I'm probably gonna skip this one, but i'm interested in what the consensous will be on the board.

last line in the review is deadly.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100630/REVIEWS/100639999

BY ROGER EBERT / June 30, 2010

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

Let's start with the 3D, which was added as an afterthought to a 2D movie. Not only is it unexploited and unnecessary, but it's a disaster even if you like 3D. M. Night Shyamalan's retrofit produces the drabbest, darkest, dingiest movie of any sort I've seen in years. You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.

Now for the movie itself. The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe. It's in the very nature of animation to make absurd visual sights more plausible.

Since "Airbender" involves the human manipulation of the forces of air, earth, water and fire, there is hardly an event that can be rendered plausibly in live action. That said, its special effects are atrocious. The first time the waterbender Katara summons a globe of water, which then splashes (offscreen) on her brother Sokka, he doesn't even get wet. Firebenders' flames don't seem to really burn, and so on.

The story takes place in the future, after Man has devastated the planet and survives in the form of beings with magical powers allowing them to influence earth, water and fire. These warring factions are held in uneasy harmony by the Avatar, but the Avatar has disappeared, and Earth lives in a state of constant turmoil caused by the warlike Firebenders.

Our teenage heroes Katara and Sokka discover a child frozen in the ice. This is Aang (Noah Ringer), and they come to suspect he may be the Avatar, or Last Airbender. Perhaps he can bring harmony and quell the violent Firebenders. This plot is incomprehensible, apart from the helpful orientation that we like Katara, Sokka and Aang and are therefore against their enemies.

The dialogue is couched in unspeakable quasi-medieval formalities; the characters are so portentous they seem to have been trained for grade school historical pageants. Their dialogue is functional and action-driven. There is little conviction that any of this might be real even in their minds. All of the benders in the movie appear only in terms of their attributes and functions, and contain no personality.

Potentially interesting details are botched. Consider the great iron ships of the Firebenders. These show potential as Steampunk, but are never caressed for their intricacies. Consider the detail Miyazaki lavished on Howl's Moving Castle. Trying sampling a Nickelodeon clip from the original show to glimpse the look that might have been.

After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad. I don't say they're untalented, I say they've been poorly served by Shyamalan and the script. They are bland, stiff, awkward and unconvincing. Little Aang reminds me of Wallace Shawn as a child. This is not a bad thing (he should only grow into Shawn's shoes), but doesn't the role require little Andre, not little Wally?

As the villain, Shyamalan has cast Cliff Curtis as Fire Lord Ozai and Dev Patel (the hero of "Slumdog Millionaire") as his son Prince Zuko. This is all wrong. In material at this melodramatic level, you need teeth-gnashers, not leading men. Indeed, all of the acting seems inexplicably muted. I've been an admirer of many of Shyamalan's films, but action and liveliness are not his strong points. I fear he takes the theology of the Bending universe seriously.

As "The Last Airbender" bores and alienates its audiences, consider the opportunities missed here. (1) This material should have become an A-list animated film. (2) It was a blunder jumping aboard the 3D bandwagon with phony 3D retro-fitted to a 2D film. (3) If it had to be live action, better special effects artists should have been found. It's not as if films like "2012" and "Knowing" didn't contain "real life" illusions as spectacular as anything called for in "The Last Airbender."

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

>I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.
>

I also hope that the 3D on this film is trashed enough that studios finally stop forcing people to convert their films into 3D, ending that ridiculous trend.

an L on this one. I don't really care that he has changed the race of the main characters, other movies do this all the time.

However, the bad special effects are going to kill this movie more than the bad acting, script and dialogue. Transformers 2 proved you don't need great acting, dialogue or a script but you better have great special effects if you want a summer blockbuster.

the marketing budget was 130 million just by itself. That brings the total cost to Paramount up to 280 million US. If you Google 'Box Office Spy Blog' and then search for 'The Last Airbender', you'll come across an article that guesstimates that for The Last Airbender to make a profit, it has to clear 580 million dollars. Granted that would include international and domestic box office returns and monies from home recordings (DVD & Blu-Ray discs) and probably merchandise (toys, books, other things).

But 580 mil? I'm typing this out on my phone, so I don't have access to imdb to look up an all-time box-office return list. But, 580 million would put it with Iron Man, ET, the OG Star Wars (pre-post-George Lucas-restorationCOUGHf#ck!ngUpCOUGH), Jurassic Park, for that matter The Sixth Sense.

