Frigid watched The Last Airbender

[Cynical Cat]

I have not watched the series, but I did go see the movie.

I'm watching the series and skipping the movie and I'm happy. Since M. Night hasn't produced anything worth watching since "Unbreakable" I'm pretty sure where the blame should go with regards to movie.

[General Havoc]

Since M. Night hasn't produced anything worth watching since "Unbreakable" I'm pretty sure where the blame should go with regards to movie.

No, I'm sorry, this movie was so terrible that while M. Night deserves a full measure of blame for its turgid stupidity, he cannot take all the blame. Nobody can. This isn't one of those movies where you try to determine whether the actors were bad, or simply badly directed and badly written for. This is one of those movies where it is patently obvious that all of the above are true. Everyone, the actors, the director, the sniveling incompetent hacks pretending to call themselves writers, the cinematographers, the producers, the fucking foley artists were all deserving of full helpings of blame.

This movie was not bad. It was not a bad adaptation. It did not suffer from "problems". This movie was a start-to-finish abomination that tainted every thing and soul associated with it, including me as an audience member. Every single element of this film was independently terrible. There was not one specific thing that went wrong with it. Nothing about it was ever, at any point, right.

[frigidmagi]

Shammy is listed as the sole writer. He wrote, directed and produced it. Which frankly to me is part of the problem.

He can't write for shit. Seriously, the kid who wrote Eragon did better. Stephine Meyers did better.

HE CANNOT WRITE. And he needs to stop pretending he can. At this point I'm thinking he can't direct either.

[frigidmagi]

Did some checking. In it's 6 day opening weekend, Avatar made 70 million dollars. The Twilight movie, made 175 million. Where as Twilight is a very cheap movie to make fantasy wise, Avatar cost 150 million for a lousy hour and a half.

Frankly I can only see the earnings of the movie falling hard from here and I'm hoping they don't make their money back.

[General Havoc]

I hope that what little money they do make is consumed in a freak cosmetics fire, and they are left destitute, forced to beg their bread on the streets of Los Angeles.

[General Havoc]

My hatred continues to rage for this film. I hereby call upon the work of the esteemed Roger Ebert to show that I am not alone:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100630/REVIEWS/100639999

"The Last Airbender" 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. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

Let's start with the 3D, which was added as an afterthought to a 2D movie. Not only is it unexploited, unnecessary and hardly noticeable, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Now for the movie itself. The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe. It's in the very nature of animation to make absurd visual sights more plausible.

Since "Airbender" involves the human manipulation of the forces of air, earth, water and fire, there is hardly an event that can be rendered plausibly in live action. That said, its special effects are atrocious. The first time the waterbender Katara summons a globe of water, which then splashes (offscreen) on her brother Sokka, he doesn't even get wet. Firebenders' flames don't seem to really burn, and so on.

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. These warring factions are held in uneasy harmony by the Avatar, but the Avatar has disappeared, and Earth lives in a state of constant turmoil caused by the warlike Firebenders.

Our teenage heroes Katara and Sokka discover a child frozen in the ice. This is Aang (Noah Ringer), and they come to suspect he may be the Avatar, or Last Airbender. Perhaps he can bring harmony and quell the violent Firebenders. This plot is incomprehensible, apart from the helpful orientation that we like Katara, Sokka and Aang and are therefore against their enemies.

The dialogue is couched in unspeakable quasi-medieval formalities; the characters are so portentous they seem to have been trained for grade school historical pageants. Their dialogue is functional and action-driven. There is little conviction that any of this might be real even in their minds. All of the benders in the movie appear only in terms of their attributes and functions, and contain no personality.

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.

After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. 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. I don't say they're untalented, I say they've been poorly served by Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing. Little Aang reminds me of Wallace Shawn as a child. This is not a bad thing (he should only grow into Shawn's shoes), but doesn't the role require little Andre, not little Wally?

As the villain, Shyamalan has cast Cliff Curtis as Fire Lord Ozai and Dev Patel (the hero of "Slumdog Millionaire") as his son Prince Zuko. This is all wrong. In material at this melodramatic level, you need teeth-gnashers, not leading men. Indeed, all of the acting seems inexplicably muted. I've been an admirer of many of Shyamalan's films, but action and liveliness are not his strong points. I fear he takes the theology of the Bending universe seriously.

As "The Last Airbender" bores and alienates its audiences, consider the opportunities missed here. (1) This material should have become an A-list animated film. (2) It was a blunder jumping aboard the 3D bandwagon with phony 3D retro-fitted to a 2D film. (3) If it had to be live action, better special effects artists should have been found. It's not as if films like "2012" and "Knowing" didn't contain "real life" illusions as spectacular as anything called for in "The Last Airbender."

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

[frigidmagi]

Last Airbender does not take place in the future, it's just a crazy theory some fans threw around.

[Charon]

After seeing the rating on Rotten tomatoes and seeing several reviews which I trusted I decided to do the smart thing and download it to see if it was worth anything or if it was truly shit.

I shut it off after 10 minutes. There's a lot of things you can say they did wrong in this movie, and they would all be right. But I think the greatest travesty is that in just 10 minutes they managed to suck all the life out of Avatar. Avatar was one of the most lively, flowing, energetic, funny shows that has ever been made. I'd rate it highly on pretty much any Top 10 list.

After 10 minutes of the movie I could already tell that any vestiges of what made these characters unique and interesting was dead. What were once jokes that made me smile were completely devoid of any life and I swear were meant to be taken seriously. They repeatedly broke the cardinal "show don't tell" rule just in those 10 minutes and I've heard it gets even worse from there.

10 minutes was enough for me to know that this movie was bad. I can't imagine actually sitting through the whole thing, though I might try tonight.

EDIT: Just watched it. About as bad as I thought it would be. Alcohol helps dull the pain.

All in all, I've seen Pornos that were better movies.

[Cynical Cat]

Actually Shammy can write if you ever dig up his early stuff. The problem was that after the "Sixth Sense" which was a decent suspense mystery movie with a really talented cast, people started calling him a genius. And he believed it.

If you want to utterly destroy your ability to write there are two essential steps:

1) believe everything you write is awesome

2) ignore anyone telling you otherwise

The dude wrote himself into Lady in the Lake as a writer who will get an idea that will change the world. Think about the levels of rampant narcissism required to do that.

Now sit down and think about that some more, because frankly that's a lot of egomania to take it. He's long past the point where one takes one's critical judgment, walks it out into a field, and blows its brains out with a .357. He's a walking fucking tragedy, literally his own worse enemy. He's laid waste to his own talent and turned himself into a shit factory, his career coasting on name brand recognition. He's a giant warning sign to every would be writer of the perils of success.

That being said, I'll gladly face those dangers.

[Steve]

Yeah, you've pretty much chased me away from the live action movie, but the furor here did convince me to go ahead and check out the series. Thankfully NickToon shows it twice every weekday (twice as in blocks, a 1 hour block at 9AM and a hour and a half block int he afternoon or evening, including a 2 hour block on Friday). Three weeks ago I jumped in at the pilot episode "Boy in the Iceberg" and "The Avatar Returns", today got to see "The Desert" and "The Serpent's Pass". Sadly, the afternoon block was already mid-to-late season 2 when I started watching; it just rotated back to Season 1 today. So it'll take me longer to finish it.

So, thank you all, because this show is completely and utterly awesome.

Edit: Heh, oops, thread necro....