Customer Reviews

The Last Airbender

5 star:		(127)
4 star:		(73)
3 star:		(47)
2 star:		(43)
1 star:		(241)

 

 

I'm someone who saw this movie without having seen a single minute of the anime it was based upon, or having known one single thing about the anime. I had heard the movie got bad reviews when it was in theaters, and I had heard something about the fans of the show being upset about the movie, but I was only vaguely aware of the this, and I didn't really care. Movie critics get things wrong often enough, and the trailers looked like the movie could be cool, particularly the first one. I almost watched it at the theater this summer, and was willing to spend money on 3D, but I ended up going to other movies instead.

So, last Friday I ended up renting the movie and watching it. I then started watching the series online (check Hulu, though it might not be up any more), and managed see all 61 episodes of the series over the course of four days. This has put me in the unique position of being able to review this movie BOTH as someone who doesn't know anything about the anime series, AND as someone who is (now) a fan of the anime series.

First, as someone who knew nothing about the show:

In a nutshell, I found the movie to be dull, annoying, annoyingly stupid, and pointless. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters. For a fantasy world, complete with magical powers and diverse peoples, a hundred year war, and an adventurous quest to avert the apocalypse, the story was amazingly boring. AND it managed to be simple and confusing at the same time, which is an achievement I didn't know was possible. It's simple, in that it's a standard good guy vs. bad guy storyline, and complicated in that how this world works isn't explained very well and random stuff keeps happening with no explanation.

The protagonist of the story is a kid whose got special super powers, but needs training to use the super powers, and so has to go on a journey to get trained by some people at the north pole. He starts his journey at the south pole. Why he can't find a teacher anywhere closer than literally the farthest away they could be other than outer space, I don't know. The antagonist is the Fire Nation, apparently a nation that wants to rule the whole world. The super kid is important because he's something called 'the Avatar' or maybe it's because he's the last of his kind, the Airbenders, or because he's been frozen in a block of ice for a hundred years, or something, but this isn't explained very well in the movie. The few things that are 'explained' in the movie are explained with stupid reasons. Other stuff is filed under random s**t that just happens. When the bad guys raid a village, they ask for all the old people to be brought out. Why? I don't know. I don't think even the bad guys know. When two people are escaping a prison, a lone arrow is shot across a vast canyon, to perfectly strike one of the escapees across the face, cracking the porcelain mask they're wearing and knocking them out, but not actually hurting the person. Where did the arrow come from? Was it a lucky shot? An unbelievably skilled archer? Why was there only one arrow shot at the escapees and not a hundred? Were all the prison archers on lunch break or something? Then there's giant flying furry beast that the heroes of the story use for transportation that's just THERE with superpower boy. RANDOM INEXPLICABLE STUFF.

Then there was the dialogue. Not a single word anyone ever said actually gave you any idea as to what there personality was like. All dialogue was designed to further the "plot", such as it was. And it was REPETITIVE. In the first ten minutes of the movie one character uses the phrase "the fire nation is here with their machines" TWICE in a single minute (Also, there were no machines. There were soldiers and they came on a ship... maybe the ship was 'the machines'?). Another character, one of the main bad guys, mentions his dastardly secret plot to kill a spirit like half a dozen times. When he finds the spirit (which is apparently a fish... but also the moon, or the moon spirit or don't ask IDEK) he talks about his plot AGAIN while holding the fish up in a bag, and I'm like, "JUST KILL THE STUPID MOON FISH ALREADY!! You've only been yapping about it for the last HOUR!".


The dialogue is dull and insipid. I'd expect this kind of work from a 7th grader. A failing 7th grader. And the acting is worse. It's like the actors are reading their lines for the first time. The emotional range of the characters is the following: fear of the fire nation, worshipful hope that the avatar airbender boy will save the day, and, um.... yeah that was about it. There was a brief love interest near the end, but again, stilted acting just made it painful to watch. There was ZERO humor in this movie.

I don't know how else to describe this. I think I'll borrow Roger Ebert's words:

"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... 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..."

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Now as a fan of the show:

Before seeing the the anime series, my feelings on the movie were somewhere along the lines of, "Meh. Whatever." It was just one more bad movie I'd wasted my time on and in due course I'd eventually forget everything about it. Someday, I would get those memory braincells back. Or at least forget I had them.

No more.