Those are all runaway box-office blockbusters. As commercially successful as M. Knight has been, requiring that kind of ROI is a steep task for any filmmaker.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_airbender/

This is what happens when you fix something that's not broke:
"I took away a little bit of the slapsticky stuff that was there for the little little kids, the fart jokes and things like that. We weeded that stuff away and the other stuff came out. We grounded Katara's brother, who's the comic relief in the show. We grounded him, and that really did wonderful things for the whole theme of the movie."-M. Night

The humor is what gave the show spirit and what I read from the reviews is that the characters are lifeless and wooden.

I've seen the trailer a couple of times and I've only seen book 1 of the series. From the look of the tone of the trailer, I didn't see comedy, and that was one of the best aspects of the show, the humor. I'll go in with very low expectations. M. Night just can't do anything right.

it will be a steaming pile.

not a good look.

Where to start with this one? How about this: If any movie ever warranted a class-action lawsuit against the filmmakers, it’s The Last Airbender. Not because it’s a terrible movie—though it is—but because its release as a 3-D film becomes false advertising a few seconds after a comin’-atcha gush of water appears behind the Paramount logo. From there, it becomes painfully obvious—even more painfully obvious than in Alice In Wonderland—that a few 3-D elements have been added to satisfy the current 3-D craze, and the higher ticket prices they allow. Worse still, the process makes the already-dark imagery darker, and turns the action blurry. Viewers who see it in this form will pay more for an even shittier experience than the one they would have had in 2-D.

And that would have been plenty shitty already. Adapting a well-regarded, epic-in-scope Nickelodeon animated series, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has failed to do right both by his source material and his own strengths as a filmmaker. Set in a world in which the population is divided amid the four elements, and some skilled practitioners can control those elements to their own ends, the film vomits out complicated mythology in mouthfuls of exposition, when not putting a supporting character’s voiceover narration in charge of relaying major developments. Shyamalan manages a few striking images, most of them involving otherworldly landscapes created in Greenland and Vietnam. But none of the care and craftsmanship evident in projects he originated, even lousy ones like The Happening, find their way into this movie.

So what does that leave? A lot of headache-inducing CGI-effects sequences, many scenes of children doing tai chi, and some imperiled magical fish. Another filmmaker might have crafted the material’s themes—which reference Buddhism and Christianity while exploring the relationship between good and evil—into a striking film. Shyamalan lets his unimpressive special effects do the work for him while coaxing performances from his young cast that make Jake Lloyd’s performance in The Phantom Menace look studied. (Star Noah Ringer, who plays a messianic figure who might unite the warring forces, delivers his lines as if reading a book report, and his older co-stars don’t fare much better.) The Last Airbender isn’t that much different from the rest of this summer’s generally dire multiplex fare—from The A-Team to Jonah Hex—which started with established properties and half-decent ideas, then cranked up the volume, velocity, and effects to the point where neither sense nor tender moments could escape. But it is remarkable in one respect: It’s the worst of them.

(http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-last-airbender,42682/)

when I didn't see any early reviews. usually a bad sign.

luckily my neices and nephews will love it reagardless

How many "chances" can you get before Hollywood says "fuck you"?

I usually think people have ten years from their last hit (unless they are the kind of director that makes like one or two films a decade). Lady in the Water, The Happening, and now this (if it tanks) are bad but The Village made over 100 million so he's still got another film or two before studios see him as box office poison.

If it does well, studios give two shits about critics.

people are stupid.
I'll watch it on .......

in which nothing fucking happened. his mojo is strong cause he keeps getting checks and yall keep making sure it happens.

call the summer a wrap.

Dude was probably sittin in the theater the other night mad as fuck over that

the 16th can't come quick enough for me.

>the 16th can't come quick enough for me.

Me either. I'll still be there for an IMAX viewing on that date w/o a doubt.

It just came on and looked kinda hot...with all of the flames & whatnot.

some of the visuals in the cartoon are amazing, and i would love to have seen that enhanced with CG animation and blown up on the big screen (in real 3D even). whichever exec made the decision to put m. night in charge of it as a writer/director should be shot in the face repeatedly. or at minimum, fired.

Why not just let the people who make the cartoon make the movie?

Pixar wouldn't be making a feature adaptation of a Viacom owned property anyways.

>Why not just let the people who make the cartoon make the
>movie?
>

I'm trying to figure out why people wanted a movie made to begin with.

that isn't a three-camera sitcom deserves a shot at the big time.

That being said, not every property benefits from being adapted to the big screen. Case in point.

