The Last Airbender - Thoughts?

[Mechamaniac]

Well, it's officially out and though I haven't seen it yet and have mixed feelings about seeing it, I plan to since my kids will kill me if I don't. I LOVED the series and have been anxiously awaiting the film despite it's many obvious shortcomings but when I see reviews like this....

The M/C Review

I gotta wonder if I shouldn't wait for it to hit On Demand.

Anyone seen it? Thoughts? Discuss!

[Dobber]

I find myself in the same boat as you. Loved the animated series and was really excited for this movie and had high hopes. Now, after seeing so many negative reviews, I'm not sure if I want to go see it anymore. Interested in what other fans think of it too.

Chris

[spacemanoeuvres]

There's a scathing review on AICN:

M. Night Shyamalan's THE LAST AIRBENDER is a hate crime against those who love movies

Shamalamadingdong hasn't done anything worth a trip to the movies in a long time (IMHO).

[Ghost Train]

2 types of directors linger around for a long time: those that make really thoughtful, good, and provocative films... and those that make utterly horrible films.

It's like the karma slider on Bioware games, staying in the middle sucks M.Night should just proceed to the deep end and try to wrestle the title away from Uwe Boll.

[RD Blade]

My wife and I are looking forward to seeing it. I admit that I shouldn't have glanced at the review in the OP. It's better to go into a movie with little to no expectations, much less expectations that it'll suck.

[Wanzerfan]

I wonder how long it will take for a moderator to merge this thread to the one I started?

[EXO]

Wow, scathing reviews

Shyamalan finally made a comedy

I don't read reviews unless I'm undecided whether I want to see a movie or not. This was on the I don't care list until I saw some of the shows they've been running on TV. I guess the good thing is now I got something to watch on TV.

I wonder how long it will take for a moderator to merge this thread to the one I started?

Well since the topic starter is mod and he didnt find a previous topic, you should bump the topic so it can be merged. Otherwise if another thread is started and no one misses the other, then it doesn't really matter if there's two, when one is already dead.

[Vepariga]

the best review is the one you do yourself. a few of those reviews are from people that have never seen the series so they lash out at what they dont understand.

I'll go see it,I'll see it as it is,a film based on the series,if i want a 100% accurate telling ill just watch the series.

[Dangard Ace]

Friend of mine went to watch it. Big avatar fan. She won or was nominated for a few dotmoonufo fanfiction awards for Avatar. She's now rocking on her bed clutching her Appa doll with her husbands trying to comfort her. Yeah, I'm skipping this one.

[Seto Kaiba]

Now, before I begin posting my thoughts about The Last Airbender, I would like to first qualify my statements by saying that I'm not a fan of Nickelodeon's Avatar: the Last Airbender cartoon. In fact, the sum total of my exposure to the characters and setting consist of maybe three minutes of animation witnessed while channel surfing, and the revolting shipping fanart posted on /co/. As such, I'm writing from the viewpoint of the outsider, a casual viewer going into the movie knowing nothing of the mythos or the story of the fantasy universe. I can't exactly say I was an objective outsider, since I expected the movie to be over-hyped rubbish as soon as I heard our good friend Mister M. Night Alphabetsoup was involved.

That said, take it away... myself.

Oh god... where to begin? I'd heard some things about the movie in chatroom last night, and the impression I'd gotten was that I was in for another so-bad-it's-funny Wire-Fu action flick with pretentions to being a serious fantasy story. Since I already had a half-day at the office for various reasons, I phoned my girlfriend up and dragged her along to the cinema so we could both catch a cheap laugh and she'd stop complaining I never take her anywhere.

Now, without giving away any spoilers that might offend those who actually want to see our boy M. Night's latest unintentionally hilarious train wreck, the best I can say for the story is that it's BAD. I get the feeling that M. Night sat down with a screenplay summary of the TV series and said something to the effect of "Woah, poo! There's too much stuff here to make a two hour movie!" and then, in the misguided belief that he's some kind of genius, resolved to make it all fit anyway. The fruit of his labors is something I can't help but compare to Frankenstein's monster. It's a shambling mess composed of salvaged parts from something that was once whole and wholesome. A lurching abomination that very plainly should not be.

