75th Tumblelog |
A place for Lanny Heidbreder to write while he's too lazy to finish his own site. |
A year or so ago, I listened to a series of lectures on CD about Tolkien and other fantasy literature. The narrator recounted a story from his childhood: He was in elementary school, and he decided to take a crack at writing a play based on a scene from The Lord of the Rings. He chose as his basis the Council of Elrond, and in his lecture he says something to the general effect of “Given the entire breadth and depth of this epic journey, I chose to reenact an Elves’ faculty meeting.”
I fear that the Myst movie might become something similar.
In their most recent production-related blog post, the Mysteriacs react to the Prince of Persia movie’s shoddiness. They rightly say in that post that a big problem with all past video game movies is too heavy a focus on superficial action, and too light a focus on a solid story.
But my concern is that the Book of Ti’ana film may not have enough action to keep anyone who’s not reading this post from walking out of the theater. Personally I would certainly be happy to watch a faithful reproduction of the Book of Ti’ana. But, well, just watch their concept animatic trailer.
I understand that these are animatic stills and are not completely representative of a real trailer; however, while there are maybe a couple of stills showing action at the beginning and the end of the trailer, the four entire minutes in the middle strike me a little like this:
Blah blah blah COUNCIL blah blah DECISION blah blah blah COUNCIL blah COUNCIL blah blah WILL OF THE PEOPLE blah blah blah SPEAK blah blah LET ME SPEAK blah blah COUNCIL blah blah YOU WILL SPEAK blah blah blah!
Do you see where I’m coming from here? It’s a lot of people talking to other people, who then decide to let other people talk to them, and not a lot of anyone doing anything in particular.
I realize that the movie is still early in pre-production, and that undoubtedly the script will go through many revisions between now and production. I very much appreciate the Mysteriacs’ thoughtfulness and their loyalty to the original story. But a trailer is supposed to be a teaser of a film’s most interesting moments, and from that perspective the current concept trailer gives me pause. I hope the Mysteriacs add a little action to the film before Hollywood gets its hands on it, because there’s no telling what they’ll do to it if they find the script wanting.