>that isn't a three-camera sitcom deserves a shot at the big
>time.
>

That's kinda what I was getting at. People stay saying how Avatar was one of the greatest cartoons, then claim they can't wait for the movie. Why? Because no matter how good the cartoon is, if it isn't live action it really doesn't "count".

the title sequences were the only decent 3d part.
its not as bad as everyone is saying, but maybe its cause i had low expectations and knew nothing of the story.
lotsa bad acting and lotsa bad scenes, but i was ok with the most of it.
seeing aasif mandvi as a fake badass was cool with me
the cgi isnt that bad actually, the end scene was decent.
so much potential but def in the wrong hands.
the scene where avatar tries to rile up the earthbenders was so bad and awful.
sister and brother were awful. no comedy at all. i laughed less then once. brother was useless in the movie.
wasnt good but wasnt as awful as everyone is making it out to be.
maybe i just liked it cause it was free and i met frida pinto tonight.

I'll catch the 'Russian' version ;)

>i met frida pinto tonight.

i was looking for aasif and i bumped into freida instead. good night.

Everything that you loved about the show is gone...add to the fact that M. Night's directing was terrible, the actors sucked, and the script was just as equally bad and you've easily have M. Night's worst film to date!

This sums it up perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfDk3I6di5E

<------------
Couch surfing


│♬ ♫ ♪ ♬ ♪ ♫ ♬│

just joking...

I'm skipping on this one based off of reviews alone. M. Night will be blacklisted and most of his future films will be direct-to-DVD.
With movie tickets being $8 and 3D Movies being $11 to $20 a pop, it cost too much to risk a disappointing experience. Netflix or Red Box by Chistmas time for me...

makes it easier for me not to see it
~~~~
When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. Live so that when you die, you rejoice, and the world cries.
~~~~
You cannot hate people for their own good.

What's really this dude's problem?

**********

Here's my theories why this film was a disaster from the beginning and why it will tank in theaters:

1. He's (M. Night Shymalan) not an action choreographer nor does he have experience in successfully directing & scripting his own action adventure film. Why was is chosen for this after the "Happening" tanked is a mystery to me.

2. The writing was bad, M. Night's name is attached to it so it makes him look like a failure but its only so much a director can do to change the script to gage emphasis on particular characters and story pacing.

3. In conjunction to #2, the script probably looked good on paper but failed to transfer to live action convincingly. Its an anime cartoon with bright colors and Eastern like comedy. To transfer this into a realistic setting some things have to be moderated or ommitted all together. The film is dark with dull colors dominating the post-apocalyptic landscape which is in contrast to the animated series. I heard the comedy aspect was bare if not scrapped all together. I think the film's pacing was flawed by the time spent on the convoluted origin of the Last Airbender/Avatar and the other Fire, Water and Earth Nations.

4. The acting by the main protagonist was portrayed by a twelve year old martial artist who doesn't have any acting credits. He won the role by Producers and M. Night being impressed by his skills on an audition tape. However, the film's plot consisted of a TON of dialogue that the kid could not deliver.

5. The cast is predominently European in a film that based in Asia. This may offen a few people just like Prince of Persia which flopped hard last month (only $65 mil). Hollywood still has a problem with anyone who is not Caucasian being humanity's last hope for peace/salvation.

6. A 2D film with 3D rendering layered afterwards. I don't know if filming started before James Cameron's Avatar hit screens but it shouldn't be 3D just to jump on the bandwagon. 3D films should be shot in 3D, pure and simple. If audiences feel they are being cheated the film will flop just like Clash Of The Titans.

7. It's a T.V. series adaptation. People really are hungry for something new. With A-Team, Knight and Day and Losers and other adaptations clustering the summer season people are tired of showing up to theaters to only see the same material reiterated in live action and with a price of admission.

that's pretty much it.

©

When the Chief is in the house...ohmigod

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNl3j3Snkbs
-------------------
http://blog.melanism.com
http://twitter.com/Melanism
http://seanlovesthis.tumblr.com
http://www.formspring.me/seanathan
http://www.last.fm/user/Melanism
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meldotcom/

this isn't going to make any money. I am even willing to bet this comes in 3rd for this weekend behind Eclipse and Toy Story 3.

Action movies in the horizon..them shits have been benched.

And it's going up again that damn Twilight bullshit.

Time for M.Night to say nite nite, at least for now.

Dude has so much potential you KNOW he loves movies, I hope he bounces back.