The only suitable analogy I can think of to describe the way this movie vomits huge quantities of exposition at the horrified viewer is to say that the experience is like trying to fill a teacup with a firehose. There's just SO MUCH coming SO FAST that there's just no way for the audience to take it all in. Rather than gradually build up the universe's mythos over the course of a few installments, Shamalamadingdog resolved not to gamble on a sequel being made, and crammed three movies worth of exposition into an hour and forty-five minutes. The young actors are clearly NOT up to the task of vomiting out these huge torrents of exposition, and it all comes across rather flat and emotionless, like the whole movie's being performed by the guys who shout line prompts from offstage instead of the actual actors. The screenplay itself feels like it was written by someone who'd only ever read about the show's story on Wikipedia, since scene changes occur with an almost audible "clunk", and many scenes meant to be emotional just come off as being narm. The movie's devoid of actual emotion, and as a result even the obviously crowbarred-in romance subplot feels almost we're watching aliens try to understand human behavior by imitating scenes they saw on TV. To add to the movie's woes, the CG effects used to display the "bending", the universe's magic du jour, are laughably bad... even amateurish.

After about an hour or so of seemingly random crap happening in succession, I started to get the distinct impression the movie was desperately rummaging around to find something that would make it live up to its pretentious claims of being an epic fantasy story. The gleeful idiocy of the cast and seemingly arbitrary and pointless events that make up most of the story reduce M. Night Shamwow's "serious business" fantasy story to unintentional comedy in short order. The dialogue jumps back and forth between "Here, let me state the obvious" and parroting the same line over and over again, almost as though it's a cue to change scenes. If we were to take this at face value, M. Night is either a talentless berk or he bought a gradeschooler's creative writing assignment after it earned a "VERY POOR, SEE ME AFTER CLASS" from the teacher.

There's a lot of stuff that I'd like to criticize about the setting itself, but I can't be sure that it wasn't that way originally and M. Night just managed to make it worse in his adaptation. Particularly the six-legged flying water buffalo or whatever the hell that thing is, Ang's (sp?) glowing blue buzz cut, and the nagging feeling that all of these white people are probably supposed to have been played by Asians to go with the faux-Chinese setting.

If this wasn't a film clearly intended to be taken seriously, I would be lauding M. Night for an excellent work of ironic parody of generic fantasy fiction and wire-fu movies. In place of that, all I can say is that The Last Airbender feels like the result of an attempt to combine the impenetrable depth of Lord of the Rings with the same sort of quirky-yet-dark style of the later Harry Potter movies on a faux-Chinese backdrop right out of Disney's Mulan. It's not a good movie by any means. It's not even a so-bad-it's-funny movie. It's just all bad, all the time. The sort of movie where you leave the theater wondering why you just paid eight bucks to be confused by a strange Indian man.

Edited July 2, 2010 by Seto Kaiba

[Shadow]

I'm a fan of the animated series and have been rather skeptical of the movie since I heard of its inception. I was still hopeful and still thinking about seeing but after reading some of the reviews, may not waste the money now. I was most surprised that it has an 8% on Rottentomatoes. Ouch is all I can say.

[Keith]

Friend of mine went to watch it. Big avatar fan. She won or was nominated for a few dotmoonufo fanfiction awards for Avatar. She's now rocking on her bed clutching her Appa doll with her husbands trying to comfort her. Yeah, I'm skipping this one.

This sounds like a more interesting story, how many husbands does she have?

[Chronocidal]

I have to say, I was never really interested in this movie to begin with, but after reading that review on io9, I'm tempted, just to see if the reviews hold true. That review was more entertaining than most actual movies I've watched in the past year.

I don't know which is the funniest bit.. the absolute wrongness mentioned early on (think the firehose analogy mentioned by Seto, but in a hentai sense), the mentioning of how it seemed the actors had the incredible ability to make you think they were in front of a green screen even while on location, or the bit about how this movie is a reverse MST3K, in that it actually makes fun of the audience for watching it.

I had to shut my door at work I was laughing so hard.

Oh, and the "We have to make them believe we believe in our beliefs as much as we believe that they believe in their beliefs" bit had me picturing Kamina lecturing them all.. or maybe the version from Eva Abridged:

Misato to Shinji before some battle: "You can't believe in the me who believes in you if you can't believe yourself that believes you. But I believe in you, because I believe you can believe in yourself."

Edited July 2, 2010 by Chronocidal

[Dangard Ace]

This sounds like a more interesting story, how many husbands does she have?

Considering she's a Harlequin proof reader and a budding Harlequin novelist I'm scared to ask.

[505thAirborne]

Man and I was looking forward to this movie, now I am filled with hesitation.....

[emajnthis]

I was willing to give Manny Shyamalan the benefit of the doubt, but after reading the reviews it's been cemented in my mind that he's still a one hit wonder with the 6th sense (you can argue Unbreakable was decent, but far from good cinema).

