The Last Airbender...Hopefully Also "The Last Movie This Bad About Avatar: The Last Airbender."
Well...I just saw The Last Airbender. Perhaps I am a masochist for doing so, or perhaps I was feeling overly optimistic to hope there would be SOMETHING of value in a movie that has an amazing 9% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes...
If you don't want of the spoilers, do NOT read.
All right...where do I even START with what is wrong with this movie? Well, I should just go ahead and ignore the whole "racebending" issue entirely, since everyone's heard that before. Perhaps chronological order would help. Our entrance starts with text moving up the screen while our "Katara" voice actress Miss Nicola Peltz, the person that the Shamallama apparently saw as needing to be Katara in this movie, reads it out loud for us since we apparently can't read ourselves. I knew there was a problem as soon as two things were said in the opening:
1. Water, Earth, Fire and Air Nomads
and
2. The Avatar
Now firstly, of course the Air Nomads are the only group that are in fact nomads; if the text was written/spoken properly, it would be the Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Air Nomads, hence showing that you actually know about the world you are talking about. But more importantly, "the Avatar" was not pronounced like "the Avatar", oh no. It was pronounced like the "AHH-vah-tar." As in "open your mouth and say AHH~." What the hell!? Anyone who has been on the internet and been on forums or LJ knows how that word is pronounced since we upload avatars rather regularly, and we know it's not pronounced like that. Fuck, the series pronounces it right and even the latest movie Avatar (the one with the blue people) showed you how to pronounce the word right. Were they just trying to make it clear they weren't talking about the movie Avatar or something by pronouncing it differently? The characters in the film didn't even speak it consistently, a few of them saying it properly and others not.
On the note of mispronounciations, I have never seen anything as bad as this. I admit, when the Harry Potter movies came out, I had difficulty adjusting to "Slytherin" being pronounced "Slither-in" rather than "SLY-therin" because I'd pronounced it that way while reading the books. M. Night does not have that luxery. Not only did he have the creators to consult about pronounciations (hell, even Columbus did that), but THEY SAY THESE NAMES IN THE SERIES. OUT LOUD. Just because some of these names don't sound supposedly "epic" enough for your movie does not mean that you can change their pronounciations and not expect the fanbase to twitch everytime they say the names wrong. Here is a grand list of all of the names they pronounced wrong:
1. Aang (prounounced "AHHNG" rather than "AYNG")
2. Sokka (pronounced "SOH-KAH" rather than "SAW-KAH")
3. Iroh (pronounced "EE-ROH" rather than "EYE-ROH)
4. Avatar (already mentioned)
5. Gyatso (pronounced "GUAT-SO" rather than "GEE-AT-SO")
6. Kyoshi (pronounced "KUO-SHI" rather than "KEE-OH-SHEE")
Those got more than a little bit grating to sit through sometimes.
Besides just the names, though, the characters were all completely ruined. And I mean ruined. The first character we meet, played by Nicola Peltz, is even worse than the fake Katara in the Ember Island Players episode. That Katara was fake-crying the entire time...this one was an absolute D.I.D., DAMSEL IN DISTRESS, ALL THE TIME. Sokka had to pull her out of the way when the ice under them started cracking at the South Pole...gawd, I don't suppose living at the South Pole your entire life could have taught you to get away from cracking ice, could it? Even when she was supposedly "protecting" Aang at the Spirit Oasis from Zuko, she's just all like "You're the Firelord's son...you're the one who took Aang before!" (no fucking duh) and then splashes a bunch of water at him when he blasts at her with fire. And she goes down in about FOUR HITS. FOUR HITS. When in the series Katara was actually able to hold her own for a while. It was pathetic. At the start of the movie, as well, she feels this responsibility to save Aang from Zuko when they take him away...while not knowing he's the Avatar, not knowing his name, not knowing much else about him...and with him really not being greatly heroic or kind or sweet or anything else that would make her feel pity for him and want to help him. Did she just...sense that in this movie she was supposed to be the bland "love interest" to this bland hero?