*looks @ Metacritic*

SMH

Van Damme...

>Action movies in the horizon..them shits have been benched.
>
>And it's going up again that damn Twilight bullshit.
>
>Time for M.Night to say nite nite, at least for now.
>
>Dude has so much potential you KNOW he loves movies, I hope he
>bounces back.
>
>*looks @ Metacritic*
>
>SMH
>
>Van Damme...

word. I feel sorry for M Night I generally fuck with his movies but I cant back this botched shit. Its a shame though I really wanted this movie to succeed. But it started out wrong from the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvkT1h4arfo

http://multimedia.boston.com/tn/4/take_two.htm

how the fuck did this go so WRONG?!!
im reaaallly apprehensive about seein this now. I BEEN LOOKIN FORWARD TO IT FOR TWO YEARS!! this is very...disappointing. to say the LEAST.
sheit.
:(

V.

There's never been a live-action adaptation of a cartoon that's ever worked as a film.

Not a single one.

lol
too bad/so sad


http://io9.com/5576076/m-night-shyamalan-finally-made-a-comedy

former indie auteur M. Night Shyamalan has set out to make a gonzo comedy on purpose, with The Last Airbender. Spoilers ahead!

M. Night Shyamalan has always been fascinated by playing with genre conventions. His famed love of twist endings is really an obsession with tweaking his audience's expectations, and his best film, Unbreakable, is a superhero movie that comments on the superhero genre. It was inevitable that he would slide into full-on genre pastiche.


And The Last Airbender is a lavish parody of big-budget fantasy epics. It's got everything: the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum. No expense is spared — Shyamalan even makes sure to make fun of distractingly shitty 3-D, by featuring it in his movie.

This is the part where I would insert a quick plot synopsis of the film, but it's really unnecessary - Shyamalan has boiled every epic heroic story of the past 20 years down to its most basic, primal soup-y essence, so he can spray it all over the audience, in a kind of Hero's-Journey bukkake. You will be finding chunks of Joseph Campbell's calcified spooge behind your ears for three days after watching this film, no matter how many times you bathe.


Shyamalan's true achievement in this film is that he takes a thrilling cult TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and he systematically leaches all the personality and soul out of it — in order to create something generic enough to serve as a universal spoof of every epic, ever. All the story beats from the show's first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean? We never know, because it's time for more stuff to happen. You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place. And it's laughing louder than you are, because it's got Dolby surround-sound and you're choking on your suspension of disbelief.


The comic recipe starts with the actors, who manage to recite every line of dialogue as though they're ordering lunch for the fourth time that day. (Because they were still peckish, or because their lunch order got lost the first three times.) Nicola Peltz, who plays Katara, has one line of dialogue over and over through the movie: "We need to go!" She says this every few minutes, because this is Shyamalan's way of letting us know that one set piece is over and it's time for the next set piece to begin. "We need to go!" Depending on how badly the heroes need to go, she may pout, pushing her lips out into a trombone-player's embouchure, for emphasis. The film is simultaneously frenetic, racing at top speed, and yet totally disaffected, like the monomyth with mononucleosis.

Katara's the girl sidekick and sorta-love interest to Aang, who's an 11-year-old monk with a bunch of cool tattoos and elemental powers. We're told that Aang is struggling with a lot of heavy shit — genocide, man. It sucks, you know? — but mostly he's just sort of there. The brilliance of Noah Ringer's performance cannot be understated — he is the first performer ever to convince me utterly that he is standing in front of a greenscreen. Even when Ringer is filmed on location, in front of a real-life mountain, he still manages to create the impression that his surroundings have been keyed in, and he's actually in a studio somewhere. This is a huge, crucial factor in the way the movie makes fun of its own epic-ness. And I think everybody who has criticized Shyamalan for casting white actors as Asian characters in this film should admit they were wrong. Clearly, Shyamalan tried to cast Asians, but he just couldn't find any whose performances were lifeless enough.


I haven't even mentioned the dialog yet, which is where the real comic force of the movie comes in. Like when Aang and his friends are taken prisoner by the Fire Nation and locked up with a bunch of Earth-benders, in a big dirt enclosure. And Aang looks at the Earth-benders and shouts, "EARTH BENDERS! THERE IS DIRT UNDER YOUR FEET! THERE'S DIRT ALL AROUND YOU! WHY DON'T YOU FIGHT?" And everybody's like, "Whoa." They notice that there's a lot of dirt here, all right. How did they miss that? It's like they've got selective dirt-blindness.

