I find myself to actually be a fan of director M. Night Shyamalan, I enjoyed most all of his films(besides his latest "The happening" but i also dont find myself a fan of Marky Mark) So when the reviews started to roll in for his Retelling of one of the greatest Adventures of all time, I wanted to tell everyone "No way it cant be that bad, Have you seen the previews?"
But everyone kept telling me No...It is that bad, The reviews just kept coming in saying the 3D is horrible and the cast is all wrong or that M. Night has broken everything we as fans had dreamed for.
I waited til after the weekend to see it, let everyone else judge it and get the hate out of the way. Then this past Wednesday i finally went to a 5:20 showing at my small town theater, surprising the theater was not empty as we had about 15 people in the seats by the time the movie started to roll.
The start of the movie is amazing, by the start i mean the Paramount logo bending from water and Nickelodeon logo on fire with some ear going on. All of this was a nice little touch. Then we had the intro setting up the past, It also opened kind of like the cartoon with the shadow figures of each nation bending.
By this time i was pretty hyped but i noticed that it did seem a bit cheesy to me, but hey its still a comedy right? the show had lots of laughs along the way.
I was wrong...The movie did start off with a middle joke from Sokka but that happened to be only one of say 3 jokes i can remember? Thats not a very good amount of attempts at comedy. I do like the attempt at the Sokka/Appa joke but it was only one time and at the start of the film.
The acting from Katara was horrible, I understand she is young and everything but even the camera work didnt help at all, The cuts and the way they try to show emotion just failed. I was already disappointed in the movie and had no reason to think other wise at this point in time.
When Zuko shows up...His scare was of course lackluster to say the least...Not to mention his hair was short, which to me was honestly a big deal as it played a solid part of his character in the animated series.
We move on to the first real action scene of the movie, Aang or should i say Ung? Yeah before i go on...That really did bug me that they didnt say the name right, Its from a cartoon that always said it one way, why change it? Odd to me.
Aang is taken captive on the firenation ship with Zuko and his uncle, then he breaks out an we get appa in a bit of action...and Katar and sokka are now part of team avatar(which of course they dont bring up) So we now have the team together even tho they have hardly said anything to one another.
We fly to the air temple real quick and all....Annoying to say the least, But the air temple means Momo, one of the coolest sidekick characters of anything, along with Appa they are a great team, Appa has shown some character in his two or so scenes thus far so adding MoMo now should bring the film back to my attention.
No.
Momo or the flying lemmer bat is introduced and flys around. Pretty bad CGI as well if i do say so myself, but we dont even really get to know Momo, which shouldn't surprise me since we still dont know the other characters in this movie.
We then go to the earth kingdom, free some folks and well basically head to the end of the movie and do some battling.
I really dont want to spoil whatever it is that they offer me to spoil but we do have a few fight scenes, including one with the Blue spirit which isnt have bad. The earth bending was also kind of cool but i still must say the CGI did come off worst then i had expected, the previews for some reason defiantly looked better, maybe just being in actual full length motion?
Another big issue i have with the movie is the all powerful Fire nation, you know the guys leading this war against the other nations, They are not nearly as powerful as they should be. They need a fire supple to actually attack, They dont really tell you this until towards the end but any time we see a fire bender he of course has a giant fire ball or a fire pit burning around him
They do finally say something about this towards the end with Uncle making his own fire, I guess this is a spoiler but come on, they all should be able to make fire...Something i just found stupid.
The final fight scene is decent, i really liked the slow down fight with Aang and the fire benders or the soldiers anyways. but it still came off on the weak side of things.
Over all the movie is a huge disappointment even when everyone had already told me. I just couldn't believe how bad it was. If we had never seen the show, This movie still failed to be any real entertainment, with poor camera work and horrible acting, this is easily one of the worst films i have seen in ages.
As i walked out of the theater i turned to my friend and said "To make things easier, what DID you like?"
It seemed like the firenation ships win for the coolest part of the movie. The CGI wasnt all that bad but you still leave thinking what if it was more polished? Or if the acting was decent? The camera work didnt feel like someone was just panning around zooming in and out and slowing stuff down?
I will give it a second chance on blu ray, hopefully they add some time to the movie as i think the biggest failure is the lack fo any character development. Which maybe is because the actors are that bad....But we still never cared for anyone while watching this film.
I could rant on and on...Things keep popping into my head as i type.
The very end of the film did make me kind of smile but at the same time do i really want to see Book 2 turned into dirt? I know its about earth bending but Air was turned into a plastic bag wrapped around our heads and let us gasping for anything but what they gave us.
I'll end this rant of a review, But what did you think of the movie? Will you give it a second chance? Will you see book 2 if its made?
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