mr. shyamalan had an impossible job with this film. unlike harry potter, to me it doesn't seem that anyone who hadn't seen the source cartoon would be interested in watching the movie (and if you haven't seen the cartoon, don't waste the time you might be spending watching it on this movie); like harry potter, the source material kicks ass; so even were the film decent, monsieur syhamalan would have a lot of dissatisfied viewers on his hands (see previous remarks re: harry potter on the fact that every fan of something awesome which gets made into a movie is going to have mostly the same complaints as every other devoted fanperson, plus their own special area of complaint that nobody else could have thought of because nobody else would be insane enough to care). he's got to storytell 20 24-minute anime episodes in the space of one to one-and-an-eighth hours--i'm not great at math, but i think that's a ratio of 480 to 70, or 48 to 7, or 6.86 to 1. in order to make the last airbender a good movie, senor shyamalan has got to make time for enough cgi to stun an ox; he's got to develop characters that are richly complex; he's got to establish an entire world; he's got to honor the tone of the show; and he's got to make a coherent movie.
does any of this get done by this movie? oh dear god no. the plot is nonsensical--indicative detail being the fact that at a certain point, establishing place-names written out at the bottom of the screen change about once every two minutes. the characterizations are absurd--mostly because lines just don't seem to be what the writers are interested in giving the characters. "pshaw," one writer may have spoken to another. "aang doesn't need to say anything. dialogue is so 2009. katara's voice-over already explained everything the audience needs to know. you know, the spirit world with the lanterns, and the...um, bending...tattoos...what's this movie about again?" the cgi is nothing special, but more importantly it's inaccurate. people make bending movements, but nothing happens when they do. and aang's avatarian rampage at the end of season 1 does not take place. he just gets in touch with his emotions because a dragon told him to--oh, b-t-dub, this review contains spoilers--and then holds a wave over the fire nation's technology until they decide to go away. i guess it's the beach boys' answer to nonviolence: create a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world, doo doo dee dum dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dee dum. the tone of the show is completely misrepresented--firelord ozai's entire face shows up right off the bat, sans either leaping flame-throne or impressive ponytail; the character's names are all mispronounced, not, as my friend pointed out, the original words they represent, but the way they're said in the show. and nobody can seem to agree on how to say "avatar"--it ranges from "aavatar" to "ahvatar" to my personal favorite, aang's garbled-possibly-with-embarrassment-but-i-may-be-giving-the-creators-too-much-credit "ovumtur." and the content is wiped clean from humor, wiped cleaner than that dude in flowers for algernon's mind.
but still. the show is a damn tough act to follow. it's just that (oh, here goes a metaphor i'm going to attempt), if the show avatar: the last airbender was the star that the wise men followed to baby jesus (with me so far?), then the movie avatar: the last airbender was the party of dudes that showed up fourteen months too late because they got lost because one of them forgot which star they were following but didn't want to tell the others that he had so that by the time they got to bethlehem the baby was long gone but they decided to stay and make a movie. and that movie was avatar: the last airbender. and, lo, it was quite quite bad.
not since the other avatar have i had this much fun reviewing a movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment