Eterna and the Problem of Representation

Unfortunately, this is not a real movie.

We don’t often do fan videos, but I figured that something that managed to make both The Last Airbender and Ghost Rider movies look cool deserved some credit. I originally found this trailer here on the Mary Sue, who found it here on Vimeo from Behind The Epic.

Essentially, this six-minute long trailer for an epic movie that you’ll never get to see is comprised of clips from dozens of Sci-Fi and fantasy movies, some bad, some good, and quite a few that I’ve never seen before but now want to.

When watching it, I had a lot of fun trying to remember where I’d originally seen the parts that I recognized, but I was also struck by how much work had to go into this thing. And as I said, there are a lot of terrible movies that made it into this trailer that don’t look so terrible anymore. I almost feel disappointed that I can’t go watch the live-action The Last Airbender movie and be just as wow’d.

I’ve seen a bunch of trailer mash-ups before, but as of right now, Eterna is definitely my favorite. Unfortunately, while watching it, I did notice that the movies used are disproportionately more about male characters than they are about female characters. And to be clear, this isn’t any fault on the part of the makers of this fan trailer—that’s just unfortunately how most movies are.

Trailer Tuesdays: After Earth

While I’m not the biggest fan of Will Smith or his son, I was actually really excited for this. Anything involving a post-apocalyptic Earth tends to grab my attention immediately. And this one doesn’t even seem to have anything to do with zombies, and yet humans are still no longer the dominate species on the planet. So I was already interested in what happened. I wanted to know how it came to be that humans are afraid of Earth. On top of that, Will and Jaden have appeared together in movies before, and being actual father and son makes their relationship on screen all the more real. So there are not a lot of instances in their relationship where I could see bad—or rather, unbelievable—chemistry pulling me from the movie.

I say I was excited because the movie’s director is none other than M. Night. Shyamalan—or, Shyamalamamon, as my brother likes to call him.

Maybe at one point Mr. Shyamalan was a great director, but his movies just seem to keep going downhill, and I honestly thought we would never see him again after The Last Airbender movie bombed for being a complete disaster. That movie was so bad that all of the characters’ names were mispronounced. The girl who played Katara couldn’t even say Avatar correctly. On top of that, I had no idea what was happening or why it was happening.

I’m worried the same thing will happen here. I’m worried that the characters will have no agency. That they’ll be cardboard cutouts. That the plot will be a convoluted mess impossible to follow. That we’ll be force-fed some annoying message that will take precedence over what’s happening on the screen.

So here’s me wishing that Shyamalan will turn around and produce something worth watching. But I’m afraid to get my hopes up.