How many blue eyed Inuit do you know?
I am and I gave the movie a reluctant 5. Knowing the movie’s time is less than a quarter of the time for the combined episodes for Book One, I knew an awful lot of stuff would be left out but, criminy, some of the best stuff never showed up. To wit: No koizilla. No arc for Ang’s transition from a twelve-year-old kid to a guilt-ridden savior of the world. No arc for Uncle Iroh’s transition from jolly old grandpa to revived Dragon of the West. Sokka and Yue were pretty well reduced to “Hey, you’re hot!” “I know; gotta go now.” “Drat.”
The list goes on and on. Another big, inexplicable change was that in the series, one of the reason fire benders were so full of themselves was that, unlike the other three elements they can create fire from nothing rather than transforming what is already there. In the movie (except Uncle Iroh in one scene) they specifically can only bend existing fire. I can only wonder how they are to handle Azula’s blue fire bending.
I would recommend you see the series – at least Book One – before the movie or it will be difficult to figure out what is going on.
The same number as all the Japanese schoolgirls with eyeballs the size of of their kidneys that I know.
Okay, okay, that’s not fair. I should say “the same number as all those white people with pointed ears that I know.”
I’m still wondering how many people will walk into this thinking it’s a sequel or spinoff of James Cameron’s Avatar.
They took Avatar out of the title completely, so I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. I had no interest in seeing this, but I admit the terrible reviews are making me curious. I haven’t seen a really awful movie in a while.
Here is M. Night’s response to the reviews:
From this article in New York Magazine
So, he doesn’t really read the reviews and doesn’t have much of a response.
Since the word Avatar was pulled out of the title and there are no blue-skinned cat people, I’m guessing zero.
He’s pretty much shot himself in the foot with that first answer. “Being yourself” doesn’t necessarily mean what you make is going to be any good. If this movie bombs, then he’s as much as admitted that M. Night can’t make good films any more, especially after The Happening.
It’s a shame the reception is so bad; the trailers looked absolutely stunning. But all I’ve seen so far is “holy crap it’s bad,” and I haven’t seen any really strong reasons why so far. (Granted I haven’t read many reviews yet.) The race objection is crap, IMO, and I know fans are always going to find things wrong with movie adaptations, but is there seriously anything wrong from a cinematic perspective?
I went and saw it yesterday since I had a couple of hours to kill, the previews made it look interesting and I’ve caught about a dozen episodes over the years and liked them. Unfortunatly indont read reviews because the movie was bad. Some how Night made the movie take forever and feel rushed.
I don’t know the series so I don’t know what was left out but I really think they should have left out more or made it into two movies. I had a lot of WTF moments and even when I was following along there was no natural progression to anything. As was mentioned above when the older brother met the white haired princess it was basically they smiled at eachother, he volunteered to be her body guard (random old guy says he figures he would volunteer), they walk around for 30 seconds and talk about how much fun they’ve had together and why her hair is white and she dies and he is heart broken. An 80s montage would have done a better job of showing they’re love growing, I don’t think. Left any time out that they were one screen together.
I was at least hoping for some good special effects or cool fight scenes and there were a couple of scenes that were ok, Ang escaping the ship, in general it look like a dance off from Breakin’ but with kungfu instead of cardboard.
I disagree with the worst movie of the decade or even since while shitty there was at leSt a plot and I could understand who was punching who most of the time, the big battles everyone looked the same unless they were using an element. So the king for me is Transformers 2 I’d even consider watching book 2 on HBO or something.
If we’re going to use an elocution-based metaphor, M. Night Shyamalan’s storytelling accent resembles that of Charlie Brown’s teacher.
From what I understand, it’s bad in that there’s absolutely nothing about it that’s any damn good.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Bad: Acting (with a special raspberry award for Mandvi), script, dialogue, special effects, brightness, 3D, almost all fight scenes, casting, pacing, and possibly lastly, inexplicable changes from the anime that make no sense and often make the story worse.
Almost Good: Iroh and Zuko’s performance. Azulah also looks promising, but…
Good: To riff on Ebert, this will truly be the last one.
I’ll write a longer post later, and probably a pit thread too.
