Can we all agree that Avatar is an amazing visual spectacle of a movie but the writing was barely over atrocious? We can? That was the basic general opinion already? I didn’t need to say that? Damn. Ok, well, glad we can all agree.
Anyway, James Cameron is producing a remake of Fantastic Voyage and he’s just hired an executive producer of Avatar, Laeta Kalogridis, to polish the script. Kalogridis did some (uncredited) work on Avatar’s screenplay and also has contributed to the filmmaker’s Battle Angel and The Dive, so he must be pretty confident in her ability. And if he liked her work and we wound up with Avatar, this is a good thing, right? I mean, how hard is it to mess up Fantastic Voyage?
What’s that? You said the script has already gone through scores of scribes? Well, that’s always a good sign. Maybe they should just give it up. Oh, how that made me laugh.
For those of you unfamiliar with seminal science fiction, Fantastic Voyage is the one where a group of scientists shrink themselves to travel in a tiny submarine inside a human body to save a colleague’s life. Because developing nanotechnology to do the task for you is way too difficult and its so much easier to shrink the human body. Really smart.
Kalogridis’ resume is chock full of genre fare. She wrote Shutter Island, which, let’s be honest here, was at least better written than Avatar. I mean, I was completely surprised by the ending. I had no idea Leonardo Dicaprio was able to plant himself in other people’s dreams. Crazy stuff. Additionally, she was hired many years ago to pen original drafts of films like X-Men and Wonder Woman, and even though her vision for those projects never came to fruition, it’s clear that she’s knows a thing or two about geek stuff.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
