So... how about that The Last Airbender movie?

[Kthleen]

NOTE: If you want to discuss the race controversy, go HERE.



I didn't go to the early screening, but some people did.

Obviously, spoilers for those who haven't seen it:

Spoiler

Apparently, from what I've been reading, racefail may be the least of the movie's worries.

• Too much telling (often with a voiceover, which can work, but apparently didn't here), not enough showing. "Sometimes exposition is played twice. Once in a long "explaining" scene and then again just minutes later when Aang remembers being explained to."
• The acting was wooden and the lines were corny.
• It was rushed, and there was little to no character development.
• The Kyoshi Warriors were completely cut. (And Avatar Kyoshi liked games! ...Wait, what?)
• Katara was undeveloped. "We completely missed on her aggressive behavior and new-found confidence." No fight with Pakku. Her fight with Zuko was very short, and apparently not because of the rising of the sun.
• Certain pronunciations.... Interesting that Shyamalan had a problem with Aang (now ahng), Iroh (now eeroh), Sokka (now sohka), and avatar (now uhvatar) but apparently not Yue (um... not yoo-ay). Agni Kai is now Agni Ki (kee).
• No cabbage merchant, Foamy, or Shyamalan cameos. (Whether those are good or bad, though, depends on you.)
• Everything was serious. The humor was scarce, not funny, or unintentional.
• Zhao was funny, but for the wrong reasons.
• The bending effects were nice, but the bending itself was slow. Very slow.
• It's been described as terrible, horrible, (really, really) bad, ...not good, awful, a disappointment, disgraceful, embarrassing, ridiculous, and wrong, and it made people feel devastated, disappointed, depressed, angry, sad, appalled, and cheated. The critics weren't happy, either.
• But Zuko, Iroh, nods to the show, the visual effects, and the music were decent, if not great.

Has anyone seen it yet? What were your thoughts?

 

[Falconwing]

I have not seen it, but when I was told the reviews weren't pretty, I said, "At least it can't be as bad as Eragon"

Turns out I was wrong. I'm now very nervous.

The thing with adaptations is that the primary market is the established fanbase. You need to please them. Changing names and butchering characters (especially promised characters) is a great way to kill an adaptation. The Kyoshi warriors appeared on the website, and in a couple trailers, but NOT in the actual movie? I'm appalled. No trailer has ever lied that much.

 

[TM2-Megatron]

That's too bad.. dunno if I'll bother seeing this now. The animated version was so awesome, I really wouldn't want to have anything to do with this if it takes away from that.

Also, Ebert gave it one hell of a bad review:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100630/REVIEWS/100639999

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

Let's start with the 3D, which was added as an afterthought to a 2D movie. Not only is it unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Now for the movie itself. The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe. It's in the very nature of animation to make absurd visual sights more plausible.

Since "Airbender" involves the human manipulation of the forces of air, earth, water and fire, there is hardly an event that can be rendered plausibly in live action. That said, its special effects are atrocious. The first time the waterbender Katara summons a globe of water, which then splashes (offscreen) on her brother Sokka, he doesn't even get wet. Firebenders' flames don't seem to really burn, and so on.

The story takes place in the future, after Man has devastated the planet and survives in the form of beings with magical powers allowing them to influence earth, water and fire. These warring factions are held in uneasy harmony by the Avatar, but the Avatar has disappeared, and Earth lives in a state of constant turmoil caused by the warlike Firebenders.

Our teenage heroes Katara and Sokka discover a child frozen in the ice. This is Aang (Noah Ringer), and they come to suspect he may be the Avatar, or Last Airbender. Perhaps he can bring harmony and quell the violent Firebenders. This plot is incomprehensible, apart from the helpful orientation that we like Katara, Sokka and Aang and are therefore against their enemies.

The dialogue is couched in unspeakable quasi-medieval formalities; the characters are so portentous they seem to have been trained for grade school historical pageants. Their dialogue is functional and action-driven. There is little conviction that any of this might be real even in their minds. All of the benders in the movie appear only in terms of their attributes and functions, and contain no personality.

Potentially interesting details are botched. Consider the great iron ships of the Firebenders. These show potential as Steampunk, but are never caressed for their intricacies. Consider the detail Miyazaki lavished on Howl's Moving Castle. Trying sampling a Nickelodeon clip from the original show to glimpse the look that might have been.

After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don't say they're untalented, I say they've been poorly served by Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing. Little Aang reminds me of Wallace Shawn as a child. This is not a bad thing (he should only grow into Shawn's shoes), but doesn't the role require little Andre, not little Wally?

As the villain, Shyamalan has cast Cliff Curtis as Fire Lord Ozai and Dev Patel (the hero of "Slumdog Millionaire") as his son Prince Zuko. This is all wrong. In material at this melodramatic level, you need teeth-gnashers, not leading men. Indeed, all of the acting seems inexplicably muted. I've been an admirer of many of Shyamalan's films, but action and liveliness are not his strong points. I fear he takes the theology of the Bending universe seriously.