Later in the film, Katara says my favorite line ever, "We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs." It's as if Shyamalan had a cue card that he was planning to turn into an actual bit of dialog, but he forgot. There's a lot of cue-card writing in this film, and it feels like Shyamalan is leaving things as sign-posty as possible, in order to make fun of the by-the-numbers storytelling in so many Hollywood epics. The master has come to school us all.

The third member of our main trio is Sokka, who's played by one of the vampires from Twilight. At one point, he falls in love with a silver-haired girl with insane costume jewelry, who looks like a refugee from the "wink of an eye" people, out of the original Star Trek. We know that he's got the hots for her, because Katara tells us in a quickie voice-over.


Oh yeah - that's another one of the ways in which this movie pokes fun at the very idea of epic fantasy: the endless confusing voice-over, in which tons of important story developments happen off-camera while we're looking at a picture of a tree or a CG mountain. Because why do we privilege the story of the hero's progress over the tree?, Shaymalan asks. Why does the original Star Wars insist on showing us Luke Skywalker training with a lightsaber, instead of telling us that Luke Skywalker trained with a lightsaber while showing us a tracking shot of some rocks? Why pretend that one thing is more important than the other thing? Why pretend that any of it has any meaning? As a wise man once wrote, "A menu is as good as a myth."

Also, if the original Star Wars had given us a tracking shot of rocks, with a voiceover explaining that Luke was learning to use a lightsaber someplace else, it would have freed up more screen time for Luke to stand around shouting, "JAWAS! THERE IS SAND UNDER YOUR FEET!"


Not to mention the many scenes in which characters rattle off exposition, and it feels as if somebody must have fed the scripts from the TV series into an office shredder, and then glued some of the word stripes together. You can just imagine Shyamalan stopping the actors and demanding a retake, over and over again, because the actors were still stringing the sentences together as if they had a logical sequence. It must have taken hours to get the right level of random, Ketamine-overdose level of dissociation into every scene where somebody explains about importance of the avatar and how you have to feel your feelings, in order to gerbil machete fish dumpling crank handle. At its most sublime and brain-sluicing, the expository scenes approach the level of the opening act of D-War. And that's high praise.






Recently, at an Asian fusion restaurant, I was offered a thing called an Asiadilla. This was a quesadilla with roast duck and hoisin sauce inside it. Just let that idea sink into your mind and permeate your tastebuds — in essence, it's Beijing Duck crossed with Tex-Mex. With extra cheese. Watching The Last Airbender is like being force-fed a hundred Asiadillas, washed down with a pitcher of overly sweet Saketinis. The Asian kitsch flies at you, from the yin-yang fish to the army of Samurai who are all South Asian. You want a cheesy foreign backdrop for your fantasy epic? M. Night Shyamalan will smother you in cheese! Because the setting, in this movie, is just another trickster making fun of your desire to believe in it. Airbender's Asia is a giant pantomime, and you are Puss in Boots.


Through all of this chaos, two actors wander like lost souls, and they're really the twin poles of this undertaking. On the one side, you have Aasif Mandvi, of The Daily Show fame, who plays Commander Zhao in exactly the same way he handles the most ridiculous crap he has to say to Jon Stewart. Every line he gets, he shouts and arches one eyebrow comically, in case you didn't already know this was a send-up. (Anyone who's watched Mandvi in the TV series Jericho knows he's capable of subtlety and real emotion, so the fact that every one of his lines of dialogue in this film feels like it should be prefaced with an arch, "That's right, Jon," feels totally deliberate.)

And then there's Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He's an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that's wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub's face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who's playing the uncle of Dev Patel's tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage. (Patel is pretty good when he's acting opposite Toub.) It's a weird dichotomy in this film - the film's villains are the only Asian people in the movie, but they're also the only ones who have any personality whatsoever.


The Last Airbender, it must be said, features some incredibly great special effects (despite the aforementioned CG-overload at times) and the fight choreography is often really great. We occasionally glimpse Momo, the flying lemur-bat, and we get a couple nice moments with Appa, the six-legged sky bison, and the landscape of Greenland is used to nice effect in a few scenes. Every now and then, a cool idea or moment from the TV show breaks through the drone of engines grinding forward.

