Horrible film. Trailers utterly deceiving.
The only redeeming part was near the end in respect to what the main character does with the ocean. There is a beautiful contrast of the sea being tamed by the flowing movements of a little boy. It’s a forgivable piece for me in respect to what the film is as a whole. I appreciate that type of cinematography, it’s a wonderful thing but that scene alone is not enough to describe how bad this movie is. It’s genuinely bad from a plot, character development, dialogue, pacing and just plain old overall storytelling perspective.
The casting I get it, you cast a bunch of unknowns and it will be hit or miss. It was a miss in many ways, honestly it’s quite sad. I have never watched a movie that by all bases of where it’s grounded on being imaginative, be so unbelievably unimaginative.
Think about that statement for a bit and that’s my review of The Last Airbender. This had the sincere potential to be the next LOTR in terms of locale, setting, characters. However it falls so short I really gotta wonder how narrow of a perspective M. Night Shamamamalalalaln has. His direction consists of the same zoomed in shots of faces, same panning shots you see, the occasional bird’s eye view panoramic only because he has to based on the set design he’s working with, then you have the fight scenes. The fight scenes in themselves has some vision, but definitely not enough, there were slow motion moments which allowed the explanation of what these benders are doing. Yet by all means there is still areas of logic to how people fight and the slow pacing of the fighting made no sense whatsoever.
This is probably going to be racial in context, so don’t go posting this on your website. I was utterly bewildered how the entire Fire Nation was seemingly cast as East Indians. If not the entire Fire Nation but a great majority of the Fire Nation. The Earth Nation was Chinese, the Water Nation could have very well have been Inuits and the Air Nation was multicultural. Here in lies an odd dilemma. The Air Nation has been wiped out by the Fire Nation, so now you’ve got these nations seemingly separated by race themselves. There is an underlying theme of “togetherness” that I expect to see jammed down our throats near at the end of these movies, IF the others get made. Yes these nations are separate, but it was based on their techniques and not simply race.
I was sitting in a full theatre nevertheless. I sent my cousin to secure seats, but he accidentally went to the wrong theatre, ticket agent sent him to the Twilight theatre. So once we got there we had to sit at the front. However at an 45min it didn’t matter how bad the viewing angle was. At 45min I wanted to look at my watch to see what time it was, at 60min I decided to finally look at my watch and realized thank god it’s past the turning point and we’re headed toward some epic fight. I knew there was 40min left in the film. But at 85min I looked at my watch again to make sure the movie was nearing it’s end, because I wanted to be flat out over. The thought of actually walking out had crossed my mind at around 30-35min. But I happily ate my popcorn and candy. Overall I wonder, with the 3 cousins I brought… was it worth the 90 bucks I spent? Hell no.
Here’s the other kicker. I watched the movie in 3D. At no motherf***ing time was this movie ever meant to be in 3D. There was one scene of when we were introduced to the Northern Air Temple, where we got to see a brief hit of depth perception. Beyond that, why the hell was this movie being viewed in 3D? It wasn’t my viewing angle either, because being so close to the front introduced something very peculiar. In the opening credits, shots of water came towards the screen and cause of the 3D and me being so close, it felt like I got splashed in the face with the shots of water. After that I turned to my cousin and said, this might not be too bad if they do stuff like that. Yeah it’s gimmicky, but I expected something, anything. Instead we got absolutely NOTHING. I can’t emphasize that enough. At this point I paid the inflated price for the glasses and hell yeah I kept my pair. I got all my cousins to keep theirs.
I wonder if M. Night even watched the animated series, I really do. Because it felt like he took the source material and just decided to rewrite it for the sake of filling in the 1 hr and 43 min. It also dawned on me midway through the film, perhaps this source material just simply cannot be a movie and maybe that’s just the case. Maybe it wasn’t M. Night’s fault, maybe we should pat him on the back for trying to take something so daunting. However when the first byline at the end of the film is:
“written, directed and produced by M. Night Shamalalalalananan”
I can’t help but sigh. He’s a one trick pony with movies that solely rely on that twist to sell the audience on. So again I say, I have never watched a movie that by all bases of where it’s grounded on being imaginative, be so unbelievably unimaginative.
The one thing I wanted to add about the racial context, which has been getting a lot of flack on the internet. The complaints are more so the casting, but for me it wasn’t that. It was just bad casting for the characters. The racial context for me was the odd observation of seeing all the nations being different races, whether that was intentional or accidental, I frankly don’t know. Seriously it was really odd in the war scene, there was a zoom in on one lone fat white guy looking out to the ocean as the fire nation drew near. It was like they focused on that white dude to show there was diversity in the nations or to trick us because they accidentally casted the nations as races. I really don’t know. The racial thing is an aside though and it doesn’t matter because the movie is just bad.
I started to rewatch the cartoon series last night. Picked up season one on iTunes for $15, best price out there, will probably get the remaining 2 seasons for the same price. Quality is ook, it’s meant for ipod usage, so I just started watching it off my phone before I crashed last night. Anyway, if M. Night had just made the first episode, probably could’ve cut out maybe 6min of it to increase pacing, he would’ve set the tone of the movie. Light hearted, serious and mysterious but above all else imaginative and playful. The movie reveals too much of it’s hand right away. It’s like LOTR, when they go on the quest, they talk about stuff, but you don’t see things until later on. M. Night wants to show you everything right away so there is no magic to it all. I read an interview from him and he did watch the series, but his vision for the film was plot progression rather than character development. So his complaint was it was really hard to tell an entire season in 103 min of film. Here’s a thought though, this movie really should’ve been 3 hours long. People have sat through before, lengths of film and they’ll do it again. With all his previous films being more about the characters, what happened? Like his character development abilities in his films are devoid of incompetence, he’s actually decent at it. So why cut that out in this movie? It is beyond bizarre to me how he approached this thing. The map was already drawn for him, it didn’t have a to be a trilogy. Maybe it had to be 6 films, hell look at Harry Potter, Narnia, Twilight, they all aren’t trilogies.
I would’ve preferred him risk that, then make a shitty movie adaptation. A lot of fans have said watching the movie was like watching the series on fast forward. But that’s what M. Night did, he condensed the plot immensely to show what key points to him were, to show want minor key points to character development were, in order to get from point A to point B to point C. Like I said above, it shows too much of it’s hand right away and doesn’t set things up for beyond in ways where I should care. That’s the thing, I’ve never really watched a movie like this where I found myself resting my face on my hand, wanting it to be over, because I didn’t care. So I don’t care what happens to the characters, because I don’t know them, stuff just happens. In the end I think it’s more of a choice of director, he was not the guy for this film. Not in the slightest.
Also the budget, I think it was like 150, with marketing pushing it to 280m. Honestly, Dragonball Evolution was better. That’s saying something!
