Or, as it appears it should be titled, “What Happened to M. Night Shyamalan”?
The reviews are coming out and it, to say the least, is looking bad for the movie.
Ebert gives is 1/2 star and say, that it, “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.”
Capone, who I can usually get behind, says that it, “is a hate crime against film lovers. No one should ever have to endure what I was unexpectedly put through yesterday afternoon watching this murky 3-D shitstorm of a movie that appears to have been shot through unflushed toilet bowl water, which, upon reflection, seems 100 percent appropriate.”
Capone says it is the worst movie of the year, and perhaps of the last decade(or perhaps he was saying this next decade).
Both say the 3D conversion is bad, but that nothing could have saved it anyway. Even in 2D, this movie appears to be horrible.
Did he really cast white people in clearly Asian roles? Won’t this confuse the fan-base(which I assume is kids)?
I have not seen the show, by the way. Is it any good for adults or is it mostly a kid show?
The show is good for adults as well as kids, if you’re into light-hearted epic fantasy. And who isn’t? There have been several other threads in CS about people discovering the show over the last year or so, in the lead-up to the movie and otherwise, and the reaction from most tends to be positive.
I’m almost glad that the movie is this completely terrible; if it was getting 55 or 60 percent positive reviews, I’d probably have to go see it, and inevitably I would have ended up disappointed. With M. Night and the casting and everything else, there was never any hope that it was actually going to be excellent. So this works out well enough.
The Sixth Sense was a pretty shitty movie, too. Seriously, I think a lot of people who liked it when it was first released would feel very differently about it now. I rewatched it recently and was stunned by how much it really did suck. And The Happening was the worst movie ever made (for many reasons, but I think what tipped it over into the abyss of shit was the scene when they had to outrun the wind).
So what happened to M. Night? Nothing. He’s always been a terrible film maker. The mystery is why did it take him reaching apparent Ed Wood levels of bad before anybody noticed.
I have to disagree with the general trend here. I loved Sixth Sense, even upon recent rewatchings. I didn’t much care for Unbreakable, although i saw a lot of what he was doing. For the rest of his ouvre I admired his storytelling and director’s skills, and just watched for the inevitable crash when his point hit home, because it invariably seemed to be stupid by this point – Signs, The Village, The Happening (I didn’t even try to watch Lady in the Water) It got to the point where we were MST3King his films, which I thought was too bad, because it seemed to me that if somebody else wrote the story and the screenplay Shyamalan would probably turn out a good film.
So when I saw he was doing Last Airbender I thought it was a good sign. Our daughter MilliCal, who has watched his other flicks with us, started chanting “please don’t be bad, please don’t be bad,…” when she saw who the director of Airbender was going to be. She loves the animated version.
How could this be so awful? The scenes from the ads look great. I could live with anglos doing nominally Asian roles (although, hey, it’s a fantasy – they don’t have to be Asian). Somebody else came up with the story, which shouldn’t require some stupid “reveal”. How could this be that awful?
Could this be so bad it at least has trainwreck appeal, though? A movie being called worse than Battlefield Earth and worse than Uwe Boll actually has me intigued. It sounds like it goes beyond just being another lousy movie into being spectacularly, once-in-a-decade bad.
I was thinking the same thing. I’m actually kind of curious now to see it, where as before I didn’t really care about it one way or another.
Granted, that doesn’t mean I’m going to spend 10 bucks to see it at the theater. I’ll probably just wait and get it on Netflix.
Which roles, exactly? The uproar seems to be about Sokka and Kitara from what I can tell, but that really confuses me, because they had blue eyes in the cartoon.
Fire Nation were definitely Asian, probably Chinese. I always thought of Water Nation as Inuit, and Air Nation as Tibetan, so Asian also. I couldn’t pin down Earth Nation as easily, but they seemed Asian to me as well.
Having read the Tomato reviews, it seems like the reviews are more slanted toward M.Night bashing, rather than objectively addressing the movie. I’ve enjoyed most of his movies far more than the critical-dogpiling suggests I should.
From all of the previews and pre-production I’ve seen, the action, effects, fights, and actors look perfectly realized to me. There would really have to be some colossally disastrous acting or editing otherwise…