There are plenty of bad movies that know they're bad — but TLA is the first bad movie that knows that you are bad. You deserve your full share of the blame for this movie's existence. Airbender doesn't just poke fun at its entire genre, with its hyperactive mix of randomness and blandness - it actually MST3Ks its audience. Noah Ringer and that Civil War vampire from Twilight may seem at first to be sleepwalking through a rote adventure, but you realize at last that they're actually delivering a commentary track on your callowness as an audience. It's deadpan, but unmistakable nonetheless. Aang and Sokka become Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, staring out of the screen and bemusedly riffing on our feeble attempts to invest in this saga.


In the traditional hero's journey, the hero resists the call to adventure, before finally passing over the threshold into the dangerous but juicy fantasy world where he comes into his power. And this is what happens to you, the audience, as you watch The Last Airbender, only in reverse. You resist following this movie into the dark, scary place where heroes are pieces of furniture and heroism is a Monty Python routine performed by someone who's never seen the original episodes. But then it's too late - you've passed over the threshold, you are committed, you are on the journey and the story won't let you go. You have been drawn into a place where you will lose, not only your power as an audience member, but quite possibly your mental faculties altoghether. You are lost in the wilderness, and Shyamalan is your trickster guide on a journey into nothingness, from which only your soul-dead shadow will ever return. Too late, you understand: This is the last logic-bending movie you will ever be able to sit through.

In the middle of a summer of proctologically un-thought-out action movies, The Last Airbender breezes past self-parody into a full-on comedy assault that will have you hearing Shyamalan's mocking laughter in your sleep. It's an absurdist masterpiece, in which a million things happen but nothing takes place. (In completely flat 3-D.) This is the standard by which all future epics will be judged.

Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.

Ads by Google

Break into Acting Professional screentest & audition! www.BIHStudios.com
Maybe a Summer Play? DailyCandy Free Email Subscription. DailyCandy.com/Plays
Comedy Central Save on Comedy Central! www.ShopAtHome.com

i'll go into it with the reviewer's words in mind, hopefully it'll make the experience less painful :/

V.

i don't wanna spend my money there when i can check somethin else

http://thepasswordisswordfish.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/the-last-airbender-he-can-generate-wind-but-not-my-interest/

^^^ my full review there, but long story short, there's just a ton of exposition and zero character development, and so the whole thing was just really dull. It didn't even feel like an M. Night film... even though The Happening was bad, it FELT like an M. Night film. This one was just a big strange boring piece of crap.

__________________________________________________________
http://www.zazzle.com/auteurronin*<------BUY ONE OF MY T-SHIRTS PLEASE, Don't treat them like that movie Necessary Roughness and ignore them...lol

Granted, when they spent over 200 million on the film, it's not that great but it should be able to break 100 million.

for the sequels.

,,,,and it's really all M Night's fault....he took all the heart and soul out of it and seems to be going for his own "matrix/lotr/sw/hp/twilight" thing...and it's not working...and ALL the movie's problems have to do with how he wrote the script, which he claims to have done solo...the actors did a good job with what they had and the effects were as good as they could be without animation.....BUT if they make enough money and make a sequel, i hope he learns from all the mistakes he made here and makes a better film

...and for the record, i don't hate the movie AT ALL....it's just not good, and given the source material it's a sickly looking lifeless comparison....

>i hope he learns from all
>the mistakes he made here and makes a better film

cue the happening.

The first time I felt ripped off because they advertised it as a thriller and it's not scary at all.

But it's not meant to be a thriller. It's a bedtime story, a fantasy fairy tale. And on that level... it's really not that bad.

I'd rank it an easy 4th in ranking his films, behind the first three, but way ahead of The Village, The Happening, and this.

>The first time I felt ripped off because they advertised it
>as a thriller and it's not scary at all.
>
>But it's not meant to be a thriller. It's a bedtime story, a
>fantasy fairy tale. And on that level... it's really not that
>bad.


it wasn't but i went in with that expectation
it was kinda sweet
~~~~
When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. Live so that when you die, you rejoice, and the world cries.
~~~~
You cannot hate people for their own good.

*catches breath*


HAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHA

WAY TO GO, M. DOGG!!

LOOK OUT, WISEAU!! HERE COMES THE M NIGHT!!


What a huge turd salad. I got to go to a free screening, and I still felt ripped off.

This of course continues to justify the existence of 3D conversion to studio execs. Sigh.

production. I'll see Tron Legacy in 3D because the trailer kicked ass.

This movie ain't making it's money back.

Truth in fact, the people who have rode the hardest for "only domestic counts" are the some of the cats flying the "worldwide" flag the hardest.

it gotta make about 400 mill worldwide and DVDs and cable. it's recouping and m knighting making more movies.

cry.