[anime52k8]

Man and I was looking forward to this movie, now I am filled with hesitation.....

I was full of apathy towards this movie, now I still don't care.

[jenius]

Ran into a couple friends last night who had just gotten back from watching this film. They're review: "Hey, were you planning on going to see Last Airbender? Don't. It was BAD."

[EXO]

Nephews wanted to see it... usually kids love anything... they didn't like it at all.

to me it seemed like a 2 hour trailer for something much much longer. You don't get a gist of any sort of friendship between the main characters or any animosity between enemies. They just go along for the adventure because there's a point B to the point A that they are coming from. As Kirk Lazarus would ask... where is the emotionality?

[Mr March]

Slashfilm has a great article about the film written by a fan who has just given up on Shyamalan.

The Last Airbender The Last Straw for this Shyamalan Fan

It's a good read and hits many points worth considering.

[Archer]

I went and saw it.....even spent the extra $4 for the real D 3D.

I really did enjoy the trailers before the movie in 3D....very creative and fun.

I wish I had left the theater after the trailers....

[David Hingtgen]

Edited topic title.

::edit:: Ok, why can't I do a strike-out on this board any more? Joke doesn't work nearly as well without it.

[taksraven]

Edited topic title.

::edit:: Ok, why can't I do a strike-out on this board any more? Joke doesn't work nearly as well without it.

I don't know why we can't do strikeout anymore, seems really weird....

Taksraven

[Vic Mancini]

I was willing to give Manny Shyamalan the benefit of the doubt, but after reading the reviews it's been cemented in my mind that he's still a one hit wonder with the 6th sense (you can argue Unbreakable was decent, but far from good cinema).

I loved Unbreakable. And I loved Signs even more than 6th Sense and Unbreakable, in some ways.

I don't understand how a director can go from 6th Sense/Unbreakable/Signs to The Village/Lady In The Water/The Happening. The Happening which by the way, is easily one of the absolute worst movies I've ever sat through. (Decent premise, but unbelievably bad execution).

I was never interested in Air Bender to begin with as I'm not familiar with the series. But It just blows my mind how a director can lose his way so badly in such a short time frame. What the hell happened?

[EXO]

Signs and the Village were almost the same movie. It was like "what if the story went this way?" or "What if the monster was fake?" And notice that M Night fetishes in that one shot where everyone is hiding in the bathroom/basement while the scary thing passes right by... in Signs, Village, Lady In the Water and The Happening. It reminds me of The Brady Bunch Movie where Mr. Brady keeps designing the Brady House for his clients but he just changes the Marquee sign in front of the store.

[David Hingtgen]

I don't know why we can't do strikeout anymore, seems really weird....

Taksraven

Seems I can do it, just not in thread titles.

[Vic Mancini]

Signs and the Village were almost the same movie.

Except Signs had something to say. I still think it's one of the best movies about spirituality/faith ever made. I didn't really get anything significant out of The Village. It was just a story.

[kanedaestes]

Except Signs had something to say. I still think it's one of the best movies about spirituality/faith ever made. I didn't really get anything significant out of The Village. It was just a story.

Book of Eli was better.

[Vic Mancini]

Book of Eli was better.

Seriously? I'll have to check it out.

[EXO]

it's one of the best movies about spirituality/faith ever made.

[Vic Mancini]

I retract that statement.

But it is one of the best movies about spirituality/faith that I've personally seen.

[Graham]

Caught the cartoon on TV a couple of times with my six year old son. We both thought it was pretty boring, just another bland, generic toon. I personally thought the voice acting was dire as well. Absolutely zero interest to see a movie version.

Predators this Thursday all the way!

Graham

[RD Blade]

Saw it, liked it. The sometimes stiff acting, questionable screenplay, and exposition-driven story (I'd rather be shown than told) surprisingly didn't ruin it for me. I just found myself hoping for those issues to be addressed in the sequels. I thought the bending effects were well done. My wife loved it. She's now interested in watching the show.

I can understand how some wouldn't have the same appreciation for the movie I did, but I encourage fans of the series to check it out. At worst, you'll have a new appreciation for the series. At best, you enjoyed the movie while increasing its chances of spawning some quality sequels.

[Dobber]

Seriously? I'll have to check it out.

Yes, absolutly.

Chris

[Vepariga]

My wife loved it. She's now interested in watching the show.

She will love the show even more,and see what went wrong in the movie.