Having seen the show, I can honestly say that the movie is a heartbreaking tragedy. Including marketing, they sunk about three hundred million dollars into this movie. Given their source material, they could have made something as exciting and as fun as Star Trek, as epic as Lord of the Rings, and as magical as Harry Potter. A visual experience as stunning as Avatar, and with fight scenes and cinematography more beautiful than "House of Flying Daggers" and "The Fall". With characters and a storyline that pulled you in and gave you an experience you'd remember forever. It could have been something truly awesome.

If it had been merely a good movie, that would have been disappointing, but okay. If it had been a mediocre movie, that would have been sad, but there would have still been room for redemption in the sequels. Instead, it's this. This... this make me sad. And it makes me mad. I can only imagine how much angrier I'd be if I had been a fan from the beginning, been excited about the movie, and waited and waited for it, and then to have this come out...

This is painful enough as it is and I didn't have any hopes dashed. I fell in love with the series already knowing what the movie was. I can understand the fanbase's rage at M. Night Shyamalan. If ever you're in a movie theater, and a trailer starts playing with his name on the screen, and someone in the audience boos and heckles him loudly and vociferously, that's an "Avatar: The Last Airbender" fan who had something they loved destroyed by him and they deserve their anger.

Because there is no way to redeem this with a sequel. I sincerely and fervently hope that they DON'T make a sequel. And with all the money spent on this... There's no way anyone's going to do ANOTHER adaption of the show anytime soon. At least not in the next decade or two, if ever.

This isn't just another piece of mediocre cinematography. MNS didn't just make another bad movie. He took something away from us that we probably won't ever get back. He permanently spoiled something that was beautiful. Because "Avatar: The Last Airbender" will always be related to this movie. This can never be undone.

And I really really wish it could be.

Originally, I had been intending to wait until this film came out on DVD so I could rent it from a Redbox. However, my friend wanted to see this, and invited me along. I thought, why the heck not.

He wanted to see it in 3D, so I thought, sure, might as well. The 3D cost 4 extra bucks, but after the movie was over, I felt totally ripped off. The movie previews that came before the actual Airbender movie itself had more 3D in them than the danged movie! There were a few moments where the 3D effects popped out, but overall, if you watch this in 2D, you're not really missing out on anything here.

I don't know what M. Night Shymalan was thinking when he directed this. Now, it would have been IMPOSSIBLE to get all of the cool stuff in Season 1 into this movie, but what the people responsible for this atrocity did was disgraceful. There was so much cut out. Many beloved characters - the Kyoshian Warriors, Jet, Bato, Jeong Jeong, Haru, Avatar Roku, King Bumi, Madame Wu, the pirates, the list goes on... none of them made a single appearance. Many things were simply smushed together - for example, Haru's village and the Kyoshi Village have apparently been mushed together as one - but there's no Haru or Kyoshian Warriors (the only thing we see is a old stone statue of Avatar Kyoshi) All the cutting out of vital elements of the story was really unneccessary as this movie was barely one and a half hours. Titanic was twice that long, and this movie could have done at least two hours easy. Why such a short film? Only God knows why. Maybe M. Night or the producers got bored and decided to just cut out as much as he thought he could get away with.

Of course, you CAN'T fit twenty episodes into one movie. We all know that. I've seen enough book to movie adaptations to know that a movie adaptation can never get everything in from the source, but the problem with this movie is that there was minimal effort to capture the spirit of the TV series. I didn't feel like the producers and director CARED for the story, with the way the movie came out plot and dialogue-wise.

I loved Dev Patel as Zuko. And for a odd reason, I rather liked Iroh's appearance. Both of them were decent actors. But none of the lines from the show made it to the movie - such as Sokka's sarcasm, Aang asking Katara if she wanted to go penguin-sledding, the delicious banter between Zhao and Zuko (and the Agni Kai that resulted from it), Iroh's nuggets of wisdom, and so on and so forth. What made the show so great and enjoyable was stripped away from the movie. I didn't FEEL any of the essence of the show in this.

The Bending was a joke. Some of the fight scenes were awesome, but much of the Bending was preceded by what looked like interpretive dance whereas on the show, Bending was pretty much instantaneous with just one or two moves or gestures. Why did M. Night do this to the Bending arts? Again, only God knows why. He clearly had the budget, and the costumes were great - I loved the clothing of the Fire Lord and Admiral Zhao. Overall the costumes for everyone seemed well-done, but so many other things were lacking and props could not save the atrocious storyline, writing, and dialogue.

