A Review: The Last Airbender

I acquired a copy of the movie.  I did not pay my money for this crap.

The Last Airbender is an absolutely joyless and hideous movie.  M. Night committed the #1 cardinal cinematic sin.  He made a boring movie.  This may be somewhat long because I'm going to try to review this as not only a HUGE fan of the cartoon series, but as a HUGE fan of fantasy action movies as well.  Night failed colossally.  Forget about the dubious casting, the adaptation is simply poor.  The story isn't cohesive. It has gaps for anyone who doesn't already know the story and moves too fast for those that do.

It seems to me that when one writes an adaptation you want to keep the core of the story in tact.  Obviously, Night's casting showed he wasn't interested in that, but it's further illustrated by changes in name pronunciation.  Aang (ayng) becomes Ong and Sokka (sock-ah) becomes Sooka (so-kah) in the movie.  Did Cameron's Avatar not only prompt a name change, but also pronunciation change?  The cast says ah-vatar in most scenes.  Yes, I know tomayto tahmahto but it annoyed the heck out of me.  How could I waste so much time during a movie annoyed at pronuciation?  It's easy when there's nothing else to do.  Not only did I not enjoy the script and casting, but the acting is stiff and paper thin.  Out of the 4 leads only Jackson Rathbone showed skill.  Dev Patel seriously overacted.  The young actor that played Aang can not act and the actress playing Katara was just slightly above him. 

The movie, unlike the cartoon, is dark. No matter what the storyline Aang, Sokka, and Katara always managed to laugh and have fun in the cartoon. They're children afterall. They knew when to be serious, but they relaxed as well. The only dour character is Zuko. In the movie they're all dour. Aang doesn't laugh. He doesn't fly around on his air ball or much on his glider. I understand not everything can make it into a movie, but to omit Aang love of life was a serious mistake.

The fight scenes were half decent.  The choreography was great but the filming of it wasn't.  Benders were fighting without bending.  Huh?  One on one bending fights were short, very short.  The CGI bending budget must've been low.  The only good things about The Last Airbender are the sets (obviously where the bending budget went) and Shaun Toub as Uncle Iroh.  Though he didn't look like Iroh and no one can compare to Mako's commanding voice, Toub did a good job showing Iroh's true nature.  The sets were perfect.  Everything else was pure unadulterated crap.

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