Not Again: Shyamalan Releases Airbender Pics, Announces Trilogy
The first pictures from M. Night Shyamalan's "no twists, no trees" comeback, The Last Airbender, have been released to USA Today. Not a lot of surprises, since the film's look is heavily influenced by the cartoon it's based on (and incidentally, am I the only one who immediately hums the theme song to Mysterious Cities of Gold when reading about this project?). Oh, but there is one unpleasant revelation in this paragraph about Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel, who plays the film's villain. See if you can find it:
Patel, too, seems suited for the film, the first of a planned trilogy. He earned his black belt in tae kwon do before he turned to
Wait, I'm just gonna cut it off right there. Another trilogy? Another goddamned trilogy? Didn't we warn you guys about this already? Yes, we did.
This trilogy-ification is really harming our genre movies, especially when the trilogy is planned before the first film is even shot. Do you know what happens then? Nothing, at least in the first movie. The villain is never completely vanquished. The hero's journey is never resolved. The love story, never consummated.
Need a good example? Check out (or don't) Terminator Salvation, which was planned to kick off a whole new trilogy. Virtually nothing significant happens in the entire film, and the mythology is advanced hardly one iota. What typically should be compressed into the first act of a movie is now an entire first movie. Were they to remake T2 today, they'd wring three films out of the same plot.
So, Night? if you really want to make an ongoing series out of Airbender, can I advance a thought? Such a thing already exists. It's called Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it's the cartoon your movie is based on.
· First Look: Actors put up a real fight in 'Airbender' [USA Today]
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But wasn't the animated series made up of 3 "books", or seasons, therefore making it a logical choice to turn each season into a movie? Sort of like Harry Potter, if you exclude the anomaly that is the 7th book getting turned into two movies instead of one.
"Mysrerious Cities of Gold"? That has to be THE most obscure reference in the entirety of the internet. Hats off to ya.
I will find someone else who remembers that show!
as if m.night isn't obtuse enough? now we have to piece together 3 of his movies to make sense? wtf?
I loved that show!! i think they released it on dvd not too long ago.
The cartoon series that it's based off of consisted of 3 seasons, each called a "Book" and each containing its own conflict, climax, and resolution which still feeds into the grand finale at the end of Book 3: Fire. There is too much story to be compressed into a single movie - a trilogy is the only logical way to go. Compressing about 7 hours of Book 1 episodes (there are practically no filler episodes in Avatar - each is somehow important to the overall plot) into 2 hours gives it plenty of material, and the season finale of Book 1 is suitably exciting and gives enough resolution that the entire thing doesn't feel like the setup for the rest of the seasons/movies in the trilogy. It was planned as a trilogy (of seasons), it's being made into a trilogy of movies... a trilogy is the only format in which this story works.
As for simply watching the cartoon series instead of watching a movie series, if each season is made into a 2 hour movie (or even 3 hours), you'd still be compressing 22 hours of cartoon episodes into 9 hours of movie. If the storytelling and visual quality of the movies is kept on par with the cartoon, then watching a film series would still be quicker. Fans of the original cartoon will still see the live-action movies, and people who become really interested in the story from the movies might want to see the expanded version in the cartoon. Even if the movie isn't great, people can still see the cartoon, so it's win-win.
Yeah...
Like the others said, This movie's story is based on SEASON 1 of the cartoon series. So obviously there was going to be a book 2 and 3 movie based on Season 2 and 3 (pending the success of this first film).
Do a little research first before ranting out k? 🙂
agree pretty much with what you're saying here, not sure about the poster above me though.
in France, the country from where "the mysterious cities of gold" came, most people from 25 to 40 (and many others) still know the show pretty well from the title song to the plot passing by its major characters.
It's an incredible show and the last airbender show is even more awesome. The movie is a sad failure.