Very little of the original show remains. Even the freaking name pronouncation has changed. If all of the character's names were changed and the Bending was renamed 'element magic' or something like that, this could easily have passed as an entirely different movie/story. One would think that with such an AWESOME TV show, the movie would be awesome too. Most of the actors for this film - especially Aang, or should I say, 'Ohng' - failed in their roles and were so unlike their TV counterparts and such lackluster actors in their roles that I wonder why M. Night chose them in the first place. It seems especially that the actors for Aang and Sokka have never seen the TV show and didn't bother studying their characters - which to me is shocking, because any actor in a movie adaptation should take the time to study their character and source material.

Sadly, it's a terrible film, and I'm afraid of what M. Night and the producers will do with the next movie. Even people who haven't seen the TV show are trashing this film, and I have to agree. So much has been cut out that if you don't have the TV show information in your mind, things become really confusing. Hopefully M. Night will read all the negative reviews and rethink his plans for the next Airbender movie, because if he didn't even take the time to make sure the character's names were pronounced properly, he shouldn't be too surprised that people are being so critical of the film.

I don't understand how Shyamalan could mess this up so badly. My girls and I own the 3 books of the nick cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender and we watch it all the time. It has everything a great story needs - action, a little bit of romance (not too much - thank goodness), humor, great characters - both the good and the bad, suspense, and the plot keeps moving forward taking the viewer on an exciting adventure. But this live action version is an overblown waste of Millions of $$. This is just a big M. Night ego trip. There's an action sequence where Aang who is supposed to be fighting for his life, escaping with the help of the blue spirit, finds himself in a large circle surrounded by boards and he just starts blowing the boards into different configurations for a few minutes while the blue spirit is left hanging fighting the bad guys. This is pretty much the way the entire movie goes. MNS doesn't seem to know how to use the characters powers in any useful way, he just goes into special effects mode like "oh, this would be cool to see" without thinking of whether it makes any sense for the character to be doing that. So, the story tends to sits like a big steaming pile of flying bison poop.

Main problems with this movie:
1. Names are pronounced differently from cartoon (is this an elitest version of the cartoon? Aang is now Ahng?)
2. This is supposed to be an asian based world... uhm, where are the asians?
3. Characters are pretty clueless and they do a lot of monologuing (argh!)
4. Where are the laughs? Avatar is filled with jokes and lighter moments, this is just dull, dull, dull.

Highlights:
Zuko's uncle Iroh is the best looking character in the movie.
hmmm... yep, that's about it.

This money would have been better spent creating a 4th book in the legend of Aang. Nickelodeon, if you have any say in the live action movies I seriously recommend taking more creative control or just getting a different director. Luckily, the creators of Airbender have announced a new show called Avatar: The legend of Korra set to air November 2011. In the meantime, I'll be watching all of my old episodes from the cartoon series just to clear my head after watching this junk.

This movie is an amalgamation of poor decisions and poor understanding. Remember being young and having to constantly correct your parents whenever they attempted to discuss the cartoons and video games you liked? That's this movie. It's as if Shyamalan walked in on his son watching Avatar, watched one episode with him, and decided to make a movie adaptation as a surprise birthday present.

Where to begin? First of all, the deliberate decision to pronounce many of the characters' names differently from the cartoon reeks of ignorance. What does this accomplish? It serves only to instantly throw off and alienate the real fans of the show, and in no way enhances the movie for people not in the know.

Second, pacing. This movie ludicrously attempts to condense an entire season consisting of roughly 7 and a half hours of content into 90 minutes. A feat so daunting Shyamalan probably knew it was impossible, but did it anyway! I had watched the 1st season of the show directly before watching this movie and was amazed at how fast the it tries to plow through the storyline of the show. The film is so rushed it offers no time to introduce its characters. Characters that once formed an ensemble are now given the back burner in favor of the main character.

Finally, the magic of the show is just simply lost in the transition to live action. I don't know if the fighting in the cartoon can be pulled off in this medium, but the movie seems to want me to believe that it can't. The iconic regalia of the fire nation in the cartoon just comes off as drab in the film. Just like Dragonball Evolution, the film not only brings absolutely nothing new to the table of the source material, but taints it for merely existing.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has been one of my all time favorite series. When I heard a live action film was in the making, I was so excited! I knew I wanted to see this movie because the effects had to be amazing, although I also knew there would have to be some differences. Resigned to the fact that the characters wouldn't look or sound exactly right, but still excited to see all the bending action, I went off with my best friend to see the movie.

