Not necessarily, and not necessarily.
With all due respect, why should kids movies have lower expectations than movies for adults?
Incidentally, the movie is unwatchable. It doesn’t succeed on any level. The acting is terrible, the 3D is barely noticable, the fight scenes have no tension, M Night spends most of the time telling us stuff instead of showing us stuff which completely defeats the purpose of making a movie in the first place, the plot is rushed and he spreads things so thin it’s tough to have feelings for any character making any sacrifice they might make meaningless, it looks like it’s filmed with a lens covered in dirt and generally it looks like they stuffed about 5 hours worth of content into an hour and forty five minutes.
Also, if someone, or a group, is at no risk of losing a fight then it’s hard to get invested. You spend the whole time waiting for Hercules to simply put his ring on and win the damn fight.
Also, the fact that the Avatar can simply die and be reborn makes him essentially indestructable. Christ, at least Superman had Kryptonite
This is why we can’t have nice things: because too many people think that just because it’s a kids show or because it’s a sci-fi movie, that’s an excuse to do a shitty job.
Isn’t Felix a comparatively minor character? This is more like if they made James Bond a black man.
Guys, there’s a whole 'nother thread in regards to the race question. You have to share it with black Spiderman though.
It’s funny the pronunciation thing was brought up, because I think that pissed me off more than anything else. Ah-ng, Ah-vatar. Say it right, damnit! What are you, like, the world’s worst pirates in training? Yarrrr, the Ahvataarrr. Gimme a break. I guess it’s British English, which makes me just want to blow up England from orbit, in perfect timing for July 4th. (Kidding!).
While I’m talking about relatively minor things I hated with a passion, what’s the deal with the Firebenders needing a pre-existing source of flame? How is that supposed to be scary? How were they supposed to conquer the world with that bullshit? ‘Surrender now, or we will pillage your village with our flaming fireplace of doom!’ Was the world defeated by giant, portable chimneys? All the earth and water kingdom had to do in a battle was smother the flame source to win handily! Sure, the movie said (and showed) the powerful benders creating fire out of nothing, but you can’t win a war with only elite troops. It’s total bollocks.
All the benders need a pre-existing source of their element. Why should fire be any different
Waterbenders get their power from the moon. Firebenders get their power from sun. The sun gives energy to all living things, the sun is a giant ball of fire, so all living firebenders can create fire.
And that my friend, is my fan-wank of the day.
eheu you win I admit it I don’t know what I’m talking about.
It might be more like if they cast King Shaka with white man. And the white man was Keanu Reeves.
Whoa.
“I want my money back, actually I wish I had my hair back”. Priceless.
This guy, the director, is a hack but that is no the worst part. He is an arrogant hack. He actually changed the names of the characters because, in his opinion, the pronunciation was incorrect.
Because it would be cooler? That’s how it worked in the TV show, anyway, and the TV show was pretty fuckin’ cool, so it seems like a bad idea to change it for the movie.
It seems a lot like stampitis to me; someone up in the hierarchy making the film decided to alter a tiny seemingly inconsequential thing in order to have some effect on the film.
I’ve only seen a few episodes of the show, but from what I understand the ability to create fire from nothing was one of several reasons why the Fire Nation was so bloody arrogant, that it somehow made them better than the others. And it was the primary attribute that made Fire so dangerous; if they had to use existing fires, then airbenders could snuff the fire out, waterbenders could drown it, and earthbenders could smother it. It would be far too easy to counter fire. A setting in which firebenders had to use existing fires would produce a lot of Idiot Ball moments, where the Fire’s opponent has to deliberately ignore the source fire in order to make the threat dangerous.
Really, unlike air, water, and earth, fire is just a chemical reaction; pure oxygen burns just as well as anything, and there’s enough material in breathable air to plausibly produce a steady if brief burn with someone controlling it.
Just saw it, have only seen a couple episodes of the show, went to enjoy the special effects.