As "The Last Airbender" bores and alienates its audiences, consider the opportunities missed here. (1) This material should have become an A-list animated film. (2) It was a blunder jumping aboard the 3D bandwagon with phony 3D retro-fitted to a 2D film. (3) If it had to be live action, better special effects artists should have been found. It's not as if films like "2012" and "Knowing" didn't contain "real life" illusions as spectacular as anything called for in "The Last Airbender."

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

So it's one of those export 3-D hackjobs added in at low cost, and to even less actual effect in the film... not to mention it doesn't seem as if the movie was filmed with the necessary f-stop compensations for conversion to 3-D. Geez, it sounds like such a monumental disgrace to the incredible animated series.

 

[Falconwing]

I knew 3D was a bad idea...

 

[Rainbow]

Wow....that is a terrible review >_<
I don't watch movies anyway, but I'll warn my dad not to go see it.

 

[Falconwing]

Charlie Jane Anders in the review by io9 criticized "the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum...", sarcastically concluding that "Shyamalan's true achievement in this film is that he takes a thrilling cult TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and he systematically leaches all the personality and soul out of it — in order to create something generic enough to serve as a universal spoof of every epic, ever.".[58] Anders summarized the experience of watching the film by stating that, "Actually, my exact words when I walked out of this film were, 'Wow, this makes Dragonball Evolution look like a masterpiece.'"

One word. Ouch.

EDIT: Every difference between show and film.

 

[10Archive]

Well, It looks like I won't be seeing this now.

 

[Lord Fedora]

I wasn't going to see it in the first place due to the racebending. Now I'm not going to ever change my mind.

Bright side, we all have The Legend of Korra to look forward to.

 

[Kthleen]

Bright side, we all have The Legend of Korra to look forward to.

Thank you for the longer version of the title. Someone else responding to the reviews mentioned "Korra," but I had no idea what it was.

 

[Falconwing]

Ryuu is happy with new Avatar project to make up for this movie.

 

[Dr. GM]

Compared to the cartoon series, which is kick-ass, the movie is so messed up! I mean, Katara and Sokka are suppossed to have dark skin, and they have light-skinned people playing them. And a reverse of that, they have a dark-skinned person playing Zuko, who should be pale! You can't even see the scar that made him memorable! The only thing that they did capture was the look of the princess from the north pole!

They also made it too serious, which is a flaw because Aang and Soka are suppossed to be funny! And so should Iroh! And the pronounciation of Avatar, Aang, and anything else was changed! Why mess with it? Just because a movie called Avatar came out first doesn't mean that they used it first! The show did! This was horrible! Just like the Dragonball movie, and its future sequel! (THAT'S RIGHT! ANOTHER ONE'S COMING!!!)

 

[Transfinite]

In all the clips I've seen, the acting is horrifically bad. So much for "Well what if they were the best actors for the jobs?!?!!?!?!?!"

Also roflmao at Firebenders having to carry flame sources around with them.

 

[Falconwing]

that sorta made sense, but I'd prefer it how it was originally.

 

[$aturn¥oshi]

In all the clips I've seen, the acting is horrifically bad. So much for "Well what if they were the best actors for the jobs?!?!!?!?!?!"

Also roflmao at Firebenders having to carry flame sources around with them.

I'm saddened. That was my reasoning...

Well, can't win them all.

 

[Florizarre]

Saw it this afternoon with my kid brother. Horrible movie, don't see it. It will be a waste of your money.

The problem is two-fold: the movie had a terrible script that was only made worse by the terrible acting. Nearly every line in the movie is exposition; I almost feel bad criticizing the actors in it, considering they had nothing to work with. But on the other hand, they inject no emotion into what they are given. Dev Patel is a very good actor, for example, but his performance is laughably poor in this.

I feel bad criticizing a kid, but Noah Ringer is the biggest disaster. The fact that they signed him up because he's a martial arts prodigy (not because he's a good young actor) shows. He's great in the fight scenes, but redefines the term "wooden" when delivering his lines.

I don't think the special effects were quite as bad as some reviews made them out to be- they're not great, but they're ok. And most fans I know are understandably angry about what was cut, which includes Roku, Kyoshi Warriors, Jeong-Jeong (in fact, almost everything in the Earth Kingdom). But I don't really like judging movies against their source material. Not that it really matters with this movie, which is terrible either way.

In short: bad script + bad acting + mediocre directing = bad movie :thumbd:

 

[Dorothy LaRouge]

Ryuu is happy with new Avatar project to make up for this movie.

They're making a new series?! 8D SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I is a happy clam.


But yeah, I am now officially not going to see this movie, given your reviews of it.

 

[Falconwing]

despite all the bad reviews... I have to see it. It will haunt me forever if I do not see it.

EDIT: This quote describes the movie perfectly.

“That… wasn’t a good [movie]” –Zuko
“I’ll say” –Aang
“No kidding” –Katara
“Horrible” –Suki
“You said it” –Toph
“…but the effects were decent.” –Sokka

 

[Dr. GM]

Ryuu is happy with new Avatar project to make up for this movie.

...what Avatar project?

 

[Falconwing]

This one

 

[Kthleen]

I don't think the special effects were quite as bad

Though reviews on the how the elements look have been mixed, I've been hearing that the movie generally looks good, but that wasn't nearly enough to save it.


Also, It Sucked: the Video.