The beginning of the movie was pretty good, I'll admit, with Nicola Peltz as a decent Katara and Jackson Rathbone a surprisingly good Sokka. But it just went downhill from there.
At least three of the main characters' names were mispronounced, including the avatar's (Aang, which is supposed to be pronounced with a long A sound, not like 'Ong'). That really irked me throughout the show. Something else that stood out was that all of the bad guys (the Fire Nation people) were Indian. Well, the friend I saw the movie with is Indian, and she turned to me and asked, "Why are we all evil?"
Another little thing that really bothered me was Uncle Iroh was supposed to be heavyset with white hair, and the man hired to portray him was neither.
Also, in the movie there was almost none of the lighthearted joking and optimism often seen in the series, just the seriousness of Aang having to save the world.
All of these examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Overall, this movie was a disappointment to me as a fan of the Avatar: The Last Airbender series. I'm sure to anyone who didn't watch the TV show, it was a great film, but I wouldn't recommend this movie to a fellow Avatar fanatic.

I hated it once I saw the cast and then once everyone started actually speaking I felt even more disgusted. I can not possibly believe that anyone who ever saw the TV series would produce a movie to monstrosity. The cast is nothing like the movie, the script is atrocious. This movie resembles the TV series in name only.

All i can say is that if i could have given this movie zero stars i would have. HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT! Any fans of the tv series should feel the same. I pray that they don't decide to do books 2 and 3. jeez, it hurts just to think about how suckish this movie was.

Okay, when I first saw this I had never seen a single episode of the TV show, I had heard about it yes, but never seen it. We were bored and had nothing else to do so we rented this movie and watched it on the recommendation of a friend. O my GOSH what an awful movie, as someone who never saw the TV series I wasn't disappointed by the COMPLETE AND UTTER LACK OF STAYING TRUE TO THE ORIGINAL STORY, but the whole thing was stupid. Instead of some quick "bending" action almost every single fight seen was put into slow motion, okay, a little is fine, 95% of it, no it was very boring. The dialog was awful, it doesn't matter that the actors where/are mostly kids, kids can act if they know how and are given proper DIRECTION, but whoever wrote this was just, oh I don't know, they sent their brain on vacation for that time. It was pathetic, something that should have been dramatic and emotional just made you want to laugh. The story didn't even make sense, instead of feeling for these people who are really in dire situations you are just left trying to figure out what is going on.

Now, I did say that there is ONE good thing about this movie and that is that it got me interested in seeing the TV series, and boy, what an AWESOME series!!! It has everything: action, adventure, a little romance, creativity, and it's funny, really really funny at times. This movie didn't have an iota of humor in it, and one of the funniest characters in the TV show, Uncle Iroh, (my personal favorite character) doesn't even look like he does in the TV show, NOT AT ALL!!! Since when are the Fire Nation people Middle Eastern? They all have very pale skin in the TV show! Zuko looks nothing like he should, Sokka is too old, Iroh is too thin, the list goes on and on. Another major thing is: how in the world are they going to continue with the next two movies? (which I sadly heard is that M. Night is going to make three movies) They left out countless characters that have big roles in the next two seasons of the TV show. If this is how he wanted to make the movie, he should just have changed enough of the last little bit and made up something entirely new, at least it wouldn't disappoint as many people that way.

In the extras DVD that comes with the TV series there is an interview between the creators of the TV show (geniuses) and the man who directed this movie. In it he (M. Night Shayamalan) talks to the creators about how he was introduced to the show and how much he really loved it and how he thought he could make a great movie out of it. Well, something changed between then and when he actually made it because the way the movie is you'd think it was made by some guy who had a friend's 4 yr old try to tell him about the TV show, that's the level of knowledge about the show he seems to possess.

Everyone in my house enjoys the TV show, we've now watched all three seasons,and we all decided that the only good that came of watching this movie was that it led us to the greatness that is Avatar: the Last Airbender. If you are already a fan of the TV show and you've seen this movie, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen this movie or the TV show, then forget about this (it won't taint you memory that way) and just buy the TV series.

