts busting out Dirk Pitt movies again, I believe they really have nowhere to go but up.

©2017 E.T.

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