Speaking of bland hero, I could not have imagined how badly they screwed up Aang until now. I knew about them pronouncing his name wrong beforehand, but...Noah Ringer literally in every other scene looks like he's going to burst into tears and bawl like a baby. Hell, he LOOKS like a baby most of the time since he has a baby face, and him giving such a babyish expression so much of the time doesn't help that. Apparently he's sad and doesn't want to be the Avatar because Avatars supposedly can't have families or attach to things on earth...when...THAT IS THEIR WHOLE FUCKING PURPOSE. SERIOUSLY. The reason why the Avatar can't just be a spirit is because in order to save humans and help humans, they must live amongst humans and be human. They have to know loss, anger, need and love in order to bridge the Spirit and human worlds. And there was nothing but moping on little Noah Ringer's face. Even when he tried to smile it looked half-hearted, like he saw the entirely humorless person behind the camera and felt too intimidated to smile fully. Jeezus, the entire time I felt like shouting "CHEER UP EMO KID" at the screen whenever Aang popped up.
The other emo kid that needed to cheer up was Zuko. Anyone who knows me, for the most part, knows I love Slumdog Millionaire and Dev Patel. Dev...you should not have accepted this job. Personally I do not think any of the actors that were chosen for members of the Fire Nation should have been cast...the Firelord was not scary at all and seemed more like the canon Zhao than the menacing Firelord Ozai...and Aasif Mandvi, I love you on the Daily Show, but you were just not Zhao. And it wasn't even your fault, really, either, it was bad writing. Bad writing also crippled Dev Patel, not letting him truly show the tormented and complicated character that Zuko is. There was only one scene that had any decent acting for Patel, one where he asks a little Fire Nation boy if he knows anything about the disgraced Fire Nation Prince Zuko. It wasn't really as well-scripted as it could have been, but it at least gave him a small chance to show what he could do. Unfortunately the scar across Dev's face, which really was more like a cracking of the skin that could be fixed with a lotion regiment than a scar (you thought the scar Gerard Butler in The Phantom of the Opera had to wear was pathetic? This was even worse), was VERY distracting; how could you expect to take his sad story seriously with that pathetic little thing being called a scar of shame? The worse scene by far for Patel, unfortunately, was the scene scripted for when Zuko captures Aang while he's in the Spirit World, where Zuko actually whines about how his father loves his sister and his daddy says he's like his mother. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Where the hell is "I've had to struggle through life and it's made me strong" and "I don't need luck, though: I don't want it."!? THAT is Zuko. THAT is what Zuko is feeling: despite all of the strife and difficulty and pain Zuko has to go through, he doesn't give up and he fights.
The last character I'll talk about in depth is Sokka, simply because he is the last character of the quartet that deserves a full paragraph. I was annoyed by itself that he was being played by Jackson Rathbone of the fame of Twilight's Jasper Hale (this movie did NOT need those kinds of sparkles), but I could not have expected how unfunny he truly was. I did not laugh ONCE because of any dialogue in this movie, not just because everything was overly serious in this, but also the scripting often times was just terrible, especially in the case of Sokka. When Katara and he are at the South Pole and see something glowing under the ice under their feet, Sokka actually gets the bright idea to smack his spear into the ice under their feet...and then realizes AFTERWARDS when the ice starts cracking that it wasn't such a bright idea to do so. Who is that stupid to try to crack ice right underneath your feet: you know that the cracks are going to spread, don't you!? And he probably had about five "jokes" in the entire movie; I didn't laugh at one of them. Plus his relationship with Yue was not developed at all; it was just like the romance in the Twilight series, boy sees girl, girl sees boy, they start to stalk each other with no conversation to prompt them meeting or getting to know each other. For that matter, the attraction that Katara seems to have to Aang seems a bit similar; a boy too distant to realize that she cares about him and a girl who is determined to follow him around. Is M. Night a fan of Twilight or something?