It's cute that you're riding so hard for worldwide and DVD numbers when M. Night's involved. You play the game at a pre-school level.

will never see sequels. Reboots maybe... sequels..nah. HW is desperate for another Harry Potter.

Golden Compass was too damn boring to get me excited about another film version.

GC was just meh ... it could've been more...
it's the idiotic push for another Potter, another twilight 'saga'... I cannot wait until that saga is gone forever..until they remake it 20 years from now. HW is lazy.

(use your google) the shit talking would be financially justified but it made made and will continue to make money. All those butthurt Otaku nerds are going to get the Blu-Ray special edition because one thing I know about nerdery is complete-ism. Gotta have em all. People are so predictable.

It's not a horrible as they say it is and it not a great movie but technically good. there are some corny and strange things in it but as a whole its decent. The whole kids doing tai chi got a snicker or three out of me and the look on AANG's (PRONOUNCED LIKE WANG OR DANG) face got a sniggle also.

Is it "Manos" bad? Not by a long shot. Night made the first and possible the last ATLAB movie. You try fitting a whole season of an animated TV show into 1 movie.
Not Night's best but he has room for improvement and this is helping him atone for the Happening and that old woman's lemon drink...wtf was that about?

Movies like this don't necessarily have to satisfy the Eberts of the world to work on some level, but if the kids who grew up on the cartoon are hating, that's a bad sign.

damn son, this summer is hurting and no films are producing big bucks.

I liked it.
I was looking for reasons to not like it and came up empty.

I started watching the cartoon last week and got through Book 1 before going to the movie.
There's no way M Night was going to successfully cram nearly 10 hours of story into 2 hours, but I thought he hit enough notes from Book 1.

Being media-aware, I knew not to bother with the 3D, so I was able to appreciate the FX.
I'm no acting coach, but I wasn't bothered by any of it.
I didn't think Noah/Aang was reading and I didn't notice Katara yell "we have to go" a million times.

Rotten Tomatoes has it at 8%. AV Club gave it an F.

My only beef was that it didn't get as epic as I would have liked.
In the cartoon, Aang's command of the spirits was pretty bad ass, while this was kind of limp, but it was still kind of cool.

One trend that needs to be snapped is bright white light turning red and having some kind of deep meaning. Lost tried and failed and seeing it here just brought back that bad taste.

Overall, I'm in the minority on this one.
I liked it.

People are acting like this is Plan 9 from Outer Space or Beast of Yucca Flats.

The critics are wrong here IMHO. This backlash is more about M Night Shamalamadingdong than anything else. The shoehorning of a massive story doesn't help either. For what it's worth he did a serviceable job only the LOTR people couldve done better. Blowenkamp (sp lol), Peter Jackson or a Del Toro could've done better. The Happening and that old woman and her lemon drink hurt me so too but movie ain't that bad.
People are acting like he's Coleman Francis LOL

30 minutes of this film then I will cosign you. But until you can logically and chronologically tell me what happened in the first 30 minutes I can't cosign.

But if you liked it, you liked it.

I'd never suggest this to someone raw.
I equate this to Watchmen - go to the source and consider this a companion.
Neither are stand-alones in my book. Create a new category if necessary, but these are companions to the source material.

So being familiar with the real stories, I followed along just fine.

Would I say I liked it? *shrug* Is it better than the source material? No, not at all. Is it the worst movie of the year? Hell no. I kinda agree with previous comments in that if anybody else had their name attached to it, it would get bad reviews, but definitely not half the vitriol and hate that it's receiving.

i rolled my eyes so many times during this flick, my contacts almost popped out. what a waste

What made this movie so horrible?

The troubled translation from 'anime' to live action?

The stuff left out?

Not shoehorning Jet in?

The white people as Asians?

The stiff child actors?

The inability to say ANG?!?

LOL

How much space would prefer?: One movie, or sixty-one episodes?

Also, I had no expectations for the series, really. For the movie, I don't really have them either. Other people seem to have them. It's unreasonable, really. The movie can't be the series in so many ways.

AANG is a goofball.
They totally messed that up.

just like i expected the "get smart" movie to have the spirit of the series, or the "a team" movie, or "the brady bunch" movie, the "spongebob" movie, or even "the x files" movies, etc... this movie DOESN"T....it just felt uninspired/flat and given the source material, it's kinda sad....he just went though the motions and the movie really have no soul or drive.....

i will say ONE change i really liked...Ang's airbending was seemingly more effective against foes in the movies...it always seemed like it was the weakest element in the series...

could have easily been accomplished. It just wasn't done. You yank out that dumbass earth camp scene and you've got time right there.

