Before I express my grief over the tremendous failure that this movie was, I'd like to let all you folks that I grew to love the show with that I wish we could have shared this moment. We could have bonded over it, like Babel. Only the twins will get that, but that's probably for the best.
First, no I-told-you-so's - I knew it was going to be bad. I had low expectations for M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, but Shyamalan's got some kind of crazy limbo skills. It's as though the writers didn't so much watch the show as read the synopsis of most of the episodes of the first season and possibly some of the Wikipedia entry. Clearly not all of the Wiki, however, it's quite extensive. Every minute reminded me of when I read about M. Night learning about the series: from his daughter. The whole thing smacked of a story that a parent tried to piece together from what his child told him. Kind of like that video of 5-year-old telling Star Wars, only in reverse and considerable less adorable. In short, the Ember Island Players did it better.
I recall the hubub over casting; It could be coincidence, but I'm pretty sure the response to the outrage over casting was to retroactively Kill The Black Guy First by casting Damon Gupton as Monk Gyatso. Still, I was kind of over the whole ethnic thing, it can be hard to find people that look the right ethnicity, do complicated fight choreography, and act, but I kind of expected them to be able to do at least one of those things. I can forgive Iroh for being English and not at all fat, for example, because he did what he could with the awful writing and, in my opinion, was the closest to the original character. Zuko was alright. His scar was difficult to see and the hair was wrong, so we lost some symbolism there, but he was among those doing their best with the crap they were given in the form of a script. Fire Lord Ozai and Admiral Zhao, along with the Fire Nation countryside, looked very French/Italian and not at all intimidating. They did alright with their lines, but I just could not take Zhao's whiny voice seriously, when he was such a hot-headed bad-ass in the show. The Fire Nation Army seems to be less competent than Imperial Storm Troopers.
Poor, poor, Sokka. Jackson Rathbone is another guy who seemed to have a grasp on his character, but powerless against the writers. He was doing his darndest to make sure that we knew that there was some kind of comic relief going on somewhere off-screen. The animated character once described himself as "Sokka, the meat and sarcasm guy." Jackson had that, along with the serious side that the only main character that isn't a bender tended to have. He did good, and I commend him. Nicola Peltz's Katara, however, was more annoying than Dawn. I guess it's tough, hopeful optimism is harder to build up realistically than meat-eating sarcasm. Noah Ringer was just as annoying. I'm guessing they got the first kid who could swing a bo and was willing to shave his head. I should probably give them both some slack, as the greenest members of the cast, and the people who really failed here were the writers.
The show read like a badly-translated foreign film, where you could kind of gather that somewhere in here was a great story that got muddled up some how. As a sort of montage of the entire first season, the film managed to be both too fast AND too slow. They lacked the fast-paced dialogue that would have made such an undertaking possible, and dragged out terrible bits that ended with things like "we believe in our beliefs." That is not an exaggeration, that was a line just before Sokka's first girlfriend dies and becomes the moon. Sorry, the becoming the moon bit doesn't so much happen in the movie, they probably thought it was hokey.
In place of good dialogue, there were lots of scenes of Aang and Katara doing Tai Chi, and notably NOT BENDING ANYTHING. While a lot of the bending that actually happened looked kinda cool, you could see a lot of cheating going on, like close-ups with sound suggesting that elements were moving around somewhere. Oh, and for some reason, Iroh's the only guy who can make his own fire. Everyone else needs it to already be there. And speaking of close-ups MY GOD THE CLOSE-UPS. We get it, the make-up crew is good at hiding these kids' acne. Very impressive. Seriously, at least 75 percent of the crappy dialogue, as well as the 5 minutes of not crappy dialogue, occurred while the camera was right next to the character's face, but I digress.
The writers seemed to smack what they thought were the important episodes together by pasting the end of each one in a sort of cohesive super-plot. Unfortunately, none of the endings really benefited from the build-up that would have come from the rest of the episode it was ripped from. Like I said, probably working with synopses without actually watching any of the show.
I'm running out of steam here, so a few more things before I go to sleep. Momo was kind of scary and not really cute at all and sort of reminded me of Barbosa's monkey, Appa was perfect but I wanted more of him, and the cabbage guy made no appearance. One cabbage cart destroyed would have redeemed the movie for me, but this film was devoid of Easter eggs. All the cool bending that didn't happen in the movie was put into the closing credits.
That said, if by some depressing miracle this movie makes enough money that they actually make the other two, I will still see them. I have a problem.