There have been plenty of bad movies throughout film making. Some of them because of bad directing, some because of bad acting, some just because there wasn't enough money in the budget. But this movie really does take the cake for all time worst movie ever. M. Night Shamaladingdong made one good movie like a decade ago, and now it's like he's allowed to make flop after flop with no consequences. Why is he still able to make movies? They should take away his directors license or something...but I digress. Even with a millions of dollars, M. Night was able to turn one of the best shows of all time into an awful movie. If the 3D wasn't bad enough, only a few minor scenes actually using it properly, you had to see it throughout the entire movie. Every non action scene just looked hazy, as if the movie were somebody's dream. Next you have the actors. Horrible acting all around, with maybe the exception for the guy playing Iroh. Even that wasn't too great because of how they changed all the characters. Dev Patel as Zuko wasn't awful, but again he wasn't given a fair chance by M. Night. The kid playing Aang was depressing, even when he wasn't supposed to be sad it looked like he had been crying for minutes prior to each scene. Sokka and Katara were awful as well. The guy playing Sokka at least looked like Sokka, I give him that, but his acting just wasn't very good and besides his appearance not one thing reminded me of Sokka. The girl playing Katara looked like she was 5 years old and certainly couldn't convey whatever M. Night was trying to do, let alone the character from the TV show. Next, I don't knows whose idea it was to change all the name pronunciations, but that person is a doomass. If trying to deal with the triple threat of awfulness that was the actors' acting, eye-gauging 3D, and awful dialogue (name mispronunciations included) the plot was nonexistent. Give a good director a lot of money an entire season of a show full with 20 episodes and try to put it into a 2 hour movie, you might get and okay picture. But M. Night went above and beyond in destroying a beautiful story. Here's a rundown of the movie. Sokka and Katara meet Aang, then start to journey to the North Pole. They stop at a couple of unknown places so Aang can use his lame version of Airbending to defeat a small group of Firebenders. This happens basically until they get to the North Pole, there is a scene where Aang gets captured and Zuko saves him as the Blue Spirit. Once at the North Pole to battle begins and Aang eventually saves the day. The last battle a scenes that go with it is probably the most accurate part of the movie, but still...not very accurate at all. Now let me, a huge fan of the show with wide knowledge of it, let you in on a couple of things. 90% of episodes from the first season are skipped. If you were confused while watching this movie you were rightfully so. Some of the scenes from the show were combined into 1 location to save time, not really sure why the movie was only and hour and half long. I'm not going to go into detail explaining everything that is wrong with this film, it will take too long, and if you haven't seen the show but have seen the film you will be confused even further. What I will say is that even if I had never seen the show and was naive enough to be impressed by the lackluster fight scenes in the movie, I will still probably think this movie show get a 2/5 stars at max. An one final thing for fans of the show; did anyone else notice that firebenders couldn't bend without some source of fire (with the exception of Iroh) and at the end of the film the fact the Iroh could do, what every could do in the cartoon, was somehow going to be a sub plot for a sequel? In conclusion, worst movie ever. I highly recommend you do not waste your time or money watching this. Any dollar going towards this movie makes M. Night Douchebag one step closer to making a sequel, which I pray will not happen. But I do recommend you watch the Nickelodeon animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender", one of the best shows ever made.

I rented this movie to watch despite what I heard. I thought the movie was ok at best but it was enough to convince myself to watch the cartoon was a billion times better. The action was good in some scenes, especcialy the visual affects. But it was a mistake in make a movie based on the first season of a popular cartoon because to make it around 90 minutes, they left out a lot of important stuff from the show (The Kyoshi warriors, more on the Avatar itself) and so much more)

A good thing for M. Night Shyamalan, this was his best film in a while which isnt saying much as since Signs his films have been horrible. The actors they chose werent that good. But a key was the fact they removed all of the fun of the series and replaced it with a serious tone.

The only special features are:

*4 Deleted scenes
*Origins of Avatar
*Gag reel (makes no sense since the whole movie was mainly a joke)

They did get some things right, I wouldnt buy this, rent it if you are a fan of the show..but most likely you'll be disapointed. Probably it will be best if you see this first then start watching the show so you wont be disapointed right away.I will watch the most likely sequels but unless they make major changes from the tone of this movie, it will fail.

Pros:
-Was good enough to convince me to watch the cartoon
-Still kind of M. Night Shyamalan's best work in a while (which doesnt say much)
-Some of the action
-Visual affects

Cons:
-In cutting down the first season in a 90 minute film, they left out a lot
-The choice in actors
-The cartoon show was a billion times better
-Less Appa and momo then there should've been
-Took out the fun of the series and made this too serious
-Very little special features