Any other epic film (trilogy) runtime easily surpasses that.
Still, the film is boring and the characters are flat.
It just was not entertaining.

wtf...interest...why is the carpet wet!?!?

smh...

Especially Sorcerer's Stone.
Same target audience.
Same MPAA rating.
152 minutes.

HP hasn't been childrens fare since #3.

i'll get burned for this but so what...

so ...i never saw the series (my kids watched the series though, but i never did other than walking through the room while it happened to be on).

so i was essentially going into the Movie with no preconceptions or expectations at all...

that is, until the night before when my daughter starts telling us about the god-awful reviews shes seeing on the web about the film...folks talking about what important (and not so important) elements that were in the series but were altered or missing from the movie...talking about bad writing and acting....you know stuff like that...

so then, my NON expectations are actually lowered a bit after hearing that, thinking that it would be a complete painful watch...like a few other films which i wont name here...

but since i had no vested preconceptions i ended up going in thinking that, "well at least since i never watched the series, i wont know what i'm missing so those missing elements wont affect MY experience"...

and you know what...they actually didnt.

Did i LOVE the film? nope.
But Did i HATE it? nope.

best way to describe it is...i felt like i had a carefree 'romp' for a few hours learning about this world. Yeah, i could tell that there was probably some 'cramming' going on...trying to fit a series arch into one film...but I enjoyed it enough to actually want to WATCH the series afterwards. (this pleased my daughter because her concern going in was that if folks watched the movie for the first time..and thought it stunk...they would think it accurately reflected the series and would never give the series a chance. For me that wasn't the case at all, just the opposite. The film, flawed and imperfect as it was, was 'just' good enough to peak my interest in the TV series to further explore this world...)


...which i did...

my wife and i sat down over the next few days and started watching the TV series, and we're HOOKed now. And NOW of course i DO see what elements in the series are missing from the film...(for me the main missing element is the humor of Aang and other characters, which so far in the series has been a great treat). In the special they ran on TV before the opening night, MNight said he did FILM a lot of the humorous elements but he left them out of theatrical cut for some reason (which made me think that that perhaps leaves the door open for an extended-cut DVD/BluRay release that is truer to the series with humor and additional character development intact??? who knows...)

so...again, not knowing any better, not seeing the series first...the film on its own was 'ok'. Not 'great', not groundbreaking, and unfortunately coming up a bit short in what i call the 'heart' department...but not painful (at least not for me)...i didn't feel like i got ripped off...i thought it was enjoyable 'enough' to get me curious about the world from which it sprang....and i'm glad i did because i do really enjoy the series so far...


so i'm hoping they DO make a 2nd movie, maybe they'll capture more of the heart of the series on the second go round....

I just started Book 3 and this is a wonderful series.
Enjoy!

we on some 'rent and rip' for the Avatar series.
:)

Writing was all over the place and sloppy…Hard to watch actors who didn’t seem to understand the lines they were reciting…Dialogue was horrible…Very simple and ill-used special effects…and the helmsman, M. Night, who has evidenced himself to be a talented director and has made films that I have enjoyed quite a bit, evidently is NOT a good action director. I was amazed at how slow and boring the big fight scene with Ahn and the Prince fighting together against to many was composed. The big finale, while impressive and technically satisfactory, could have been much much better.

The one positive in the film and the only thing that kept me into it was the well acted and well directed (yet not well written) scenes with the bad guy heavies.

This was just a bad bad bad bad bad movie. If you watched and enjoyed it, so much so that you have posted in here not seeing the problems inherent in this dreck, then you and I have COMPLETELY different concepts of what makes an interesting, well-made, film. I also think we’re all owed $4 because of the complete lack of any 3D in this “3D film”.





©

When the Chief is in the house...ohmigod

I had no idea this was even a Shyamalan film until about a week ago. I don't even remember seeing a trailer for this and i go to the movies frequently.

Sounds shitty i am gonna skip thi one altogether, won't even bother to rent it.

the heroic water nations are nordic-looking yt

the peaceful, benign earth nations are east asian

the evil fire nations are south asian

and of course The Chosen One is a White Savior


gotdamn manoj hates himself even more than I hate him.

This was my 1st time seeing it. As a fan of the series, the most disappointing part to me are the charactors. I really hated the kid who played Ang. He just didn't convience me as the Avatar.