In fact, I ended up laughing at an entirely inappropriate part of the movie. At the grand finale, when Koizilla was supposed to appear but instead we got...Aang raising the ocean waves up so high that they towered over the Fire Nation ships outside of the Northern Water Tribe wall until they sailed away in fear (?!!?), there was a resounding silence and a swelling of music...and then one guy started shaking his spear up and down in almost manic triumph. It takes a long while before we see any other spears, and even when you do, all I could focus on was that one guy shaking his spear up in the air with such utter enthuisiasm. That actor probably had more enthuisiasm, excitement and energy than anyone else in this movie...and it was almost like he was trying to support the entire rest of that depressing movie just with his enthusiasm. I burst out laughing in the theater, and I still burst out laughing remembering it.
Other little things that bugged me...otherwise known as ETC, ETC, ETC.
*Firelord wasn't scary and instead looked like some grumpy old father who just "doesn't understand his son"
*Azula wasn't scary and looked more like an evil debutante
*Zhao was given orders to kill the Moon Spirit and seemed almost reluctant to do so
*Iroh was not old, wise, laid-back or weak-looking and so when he actually did Firebend there was no surprise (though...the moment he did there was no real reason to do so >>)
*The Ocean Spirit didn't go all Koizilla and so Zhao was killed by a random group of waterbenders with no explanation and Aang bended an entire ocean by himself
*The Moon didn't disappear when the Moon Spirit died and instead just turned red (which makes no sense: if the Moon's dead, there is no Moon)
*The Moon was called a "he" when the Moon is almost ALWAYS seen as a feminine body
*It was not obvious when Aang went into the Avatar State
*The Avatar State was never called the Avatar State or explained
*Aang instead of getting wisdom from Avatar Roku or the other Avatars gets wisdom from some random dragon spirit in his head that rather resembled the dragon from the Merlin BBC series
*The character that I could presume to be Haru looked to be eight years old and looked like a girl
*The script lied about Avatars not having families. I'm sorry, I see this as a blatant lie. ROKU OBVIOUSLY HAD A FAMILY, IF HE HADN'T, A CERTAIN CHARACTER WOULDN'T EXIST. M. Night just completely ignored that.
*He also really ignored there being previous Avatars for most of the movie; you only really first hear about Aang having had past lives when an old guy talks about a statue of Kyoshi and later we see the statues of other Avatars (the previous Airbender of which was male when Avatar Yangchen, a female, was the airbender before Aang)
*The Blue Spirit costume just. Looked. STUPID. I don't care who says otherwise.
*Without the subtitles for the locations, sometimes you honestly couldn't figure out what nation you were in. The Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation looked almost identical excluding the buildings; would the Fire Nation honestly be a place with a lot of trees and forests and grass sprouting up all over the place? Y'know, since they firebend?
*The benders looked like they were dancing half the time. They could be moving their arms around randomly for a whole moment and get only one blast of fire that did not in any way follow the movement of the person's hands/feet.
*When Zuko was done knocking Katara out after their battle, he actually goes over and adjusts her so she's lying on her back, mumbling something to the extent of "I cannot go home without him" almost in forgiveness. I don't know if they were trying to get a tally in with the Zuko/Katara shippers, but there was JUST NO POINT and Zuko wouldn't have done it...particularly when they had even less time to know each other in this movie.
*There were too many characters left out to even mention...I knew they were going to take out a lot, but they even took out Yue's father the King and just made her the sole ruler of the Northern Water Tribe for some reason. Why? Did you want the Water Tribe not to be led by anyone after she sacrificed herself?
When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I analyzed that this film would be like the Ember Island Players episode only with all of the humor sucked out. I am appalled by the thought that it is even worse than that analysis. It is by far the worst movie I have ever had to sit through, meriting more chokes of despair, smacks to the forehead, and shaken fists of unfocused rage than I have even given to anything else. I have no idea how someone who has never seen Avatar would see this...my mother has not seen all of Avatar, but I gave her a rather good summary beforehand and she has seen select episodes of the show, mostly in the second season, and she said that she could stand it better than I could, but only just barely. It is a perfectly wretched movie and I think you should only go see it if you want to truly see how wretched it is.
Tory gives this 5 out of 5 stars...in the FAIL department.