The Last Airbender Reviews

[Sheridan Passell]

I think this deserves a big, fat I TOLD YOU SO WILLIAMS! ------->

http://uk.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_airbender/

[dnwilliams]

yeah, I saw these yesterday, they're exceptionally bad. part of me is happy about that, they did some truly terrible things in the adapting of the source. the other part of me wants to keep my tenner. bad movies get sequels too right? transformers 3 is on the way...

[Sheridan Passell]

Roger Ebert - "The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."

It's got worse reviews than The Happening.

[dnwilliams]

I know, I know. It's getting worst movie ever kind of reviews. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be good, just because of how much they deviated from the show in terms of what I personally liked about it, as well as the casting. I've been thinking for a long time the only things I'll enjoy are the score and the effects.

The story takes place in the future, after Man has devastated the planet and survives in the form of beings with magical powers allowing them to influence earth, water and fire.

Potentially interesting details are botched. Consider the great iron ships of the Firebenders. These show potential as Steampunk, but are never caressed for their intricacies. Consider the detail Miyazaki lavished on Howl's Moving Castle. Trying sampling a Nickelodeon clip from the original show to glimpse the look that might have been.

Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad.

It's supposed to be a fantasy world, not our future. I raged so hard when I read that in Ebert's review. The culture and the world-building that had been so well realised in the cartoon was thrown out of the window, and Ebert confirms the casting to be nothing more that passive racism.

[dalmatianjaws]

In the movie's defense, Ebert is an idiot and might just assume it's set in our future ... thought they might have started with cheesy voice-over "In the future, the polar ice caps have melted ..."

The Shaman is dead. Let's all mourn and dread the next one and yearn for the days of Unbreakable.

[Sheridan Passell]

I put it up for discussion that M. Night Shyamalan has had the most extraordinary career arc of any director in history.

[Sheridan Passell]

Here's the public's reaction -



WOW

[dnwilliams]

What upsets me the most is that I have the feeling the legacy of this movie will overshadow the quality of the show...

[Sheridan Passell]

Oh man, the fury is ongoing. This is the 450th pissed off Last Airbender comment I've had to ok on the front page. It's a pretty good one too:

First of all, they didn’t pronounce the names right, the firebenders didn’t make their own fire, Sokka wasn’t even funny, the skin tones were whacked, (firebenders are pale and waterbenders are dark-skinned), the bending was pathetic at best, the hair on almost everyone was all messed up, the actress playing Katara had no presence on the screen and Aang was so -blah-. No background at all! And if they think that cramming twenty episodes into a movie is hard, what about LOTR? Have you read those books?! There’s more than thirty movies could handle and Peter Jackson managed! I expected there would be differences, but this is just pathetic. Someone needs to get Shyamalan’s head examined. I think if this was an original thing, it -might- have been ok. Why didn’t the director just write his own script and forget about trying to do anything with A:TLA? It’s like he didn’t even WATCH the series. There’s barely anything that happened in the series that is in the movie. Haru was a freakin child! Please, explain how this came out of A:TLA? Aang didn’t even save the Northern Water Tribe like he did in the series, Zuko didn’t fight Zhao and the battle between Katara and Zuko? It was freakin epic in the series. In the movie, poof! Bye Katara. ONE HIT! She’s a master waterbender! Pulease! I hated it. It needs to be permenantly deleted from the world and redone. Shyamalan, you didn’t just miss, you weren’t even in the same stadium.

[dalmatianjaws]

Awesome. It really is that bad. I"m not even a fan of the show and I was pissed.

[dnwilliams]

I think I may never watch it, just to remain unscarred.

[dalmatianjaws]

There is a scene early on when the older boy and the girl almost fall in through the ice because it's so precarious. Then, moments later, they see the kid frozen below and decide to get him out by CHIPPING AWAY AT THE FUCKING ICE. Then, when it starts to crack and they are in danger of falling in the water below, they seem shocked like they can't believe it's happening.

At this moment a small boy in the audience turns to his mother and says, "why did he DO that?!"

Amazing.

[Sheridan Passell]

That boy is going to grow up into one of us. Sitting at the computer, pissed off at movies.