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.