So last night, my friend Chad invited me to go to The Last Airbender with him and a small group of people. We went to a 9:50 showing, which seemed a bit late, but we’ve all learned not to question Chad. It’s just easier.
None of us have high expectations. According to Chris, another member of the little group, it was the lowest reviewed movie in the past six months. Ouch.
And I have to say, it was deserved. Oh. My. Frack. That movie was awful. But the worst part was that it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL.
Think about this: The kid from Slumdog Millionaire, Jasper from Twilight, Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show. How can you screw up a cast like that? Oh, with M. Night Shyamalan sticking his stupid hands into everything.
According to IMDB and the credits last night, our good friend M. Night decided to not only direct the movie, but also write the script. Which really was this movie’s undoing, considering I’ve heard fourth graders speak more naturally than those poor actors. What was with those lines?? There was so much random, unnecessary dialog!
After the movie, when we were all discussing the movie, I told everyone that you can’t make dialog that poor unconsciously. Here’s my theory: M. Night got the script, and he was like “hm. What can I do to make this completely suck? OH! I could add some strange narration and give the characters really random, extra lines. And THEN I could just make them run around and do silly martial arts moves while NOT ACTUALLY BENDING ELEMENTS. MUAHAHAHAHAHA”
That was another thing. When they were all running around doing their martial arts to bend the elements, the first ten seconds of the moves were completely useless. They’d wave their arms around for a while, then point at an enemy, and THEN something would start to happen. Why wouldn’t they just cut the crap and point in the beginning? Why all the buildup? Seems awfully inefficient to me.
Finally, this movie was way too long. I understand that they were trying to fit the entire first season of the animated series into one movie, but there were better ways to do it. They put way too much information into the movies, information that wasn’t really important to the understanding. “Aang likes to play games.” “Aang has a flying pet lemur named MoMo” (So in the movie, the flying lemur flies to Aang’s shoulder when he gets to the ruins of the airbending temple, and then like almost an hour later you see it again and Aang calls it “MoMo”, like we should just inherently know he adopted it and named it that.) “Katara is the last water bender in the Southern Water Tribe.” “The Southern Water tribe hasn’t had a water bender since grandma’s friend was captured.” “The princess and Sokka became really good friends” (Yeah, on that note, was anyone else convinced they were totally having sex?)
NONE OF THAT INFORMATION WAS NEEDED. Honestly, I could have gone without the Sokka/princess romance, seeing that it lasted all of fifteen minutes and made no difference to the plot line. They just wanted Jasper/Sokka to get some action. WEIRD.
