The Last Airbender - 5/10 (2D version)- Well, this wasn't the utter raping of my neo-childhood like I thought it would be, merely the equivalent of M. Night beating it half to death with a baseball bat. I haven't seen such a perfect example of a spectacularly average movie in a long time, but let's get the good stuff out of the way: the music is good, the costumes (aside from the Fire Nation's, which are hideous) are excellent, the sets are good, and 3 actors were good-to-pretty decent (Katara, Zuko, and Iroh). Some of the effects were also pretty decent, as was the bending choreography. Everything else, though, was mediocre to awful.
The thing that's most frustrating about the movie, though, is that it's often one step away from being awesome but never moves beyond that. Every time it approaches that the threshold of being incredible, the movie suddenly turns skittish and backs down as if it's afraid that it was being presumptuous. The bending itself is odd, because while the movement looks great (except for Fire Bending, which isn't kick-centric like it is in the TV series despite being based on the Northern Shaolin fighting style) the effects are so minimal it's ridiculous. For example, early in this movie there's a bunch of Earthbenders staging a revolt. They'll do this extremely complex movement that takes 5-10 seconds to execute, and a frickin'
pebble will get thrown at someone. And there's always a considerable delay in the character movements and the actual elemental bending, which is very distracting since it was fairly 1:1 in the TV series. It's so frustrating in an action-centric movie like this that there isn't a
single good action sequence in the entire movie.
The pacing is all over the place as well, with the first half tripping over itself to establish some sort of cohesive narrative. As you might expect, the movie's full of plot holes, some of which the movie's kind enough to point out for us ahead of time.
While Zuko' story and characterization is handled fairly well, no one else's is. Katara and Sokka don't do a damn thing in this movie, either, and the movie conveniently overlooks that Katara always is a better bender than Aang the entire series. Then you have the casting...man, the casting is this movie is incredibly hit-or-miss. By far the worst actor is Aang himself, followed by that travesty of a little girl they apparently casted to play Azula (Azula's supposed to look evil and crazy, damnit! Not a sweet little girl!).
This movie perplexes me. It's not as horrible as I feared, yet not as good as I hoped. Maybe it's just due to incredibly low standards after seeing all the reviews, but I can't bring myself to hate this movie. It's just so...average. On the upside, M. Night did the impossible and managed not to cast himself in a main role in this movie, which surprises me because the guy they have playing commander Zshao looks
just like him.
Topic: Rate the last movie you've seen (Read 1553282 times)
