Friday, February 11, 2011

What I Found Wrong With The Last Airbender

Even though it’s been about 2 months since its premiere, I’m still hearing people talk all about the race-bending issue with The Last Airbender and how that is the problem of the movie. I frankly see this as a stupid (and worst) reason to hate such a bad movie. Honestly, if white people could have played those characters best, then M. Night Shyamalan should have cast them for the sake of the audience. Here is the
reason why certain people should hate The Last Airbender.

Fans of the Animated Series:

The problem with The Last Airbender is that it did not hold true to the story. Main people that weren’t there include the Kyoshi warriors (one of whom plays a major role in the huge finale), Avatar Roku, certain members of the White Lotus (King Bumi and Jeong Jeong), and Jet (somewhat of a minor character, but plays a big role in the second season). Then you have Fire Lord Ozai, whose primary purpose in the first season was to inflict a greater sense of fear into the Avatar, just shows up. There is no suspense and no tension because Ozai is not a mystery. He’s there almost all the time. He isn’t even played that well by Cliff Curtis. Usually I trust him to give at least a decent performance, but his portrayal of pure, corrupt evil was laughable. We were expecting someone to pull this off like Ray Fiennes did with Voldemort. We got stuck with Keanu Reeves as Dracula.

Then you have the characters already in the movie. I do believe that Aang  and Zuko were played to the best of the actor’s abilities given the horrible script. But Katara, Admiral Zhao, Uncle Iroh, and especially Sokka were either caricatures of their true characters or simply too underacted. This is not complaining about the pronunciation of these names because in an ironic twist of events, the names were changed to make them more Asian. But Katara, played by Nicole Peltz (whom M. Night thinks is the best casting decision since Haley Joel Osment was cast as Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense), essentially had no character. She was underdeveloped as the romantic interest of Aang, and we never see enough of her to see if she really is as motherly as the series plays her out to be. Admiral Zhao was another story. Aasif Mandvi (who is funny, but wrong place, wrong time to do so) was just a d-bag. True Admiral Zhao is evil, but he was not evil in an annoying way. We wanted Zhao to die in the series because he was dastardly evil, but I wanted Zhao to die in the film because every scene he was in I wanted to stab my ears because of Mandvi’s seemingly humorous approach to a true villain. Iroh was just a victim of a bad script. Shaun Toub had no chance to portray Iroh’s spiritual wisdom and hearty manner in the movie. Sokka was the worst. His character in the television series blatantly says that he is the meat and sarcasm guy. His character in the film (played by Jackson Rathbone) has no substance. He is not that Sokka that he is in the television series. It was just a horribly acted character by an already weak actor.

Lastly, the entire storyline doesn’t stick with the TV series. It was pretty much M. Night finding segments of the series he liked and cramming them together into a movie. He may say that it was just too long of a program to make it flow perfectly. May I cite the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy as two essentially really long stories condensed into a movie absolutely perfectly? Why couldn’t M. Night just make the movie longer? It would solve blatant plot holes (Earthbenders were already on earth when they were imprisoned, they almost did not talk about Sozin’s comet), character flaws (Pakku just lets Katara and Aang train with him, everybody knows about Zuko’s past), and differences between the movie and the series (Zhao was killed by the ocean spirit, not vengeful waterbenders, firebenders need a source of fire in order to firebend, the Fire Nation does not just run away because of some giant wave Aang creates while in the Avatar state).

Regular movie-goers
Really the obvious problem with this film is the script. M. Night said himself that script-writing is not really his forte. And that was very obvious in this movie. The writing is horrible. It is overly dramatic and sometimes so bad its funny. The way the actors say the lines also is cringe-worthy. They can not seem to find any middle ground. They are either overacting or not even trying. No one wants to see actors just give up.
The other major problem is the storyline. There is no flow. I have seen episodes flow better than this. It seems to be just one story after another. M. Night tries to patch it up using Katara’s narration, but that once again goes back to the entire bad writing thing. These are really only two major problems, but what a big two they are. The story and the writing is bad. I could talk about the actors and how badly they did, but I feel that they are victim to M. Night’s direction and writing.

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