The Last Airbender

[cynchick]

I was really excited to see this movie. I even rewatched book 1 of the series this past week to refresh my memory. I expected certain things to be subpar; the fact that large chunks of the story would have to be cut for example. I also knew it was getting a bad rap from day 1, but I’m not as crazy diehard as some fans and I held out hope that it would still be good.

 

I hated it. Haaaated. I actually left the theater angry at the end. Which is a first. My friend and I kept looking to each other with growly faces during the rageworthy moments (which is kinda funny while wearing 3D glasses). It’s not even that the movie was bad, in the traditional sense, as if it had a crappy story or bad acting, bad cinematography, looked low-budget, etc.

It’s none of those things. The special effects were great, the overall acting was un-complainable at the very least, they had pretty, elaborate costumes, yadda yadda. But some of the things that were wrong with this movie were just plain inexcusable.

Such as:

-- Actors of the wrong ethnicity and skin color. And I don’t just mean the white people playing all the Water Tribe roles as well as the main hero. The Earth Nation peoples were appropriately Asian—Japanese-esque as their culture indicates. But turning the Fire Nation people into Indians? (also rebuilding their entire culture/architecture etc. as Indian) Especially when the Fire citizens are the palest-skinned group of people in the entire series and are quite clearly meant to be Chinese (firebending itself is modeled after kung-fu)? What the fuck is up with that. I’ll tell you what’s up with it. It’s called turning the villains into the darkest skinned people around. Because dark = bad. That’s the way we roll in America. And BTW. M. Night Shyamalan IS Indian and he let this Hollywoodized change happen. Yay for subliminally villainizing your own ethnic group. Internalized oppression much? But this is an old old argument by this point. People have been bitching about the race issues of this movie since the cast list was released. Let’s move on.

If you’re interested, here’s a great non-fail recasting of the movie that I agree with 99%. http://community.livejournal.com/ohpretty/6767.html I say 99% because I think Ken Watanabe would be better as the Fire Lord. He has the presence, which the actual actor severely lacked.

-- My first growly-face happened within the first 10 minutes, as soon as I heard Katara call Sokka, soh-kah. And then there was Uncle ee-roh. And worst of all…onng. I mean. How the hell do you mispronounce words that are originally in English!? It was an arbitrary, willful overlooking of phonetics. Like Iroh. The H is what makes it eye-roh. If it was ee-roh it would not need the H. See how grammar works? It’s not that hard. Especially when it’s said for you in PLAIN FUCKING ENGLISH! Did the creators of this movie not even watch the show? This is a huge huge peeve of mine when it comes to English dubbing of anime—which is why I refuse to watch anything but subs. But when there is no translation issue to deal with it’s just inexcusable.

-- Genderfail. In a series with almost NO genderfail, the movie producers managed to make it happen anyway. First, Suki is completely absent along with the Kyoshi warriors. But most of all, Katara is relegated to a sidekick—she has no story of her own, and is never shown to be the diamond-in-the-rough badass waterbender she is. And she’s weepy. She was on the verge of tears nearly the entire time. Katara is not a sad girl. Katara is an angry girl with a loud mouth and such a willful spirit that she’s a hypocritical bitch a lot of the time, especially in Book One.

-- Aang was emo. Yeah, waking up in an iceberg to find that a hundred years has passed and your entire race is dead and the world went to shit because you took off would be pretty hard to deal with. But Aang is not a sad panda. He is cheerful and playful to the point of exasperation. And in the series he accomplished this without looking frivolous and insincere. I guess that was too much to ask of the scriptwriters here.

-- Things didn’t look like they were supposed to. I already mentioned the entire culture of the Fire Nation being switched from Chinese-esque to Indian-esque to match the new (and UNimproved) darkening of the Bad Guys. But certain highly recognizable scenes were altered in really stupid ways. The Fire Lord's chamber went from being intimidating and dark with the wall of fire before the throne, to a giant bare room of beige marble. It didn’t look like a throne room in any sense of the word, let alone the throne room of a tyrant warlord.  

-- Changes to characters or the storyline that made no sense being changed. Like Gran-Gran being called Grandma. Or Zuko and Ozai having short hair. Commander Zhao showing moments of conscience about killing the moon spirit, which he then does anyway thus making his hesitation pointless. (Zhao, hmm…there’s a real Indian sounding name…). Or Yue being the leader of the northern Water Tribe. Zuko being burned by Ozai because he tried to save some friends from being sacrificed. But the biggest, most unacceptable change of all….

-- Firebenders can’t make their own fire. Whut. I mean….WHUT. They needed like, braziers and shit to direct fire from. When Zuko fights Katara, he even drops a torch on the ground to start a fire so he has something to work with. WHUT? And Sozen’s Comet is a big deal for the firebenders because its power will let them create their own fire. Yet…Zuko still melted himself out of the ice more than once. So can they make their own fire or not? Oh and the reason the Fire Nation started the war was not because they were resource-greedy warmongers, it was because they didn’t want to live by the guidelines the spirit world set down for mankind. WHUT.

-- And finally, Zuko was a little too nice. Too much of a sympathetic character for this stage in the story. He’s always been a sympathetic character if you looked deep, but he’s not supposed to be so “poor mistreated boy nobody loves him and he’s just trying to go home”. I get that they did it to make his transition to a good guy more believable with the time/story constraints later on. But for me the easy transition makes his redemption ultimately less meaningful.

I’m not an M. Night Shyamalan hater. In fact I enjoyed all of his other movies and thought the criticisms were too harsh. But he made an absolute mess of this. With such great source material as ATLA, you would really only have to copypaste scenes and hire some actors to deliver the same lines and the movie would have been awesome. But no, he had to try his own original (failure) adaptation.

Things I DID like:

-- Iroh. The actor did a good job, and even though he wasn’t fat, he was recognizably Iroh.

-- The scenes between Zuko and Iroh. They definitely had that father/son chemistry. Best scenes of the whole movie actually.

-- Dev Patel. I just love him. I think he’ll make a good Zuko overall because he can play the good guy with the dark side really well. And he’s totally adorkable. And we all know Zuko is really just a giant dork. XD

-- The fight scene between Zuko and Katara. Zuko was properly impressed with Katara’s skill (the only one who was) and his interest in her was piqued. And then after he knocked her out he gently laid her against the wall, unnecessarily touched her (couldn’t see exactly, maybe moved her hair, straightened her clothes, something like that) and even sort of apologized to her in an “I had no choice” way. Cynchick was pleased with this little spark of Zutara.

I could say more, but I wasted 2 hours of my life on this movie and another hour ranting about it. Many people on my F-list are ATLA fans, so let this serve as a warning. Don’t watch it unless you want to be severely disappointed and pissed off at the butchering of such a great show.

Comments

Haha..

[(Anonymous)]

At one point I figured that the Northern Water Tribe would have been Canadian had the Avatar world hold any significance to the real world.
So half the movie, all that went through my mind was "FUCKINGG EHHHHHHH, FFUUUCCKKKINNNGG EHHHHH."
But then the goddamn pronounciation had to fuck things up.
Soh-ka. Soca. Soca is freaking music, not a name.
I liked the special effects, though.