All in all, it played like a…cartoon. I don’t think it was any worse than, say, The NeverEnding story, or Labrynth if Bowie hadn’t been so cool. The acting was stilted, the wording was…weird, and within 10 minutes I was mentally shouting at the characters “WTF, land is right there 5 feet away, why are you running away from cracking ice by walking on more ice?!” But it wasn’t terrible. It just seemed like 15 minutes of movie spread out over an hour and a half.
That said…the opinions of the two who matter <ie the 10 and 12 year old who are huge Airbender fans> is that it was neato, despite the changes, and they look very forward to the next chapters. They like Earth the best anyway.
Indeed. It was so bad that it was bad even at being bad, which all in all made it worse, as if it had sucked more it might been entertaining to mock at the very least. It’s malaise and all-around boringness is perhaps my chiefest complaint.
Re: the inability of most Firebenders to summon fire from nothing. If the water benders just snuffed all the fire sources, (nevermind the fact that they made no attempt to do just that even after saying they should), the Firebenders were still lobbing what looked like big balls of tar into the city. This seems like a pretty decent workaround to the enemy not obligingly giving you fire to work with. Depending on what the giant tarball-o-firey-fun is made of, dousing it with water might actually just give the firebenders more fire to work with.
“Hey, I got a great idea, let’s douse water on that big vat of burning oil!”
But yeah, speaking of idiot ball, nobody in Aquaopolis (I can’t remember the proper name for the city, though I would if I watched enough of the show) made any solid attempt to actually douse the existing fires in their city, even without the Firebenders lobbing in burning tar balls and opening up on the walls with flame throwers (Napalm?! I thought this was a kids movie! :D)
Unfortunately, when I read this I was in the middle of drinking. I’ll PM you the address where you can send a new keyboard"
As a bit of a sidebar, I just got some first hand experience in cleaning a keyboard post-spill (there was a three-vehicle collision involving some linens my wife was carrying, a 16 oz can of Rip It, and a $60 Saitek Eclipse II keyboard). You can unplug it, pop the keys out with a flathead screwdriver, and clean out everything with some cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol. Turns out a lot (if not most) keyboards nowadays are designed to be a bit spill-resistant. There’s a plastic “gutter” layer beneath the keys and above the circuits, and when you push the keys, they press down through a little hole thing to the circuit board. If you spill up to a certain amount of something, the liquid pours over the outside of the keys but lands on the plastic gutter and not the raised holes.
All this is saying is that if a water bender gets careless around your keyboard, all is not immediately lost (your keyboard probably being made of plastic, you still gotta be wary of careless firebenders though).
That’s because Toph out-cools the rest of the gaang put together. And I’m betting she’ll be pronounced “Toef” like in topiary.
It’s interesting that your two tweens were more forgiving of the movie. Perhaps the complaints here and elsewhere are because us older folks are not the target audience. The point is that one of the series’ notable achievements was that despite it being a kid’s show, it appealed to adults as well. The most noticeable kid’s aspect was the relatively bloodless combat – ala GI Joe, a round would hit a tank and you’d see the crew bail out and scamper away before it explodes. The series had an elegant plotline with all of the fiddley bits that make it interesting and explored themes you’d never expect in a kid’s show (genocide, anyone?). And that’s without even mentioning the whole truckload of fetishfuel it delivers. When I was selling the show to my brother I commented that I gave it the highest accolade a storyteller can get: At the end of each episode I would ask, “What happens next?”
The movie had none of this.
That very first entry in the list is so true. Grey DeLisle’s voice is pure sex.
Yeah, after reading all the reviews I was worried the kids would be highly disappointed, especially after the oldest one said “I kinda want to see it, and kinda don’t, cause I can tell already it’s different from the series.” And after the movie, they each detailed even more things that were different. But when I asked the result they said ‘AWESOME! Can’t wait for the next Book!’ So…um…yeah. Kids are more forgiving than adults, by a long shot. 
Momo’s name was mentioned at least once; the kids said twice, but I only noticed once. He just wasn’t any kind of important, barely even shown. No idea how big he is in the series, but here he was just a quick blip, like Stan Lee sneaking in or something.