Scroll a bit down on this page and you can see a graph of the decrease in Night’s movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes.
Yeah, critics will review a movie kindly no matter who makes it, but his latest movies just plain stink.
Saw it tonight with the wife and friends. Heard about the bad reviews and the problems, and decided to just enjoy the film despite all that.
Yeah, acting was pretty lacking for almost all of the characters, the writing seemed very touch and go (in that the plot would literally touch one point, then take off and land at another point), it felt like I was missing a lot of what was going on.
The fight scenes were fun. Didn’t notice anything funky about the special effects. I have to admit to coming across a few “Why don’t you just shoot him?” moments, particularly towards the end:
The Fire Nation fleet arrives to attack the Water Nation city. You know, the fleet. That sails in ships, on the water. Attacking the Water Nation. I wondered why they didn’t just pull the water apart from under the ships and then let it loose again. I guess they weren’t powerful enough at water bending to do that or some such.
Apparently, according to the reviews I’ve read:
[ul]
[li]The acting, blamed mostly on the directing, is horrendously awful;[/li][li]There isn’t much action, and what there is is not what you’d expect for an asian-themed story and setting (i.e. no martial arts); Most of the action is described in exposition, as happening off-screen.[/li][li]The 3D is really badly implemented and makes the film murky behind the 3D glasses.[/li][/ul]
I do not plan to see this film.
Fan of the series who saw the movie. Definitely a disappointment and honestly don’t recommend going to see it, but to call it the worse movie of the decade is a pretty big overstatement. My guess is it ends up having some appeal for kids, but it absolutely fails for adults which is one of the things that made the series so great.
Except perhaps the ethnicities, the movie did a good job recreating the look of the series. The Fire nation ships look particularly bad ass. The fight scenes with bending in them are pretty fun to watch as well. The last 15 or 20 minutes of the movie I thought showed some promise, but of course by that point it was way too late to be just starting to get entertaining.
The acting is atrocious, but considering what they had to work with you can’t put too much of the blame their. There is an absolute lack of character development (even with Aang), which leads to you not really caring what happens during the final battle. The plot jumps around quite a bit, and too much of the plot is told to you instead of being shown to you. Honestly, I didn’t have that high of hopes for this movie no matter who was directing as there was just too much condensing that was going to have to happen, but this was a particularly poor effort. The 3D was not well done, although not too badly distracting. If you do see it, I would just go for the 2D.
I am really at a disadvantage, as in this Avatar-Airbender World I have not seen either Mythology/Film in any capacity anime’, third dimensions nor Hyperreality. I have no opinion. Maybe I will watch them in temporal context, someday.
That is pretty much it. Individual benders just aren’t all that powerful. The reason Aang is able to move so much water is he enters the avatar state (when his tats start glowing) which basically taps the spirit and powers of all previous avatars. Of course that explanation is from the series, the movie doesn’t really go into what it means when he starts glowing. In the series, going into the avatar state has some pretty bad effects on Aang himself.
[spoiler] (the following is about the series)
Aang had also merged? joined forces? with fish La/the ocean spirit to get revenge for what happened to fish Tui/the moon spirit. The avatar state helped, but I think a big part of it was the ocean spirit. I really like how they animated/colored the siege.
Further reading on the wiki page I googled, they call the fusion of those two Koizilla. :)[/spoiler]
I have to disagree with this bit though:
The thing about Shyamalan is that while his critical reviews have nose-dived his box-office has been OK. If you look at his last three films: two were moderate hits and one was a moderate failure at worst. Before that of course he was enormously successful with the Sixth Sense and Signs with Unbreakable being another moderate hit. So his overall boxoffice record is great and his recent record is OK so it’s hardly surprising he is still making films.
Last Airbender could seriously damage his career though. My understanding is it’s a lot more expensive than his previous films;perhaps 150 million. And obviously the reviews have been particularly brutal. It’s opening day US take of 16 million wasn’t bad but it may drop quite quickly because of poor word-of-mouth. However this is the kind of film which could have serious international appeal. It could do numbers like Prince of Persia which made just 87 million in the US but 313 million worldwide. Those kind of numbers would get Airbender close to breaking even in which case Shyamalan’s career may live to see another day.