No, I haven’t seen the movie. No, I won’t see it. (Well, I will, but not until I’m in NYC on “movie mocking” night.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, my point, briefly, so I don’t spend all day at the group gathering explaining it and reexplaining this point to people.<\/p>\n
In a Google Buzz conversation, I said:<\/p>\n
Frankly, the original iteration of the story always felt like ‘enough’ to me — even when I first heard about the movie, before all the racial hullabaloo and drama, my first thought was “what will this really add?”<\/p>\n
I mean, with Lord of the Rings, a movie presented a whole new visual medium that had never been explored (okay, yeah, Bakshi, but it was (a) not great and (b) not finished); I could see the POINT, and Jackson delivered on that point — excellent visuals of stuff I’d only ever seen on the page and in my head up to that point.<\/p>\n
We’ve SEEN a visual representation of the Avatar story already — it’s probably in my top ten TV shows all-time, and easily in my top five animated shows — and more to the point we’ve seen it in far more depth and detail and with more nuance than any movie series could ever manage, even a great one.<\/p>\n
I guess I just never saw the point. The fact that that the final product sucks perhaps bothers me less, since I was never that excited about it to begin with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here’s the thing: this movie was doomed to disappoint. Didn’t matter who was in it, who directed, or anything. Doomed.<\/p>\n
Why? Because the show was Great. Sometimes it was even Fantastic and, in my memory<\/em>, it’s damn near perfect.<\/p>\n
At it’s VERY BEST<\/strong>, a movie adaptation of the show could only be a Great movie, right? It’s not going to add anything: you won’t finally<\/strong><\/span> be able to see what Appa looks like, or finally see how cool the Fire Nation tanks are, or finally watch cool earth bending — you’ve always been able to see all that. To hear the words spoken by good actors. To et cetera et cetera.<\/p>\n
Put another way, the very best a movie adaptation of the show could manage is to not make anything worse<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n
It won’t add<\/em> anything. It’s like painting a copy of Starry Night — your ultimate goal in that endeavor — your overarching thought is: try not to fuck anything up.<\/p>\n
Say you make a Buffy movie. Just pretend. Then you get enough interest in the movie to make a TV show. You don’t retell the movie again. You go to the sophomore year in a new school. You move on. If you ever do a movie after<\/em> the show is done, you do something after<\/em> the end of the show, you don’t make a “Season One, the Movie” movie. I mean… just look at that idea: it’s clearly stupid.<\/p>\n
If your space western gets canceled, but you have enough fan support to make a movie with the same cast and setting, you tell the next thing<\/em>.<\/p>\n
If you make a show called LOST<\/strong>, you… well, you don’t<\/em> make a movie after you’re done with the show, because the story is done<\/em>, and the only thing you could do with a movie is go back and retell it again, and hope you don’t fuck anything up.<\/p>\n
I’m not saying anything particularly insightful here, am I? This is obvious, or at least it feels obvious to me: if the best you can hope for with a ‘new’ creative offering (in essentially the same medium (visual)) is to maintain the status quo with regards to that creative property, you are working on the wrong thing<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n
No matter how much money it might make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, I haven’t seen the movie. No, I won’t see it. (Well, I will, but not until I’m in NYC on “movie mocking” night.) Anyway, my point, briefly, so I don’t spend all day at the group gathering explaining it and reexplaining this point to people. In a Google Buzz conversation, I said: Frankly, the … <\/p>\n