I used to have a lot of faith that Mr. Shyamalan was a good storyteller and good director. I loved Sixth Sense, even if it creeped me out quite a bit (I'm scared of ghosts FYI). I liked the message of Signs and the premise of an alien invasion was fun. Unbreakable is probably my favorite of his films, which took several viewings to establish my love for it but it was worth it. I hated The Village, it was boring and the story was not engaging. I never bothered viewing the Lady in the Water, I heard plenty of bad things and I had no interest after watching The Village. I was interested in seeing the Happening, which I felt like it was a deceptive title because not much happened. I agreed with the environmental message of that film, but would not bother watching it ever again. Right now, M. Night has a 50/50 chance of me enjoying the movie.
The Last Airbender was by far his worse film, and one of the worst films I have ever watched. I am in fact a fan of the show. And I know the potential that show has to make a great film that isn't just fun to watch with cool special effects but also tells a good story that has lots of depth due to strong characters. I knew the film would be bad when I saw the running time for it. It ran at an underwhelming 103 minutes, which is an hour and 43 minutes long if you aren't good at math (which I'm not).
103 minutes is not enough time to tell the story of an entire season of a show. I understand that not everything from the show can be or should be in the film version, but there was not a lot of character development and major characters seemed far less important to the story than they should've been. No, I am not that upset about the exclusion of fan favorite characters like June, Jet, and the Kiyoshi Warriors (even though they play a significant role in the next two seasons of the show). This wasn't helped by the actors' weak performances. The only person who did what I would consider a good job was Shaun Toub, who played the lovable Uncle Iroh. I have yet to watch Slumdog Millionaire, but I was still looking forward to Dev Patel's portrayal of Zuko. I found it disappointing, but I am still willing to give Slumdog a chance! Noah Ringer looked like the central character of the television show, but the lack of character development made the character seem weak and his acting did not help with that. Other members of the cast were equally weak if not more so. I blame the overall weakness in the characters on the script (written by Shyamalan) and a lack of direction (also Shyamalan's fault).
So a character driven story that lacked the character development equates to it being a decent story that is undermined by this lack of character development. It falls apart as the film progresses. The writing was atrocious as well. There were lots of useless dialogue moments where the dialogue did little to nothing to further the story or develop the characters and their relationships to each other. The story was choppy and made no sense overall. I felt like I relied entirely too much on my knowledge of the show's world whereas the film should've been telling me what was happening with appropriate timing.
Something that I feel is necessary to respond to with reading other reviews and what other people have said about the movie is that they thought the special effects were awesome. I thought the effects were underwhelming, it wasn't a spectacle to witness. The only effect that seemed awesome in the film was the giant title wave that can be seen in the tv spots and theatrical trailers. M. Night's ability to show locations and give them a sense of scale was good, and I will give him credit for that. The bending of the elements was lack luster. Watch how bending is done in the show and compare it to the film. His overuse of slow motion hurt the flow of scenes. At points M. Night used a panning shots to show the flow of the action and it honestly hurt my eyes.
The only differences to the show that I despised were the lack of character development and how they drastically changed the roles of several key characters. There were other things that irked me as a fan of the original television program, however. Chiefly, the change of pronunciations of character names. I can understand if it wasn't pronounced the way I would if the source material had been a book, but it was from a television show where the names are spoken out loud repeatedly. This was only a minor annoyance. The fact that the film was not completely true to the show did not bother me, the exclusion of some characters is understandable. The blending of important scenes was fine. The ending was bad though, and for those who have watched the series, there is no Koizilla/Aang creature.
It would be irresponsible to not bring up the racial naiveté that is within the film. M. Night isn't a racist, and it is ignorant to assume that he is. However, the fact that the central protagonist group members are white and the evil guys are all brown does come off as somewhat insensitive to the current age. Also, with the Southern Water Tribe looking like a group of aboroginal Canadians with 3 members of that tribe looking like they were caucasian was almost downright laughable. There was an explanation for this if you had watched the series, but that was never explained within the film.
The movie seemed to be a Lord of the Rings rip-off, except not in the ways that it should've been. It lacked the epic vision of those films and character development. It should've been as long as those films as well. The studio must have wanted it to be shorter so that kids could watch the movie. By pandering to the kids, it weakened the ability for the movie to be good and fun, which it was neither.
Where was the abundant amount of feminist ideas that are present in the series? Lost with the development of certain characters.
It's a waste of time and money to see this film. I would give it a 0 out of 5 if it hadn't been for the fact that I really liked the guy who played my favorite character, Iroh. It gets a 1 out 5 from me. On a scale of a 100, it probably would get a 1 out of 100. M. Night Shyamalan should stick with his own works because then he wouldn't be destroying the integrity of an amazing franchise. This film should be seen as an incredible insult to the original creators of the show. The sad thing is this movie was number 2 in the box office its opening weekend, and probably would've been number one if it hadn't released the same weekend as a Twilight movie. If this is to be a trilogy, Nickelodeon Studios, hire someone else to do the direction and the writing. The next director also should not have cut their teeth by making a Twilight movie either.
I knew the movie would be bad, and I went to see it anyway. Sometimes it is more important with whom you go to the movies than the movie you go to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment