Friday, July 9, 2010

THE LAST AIRBENDER - Movie Review by Movie Diva Monique



Visit Monique's Entertainment Blog: www.moniqueblog.net

It's probably a good thing that I waited until the hate-spree died down before seeing this film. However, that doesn't mean that I'm going to let up on spreading the hate.

The plot of this film is, roughly, the same from the show--in a world where nations are divided by the elements (earth, fire, and water) and where people know how to utilize said elements in a martial-arts form, a special boy, the last of all the air nomadic monks, has the power to control all of the elements and must restore the balance, which has been taken over by the ruthless Fire Nation.

That's about all that is the same, though. Really, I'm not going to waste too much time on reviewing this movie; the film itself really doesn't have anything worth talking about, which is a shame, considering what television series it came from (one of the few animated series in the league of such greats as Samurai Jack, The Justice League, Batman: The Animated Series, Hayao Miyazaki films and Grave of Fireflies in my and other people's opinions). I'm tired from watching this film, so I'll just run through the main points:

1) Exposition and narration was horrible. The way it was inserted into the film was also choppy and inconsistent with the dialogue. Sometimes, the dialogue would reiterate what the narration (led by Katara, played by Nicola Peltz) had just told the audience.

2) The action sequences were way too slow and too orderly for action sequences. All of them were shot in slow motion, making the movie seem even slower, not to mention the horrible special effects.

3) The acting, for the most part, was atrocious. Peltz and Jackson Rathbone as Katara's brother Sokka were more than wooden; they were basically trees. Poor Noah Ringer, his first time in a big-budget movie, reeked of "acting noobie" throughout the entire movie. The Fire Nation, comprised of main characters Dev Patel (Zuko) Aasif Mandvi (Commander Zhao) and Cliff Curtis (Fire Lord Ozai, Zuko and Azula's father), Summer Bishil (Azula, Zuko's maniac sister), and Shaun Toub (Zuko's uncle Iroh) actually had the best acting in the whole movie, and out of that group of people, Patel, Bishil, and Curtis were the cream of the crop--and Bishil only had one line! I do think, however, that a lot of the blame for the drab acting lies squarely on the shoulders of Shyamalan himself--as a director, he should know what he wants out of his actors and how to make the audience like them, especially if the characters his actors are portraying are already popular characters with already popular traits.

4) The pronunciations in this movie throw fans of the show out of whack. "Aang" is pronounced "Ahng", "Sokka" is pronounced "Souka", etc. It's pretty moronic to do that to characters who are known by the Americanized pronunciations of their names. I know that he was trying to make stuff seem true to certain cultures by doing this, but really? This is the area you want to make true to certain cultures? Which leads me to one of the craziest things about this whole crazy movie:

5) Racebending. It's one thing to have all of your main "good" characters be white, even down to Sokka and Katara's grandmother (Katharine Houghton) with an English accent! But it's also a completely different thing to have said white characters be surrounded by a sea of INUIT PEOPLE! Every extra in the Southern Water Tribe is ethnic, just like how in the '40s and '50s, every extra in a movie set in an exotic locale were locals while the main characters were white. I'm not making this an issue just to have something to gripe about. The level of misunderstanding the importance of race in entertainment, especially movies, is beyond me. Shyamalan is a student of old-school film. He loves Hitchcock, so he knows the method for making gripping movies. He should also know how whitewashing is apparent in film history.

Along with changing the main good characters, the "bad guys" are all Indians (except for Taub, who's Persian, and Curtis, who's a Kiwi). I don't know what that means to Shyamalan (who says that Zuko is the actual star of the movie--that is debatable, to be sure), but to me, it seems like he's reiterating what a lot of people think about dark-skinned people in film history, which is, if you're dark, you're automatically evil.

But aside from that, Shyamalan included ethnicities that aren't even in the original series. While I appreciate his thought to put an African tribe in the film and cast Monk Gyatso as a black man (Damon Gupton, to be exact), it doesn't make sense in the realm of the series. The series is based in Asian and Inuit culture. Not Caucasian culture, not a culture from one of the many African countries--it's strictly Asian culture and Asian philosophy. The point is this--he could've cast a full Asian cast to respect the series, but even still, we'd have the other parts of this film I've already mentioned to contend with.

Overall, this film was a real letdown. As a fan of the series, it was a double whammy. I was angry over being bored, then I was depressed because the action and storytelling was much better in the series and how I'd rather watch any one of those seasons again than watch this movie. After a while, my brain shut down, as if it was protecting itself from the awfulness of this film. Watch it if you really want to experience the brute force of this movie, but in all honesty, you'll end up like me--tired, bitter, disgusted, disturbed, and ultimately saddened.

EDIT--By the way, in the film, Aang's story arc is that he has to accept his role as the Avatar and make peace with the fact that he caused the deaths of his Air monk brethren by running away all of those years ago. In the series, this is not the case; he's a 100 years in the future, yes, but he was put in the iceberg by the monks so he could be protected from the Fire Nation who were raiding the Air Temples. Aang always knew his destiny as the Avatar. He had already accepted it as fact. He didn't have to grow into it, so to speak, aside from learning how to master the other elements. And neither did the Fire Nation have to have lanterns and pots of fire with them in order to bend fire. Fire came OUT OF THEIR APPENDAGES! There. I am done.

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6 comments:

S.A. Larsenッ said...

Ugg. I loved the TV series. Yup. I'm a kid. This is so disappointing to me. Now what can we take the kids to see??

Thanks for the heads-up, LM.

SJ Stone said...

my review was similar, although i'd never seen the anime series. the movie was just awful awful awful. the kids liked it, but they are still little and don't care about acting and plot.

E. Arroyo said...

I loved the series too. I was disappointed but the kids liked it. I agree, they care little about acting and plot.

Remilda Graystone said...

Your review was so spot-on! I hated this movie. We went to see it the day after it came out and my mom--the person who doesn't really care about reviewing anything--even said it was awful. Okay, that may be because we all watched the show and were obsessed with it. To take such a popular and wonderful show and turn it into this mess...dreadful.

I went through all of the emotions you felt as well then landed on annoyance. I wanted to walk out of the movie theater halfway through it. *sigh* The worst part had to be when we came home and the scenes that were in the movie were the episodes that were playing on TV. It was just so depressing.

But thanks for this review! It was entertaining to read!

Monique said...

Thanks for your comments. I'm glad my ranting was entertaining (I'm sure it was more entertaining than that doggone movie!)

Anonymous said...

Love love your review EXCEPT this part:

"In the series, this is not the case; he's a 100 years in the future, yes, but he was put in the iceberg by the monks so he could be protected from the Fire Nation who were raiding the Air Temples. Aang always knew his destiny as the Avatar. He had already accepted it as fact."

This is wrong. REALLY wrong. In the television series, Aang did NOT accept his fate as the Avatar when the air nomads told him. He was frightened and rather than face his destiny he ran away. However he was swept up in a storm and got trapped under the ocean. He was going to drown, but at the brink of death his Avatar State kicked in and, in an effort to preserve his life, forced him to automatically waterbend a globe of ice around him and Appa so that they would both survive. That's how he was stuck there for 100 years.

In the first and second seasons particularly he had to deal with the fact that his leaving did indeed help cause the destruction of the Air Nomads and the perpetuation of the war. He deals with it and is called out on it on a number of occasions.

Er sorry, just wanted to clear that up.

But everything else you said about the movie is spot on.