Avatar Movie
Saw it with Dan and Khuffie. It's pretty bad, but let me tell you why...
I wasn't under any illusions going in that this might be a good movie.
Basic premise was a retelling of the first season of the series. Sounds simple.
The challenge you have is that you have 20 or so half hour episodes, and you've got to condense them to an hour and a half. What I would have done is looked at the themes, the basic plot points, and cut out anything that didn't push those two things forward, including tertiary characters (which is a sticking point with many fans, but tv is not the same as movies, and you gotta sacrifice if you have any hope of character development).
What happened in the movie was they took a bunch of scenes they liked in season one and attempted, with mixed results, to recreate them in live action.
On top of that, they kept repeating shit we already knew, or having the kids explain crap at length that either didn't need to be said, or could have been shown some other way.
The acting wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. You can sort of tell that they were at the mercy of a really stupid script. I think they did the best they could. I mean, for all the yapping they had Katara do, you learn nothing about her in the film. She's basically there to throw water around.
They cut a lot of shit out, and you think "well, that's good, cause it probably wouldn't have fit anyway". Instead of using all that time to character build, they fill it with other shit that doesn't need to be there. Ozai doesn't need to be here yet, and him and Zhao have a few scenes where they talk about the same shit over and over.
Dan mentioned that the best thing would have been getting out a lot of Aang's story at the beginning of the film rather than yap yap Katara talking shit. He laid it down this way:
-Take Aang's backstory and have that the start of the film. Have him at the temple being happy and being a kid and then show him running away when he discovers he's the avatar
-Then you can do some of the shit with Katara and Sokka.
-Have Aang get kidnapped ONCE (dear lord) by Zuko. Then have him taken in by Zhao and when Zuko finds out Zhao's going to use Aang to screw over Zuko to his dad, have Zuko go and rescue him (and he said you'd probably have to cut out the shit about the Blue Spirit. I slightly disagree, but it would depend upon the entirety of script)
I think that would have fixed the first third of the film easily, but you've still got two more thirds of utter shit filled with scenes we don't care about.
The action scenes at least looked cool, and the movie didn't look cheap. I did really have a sense of a "world", but it was a world populated by robots.
Other random shit comments:
-The guy playing Iroh was the guy who helps Tony Stark in the cave in Iron Man. That was weird!
-I really liked seeing the Earth Nation, probably because they were the closest to what you see in the actual show.
-Are the Northern Water Tribe Danish or something?
-I didn't think it was worth it, but I liked seeing the Zuko vs Katara fight at the end.
-I would have written out Zhao, and not had Ozai in the first film at all. You could have saved like 20-30 minutes which could have been used to build personalities for Katara, Sokka, and Aang.
-Iroh was at least established as the fabulous badass we all know he is.
-Speaking of Iroh, we laughed at the scene where he tries to hook up Zuko with eight year olds. WORK IT IROH, YOU SLUT.
A shorter summary: I've seen worse, but you'll wonder where everyone's brain went during the script writing process. SHOW, DON'T TELL.
Show it to your English class as an example of how not to write a story.
I wasn't under any illusions going in that this might be a good movie.
Basic premise was a retelling of the first season of the series. Sounds simple.
The challenge you have is that you have 20 or so half hour episodes, and you've got to condense them to an hour and a half. What I would have done is looked at the themes, the basic plot points, and cut out anything that didn't push those two things forward, including tertiary characters (which is a sticking point with many fans, but tv is not the same as movies, and you gotta sacrifice if you have any hope of character development).
What happened in the movie was they took a bunch of scenes they liked in season one and attempted, with mixed results, to recreate them in live action.
On top of that, they kept repeating shit we already knew, or having the kids explain crap at length that either didn't need to be said, or could have been shown some other way.
The acting wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. You can sort of tell that they were at the mercy of a really stupid script. I think they did the best they could. I mean, for all the yapping they had Katara do, you learn nothing about her in the film. She's basically there to throw water around.
They cut a lot of shit out, and you think "well, that's good, cause it probably wouldn't have fit anyway". Instead of using all that time to character build, they fill it with other shit that doesn't need to be there. Ozai doesn't need to be here yet, and him and Zhao have a few scenes where they talk about the same shit over and over.
Dan mentioned that the best thing would have been getting out a lot of Aang's story at the beginning of the film rather than yap yap Katara talking shit. He laid it down this way:
-Take Aang's backstory and have that the start of the film. Have him at the temple being happy and being a kid and then show him running away when he discovers he's the avatar
-Then you can do some of the shit with Katara and Sokka.
-Have Aang get kidnapped ONCE (dear lord) by Zuko. Then have him taken in by Zhao and when Zuko finds out Zhao's going to use Aang to screw over Zuko to his dad, have Zuko go and rescue him (and he said you'd probably have to cut out the shit about the Blue Spirit. I slightly disagree, but it would depend upon the entirety of script)
I think that would have fixed the first third of the film easily, but you've still got two more thirds of utter shit filled with scenes we don't care about.
The action scenes at least looked cool, and the movie didn't look cheap. I did really have a sense of a "world", but it was a world populated by robots.
Other random shit comments:
-The guy playing Iroh was the guy who helps Tony Stark in the cave in Iron Man. That was weird!
-I really liked seeing the Earth Nation, probably because they were the closest to what you see in the actual show.
-Are the Northern Water Tribe Danish or something?
-I didn't think it was worth it, but I liked seeing the Zuko vs Katara fight at the end.
-I would have written out Zhao, and not had Ozai in the first film at all. You could have saved like 20-30 minutes which could have been used to build personalities for Katara, Sokka, and Aang.
-Iroh was at least established as the fabulous badass we all know he is.
-Speaking of Iroh, we laughed at the scene where he tries to hook up Zuko with eight year olds. WORK IT IROH, YOU SLUT.
A shorter summary: I've seen worse, but you'll wonder where everyone's brain went during the script writing process. SHOW, DON'T TELL.
Show it to your English class as an example of how not to write a story.