We’ll have to see it because the Boozi-kids LOVE the cartoon (we also enjoy it, but not enough to see the movie for ourselves given those reviews). I hope that Boozi-girl, at 7, will enjoy the movie and not realize the suckiness.
After all, she does like The Phantom Menace . . .
All 4 of my kids loved the series and we’ve watched it all the way through 3 times. So I know we’ll end up going anyway. I had a bad feeling about it ever since I saw the trailer. The kid who plays Aang just didn’t seem at all right.
A notable number of fans of the TV show have been mightily pissed off by the casting of white actors as Asian.
Reasonably balanced post about whether it is/isn’t racist from ONTD.
Also, from reading the ONTD comments, it looks like M. Night pretty much mangled the franchise, so your kids may be very disappointed if they’re expecting it to be true to the show’s spirit.
Man, I am disappointed to hear that. I was really, really looking forward to this movie.
Some times, works are best done in a particular combination of idiom and medium, or if adapted with a specific point of view.
It could be that The Last Airbender is perfect as an animated piece using Animé-derived styles, idioms and aesthetics (it’s not *really Animé, since it’s an American cartoon) and it would suffer in any attempt to turn it into live-action, never mind 3D live action to boot (as in the above-referenced Dragonball *movie, IMO something that was pointless to ever try to do live-action). BTW and while I’m at it, hello, filmmakers, marketers, buying public: not every&^%#thing even remotely SF or action-fantasy ***has*** to be in @#%^ 3-D!
Or it may be , though, that it could have worked as a live action… had it been done by Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee, Cameron, any of a dozen others, rather than by Shyamalan.
Or that it could work as live action… 20 years from now, when a new generation of directors and screenwriters with a different set of sensibilities would be doing it for a public with different expectations about the characters, visuals and narrative in an action fantasy.
ISTM that historically it’s just damn easy to fail when starting from a [pick any: novel, play, animation, feature film, TV series, comic book] and trying to transpose it into a [pick one of the other artforms]. Add in M. Night’s propensity for confusion and you can really get things bolloxed up.
I would have preferred they put it in the hands of Robert Rodriguez or Zack Snyder.
With just a little more patience, you can probably just catch it free on TNT (“the modern classics”).
Ouch.
My wife and I have been hording some free movie tickets, and I was going to talk her into seeing this with them, but now I’m glad I didn’t.
I just recently finished watching the series and I was really excited about this :(.
Someone said it better than I could;
And I’m totally OK with that.
That particular complaint is still stupid. The characters in the show weren’t Asian, and they weren’t Caucasian. They mixed features, cultural bits, and concepts from a broad array of sources. Calling the characters 'Asian" is among nthe most racist thing I can think of.
It’s more complicated than that and people who point out that the characters are clearly Asian and not Caucasian is not being racist–it’s pointing out the obvious fact that the characters aren’t Caucasian. This is a very good and thorough article on the controversy.
To be fair, they aren’t Asian, either, because there is no “Asia” in the setting. To say that the characters are literally Asian (or Caucasian, or whatever) would certainly be silly, because those places and cultures just don’t exist.
On the other hand, it’s not unreasonable to point out that those mixed features, cultural bits, and concepts from a broad array of sources more closely tend to resemble, in the real world, Asian, Inuit and so on potential actors and backgrounds more than Caucasian ones.
between the martial arts, architecture, and physical features (facial hair, skin color, hair/eye color, etc) isn’t pretty obvious that it’s at least modeled on asians? iirc the creator himself admits to having certain “nations” in mind and implemented aspects accordingly (mostly architecturally and through the martial arts).
it’s definitely a fine line to walk between recognizing races vs stereotyping races. as for the actors themselves, i don’t really think it matters that much as long as they LOOK the part. if that native american in the littering commercials can be ethnically italian and yet have nobody be any the wiser then where’s the harm? they’re ACTORS.
I really wanted to see this one.
The reviews are fun, though.
Have any fans of the show seen the movie? If so I’d be interested in their opinions. I haven’t seen the show but it’s on my list.
I’m not a fan of the show but I have seen a bunch of episodes. I saw it with a group of people who are hardcore fans of the series. They hated the movie even more than I did.
Except rhe physical features don’t particularly resemble said peoples. At all. Not even within the very wide latitude given to animation, for the most part. I don’tm really care who they cast for the role if it the whole thing comes out good. It didn’t in this case, but my point is that as long as it makes sense within the context I don’t really care, and I consider the entire controversy pathetic.
Basically, my limit would be if they were trying for versimilitude in several areas but, say, dropped in clashing and obvious ethnicities with no sense of them being mixed.
The problem is the entire village they’re from looks ethnically Eskimo and the main characters are white- they have a markedly different skin color than the people who are part of their village.
I heard M’night cast the Wind from The Happening and the Water from Lady in the Water and Signs.
“Hilary Swank has a vagina and she won an Oscar pretending she has a dick. That’s what actors do, they pretend.” - Ari Gold