Timstuff wrote:Why is that most of the negative reader reviews seem to be from people with only one post who joined today? Do people really feel that strongly about this film that they felt the need to seek out a fansite and register to the forums just to post their negative review?
just because you have few post doesn't mean you haven't been here a while or that your opinion doesn't matter. Some people like me, prefer to keep there opinion and read others.
Project 86 wrote:so i hear many stuff was cut i heard sokka jumping scream from tv spots was not even in the movie
Many of the scenes in the tv spots were not in the movie. Including
the man on the mountain that we thought was Roku, Sokka jumping up and screaming, the scene with the fire benders throwing fire at the screen like in the cartoon, the shot of Sokka and Katara holding each other like in the cartoon and some others that i don't remember right now.
DynaMix wrote:*sigh* Just got back from the midnight screening in my area. I don't know what other words I can use to describe me and my friends' thoughts other than heartbroken. After waiting so long to see this movie, its the only word I can think of. It is horrible. Such a disgrace you want to laugh and cry at the same time while you are watching it. Laugh because it comes off like a low budget joke, and cry because you know what it could've been. The one possibly redeeming quality is that it is visually decent. I don't know why some of the reviews trashed the look of the sets and such. I thought it had a visual appeal. From there it only gets worse. The acting is, on a whole, atrocious. A couple of actors do well but most of the performances are wooden and feelingless. The writing is mind numbingly bad, with CONSTANT references to what is going on, using narration to describe certain plot advancements and gloss over other ones. Names are changed and misprounounced, critical plot elements are forgotten or distorted. No one who hasn't seen the show will have ANY clue what is going on. I don't mind at all diverting from the show (we all knew they would have to) but at least keep the feel, the spirit, of the story... Even the action sequences (of which there are very few) are much slower in tempo, style, and excitement level than the cartoon. There are very few moments where you care about characters, the battle, or the outcome. I can't write anymore, this is too depressing.
so you go an account just to post that? hmm sorry not buying it
cmon man, are you serious? Listen I am one of the older fans probably watching this movie (28), I certainly was in the theater last night. I don't have time nor energy for diabolical schemes of infiltrating movie boards in order to troll or attack fans. I post on many different avatar sites just for the interaction. I promise you, I made this account and posted so that I could vent. That is the only reason. When you see the movie you will understand. I apologize if my post bothered or offended you but that was not my intention.
Timstuff wrote:Why is that most of the negative reader reviews seem to be from people with only one post who joined today? Do people really feel that strongly about this film that they felt the need to seek out a fansite and register to the forums just to post their negative review?
just because you have few post doesn't mean you haven't been here a while or that your opinion doesn't matter. Some people like me, prefer to keep there opinion and read others.
Timstuff, I think its because some of us are just genuinely surprised at how bad it turned out and need to vent. I understand the low post count makes you question one's intentions, but before this (I can only speak for me), I never really felt the need to post on this particular board. I didn't even know it had a board, I came here for all the video links, daily.
Project 86 wrote:so i hear many stuff was cut i heard sokka jumping scream from tv spots was not even in the movie
Many of the scenes in the tv spots were not in the movie. Including
the man on the mountain that we thought was Roku, Sokka jumping up and screaming, the scene with the fire benders throwing fire at the screen like in the cartoon, the shot of Sokka and Katara holding each other like in the cartoon and some others that i don't remember right now.
A review of M Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender in 3D by Mindbender the Magnificent
Hello fellow LAFers. So I watched the movie at midnight last night with a group of five of my friends, two of my converts to the show, and three friends that had not seen the show. After the movie, we went to Denny's to eat and discuss and we learned a lot about the difference in the film experience between the two groups. By the time I got home, I was too tired to write my LAF review, but now here it is.
As a fan of the show, there were a lot of moments in the movie that were a joy to see on screen because of my familiarity with the characters and the world of Avatar. However, I knew as I was seeing these moments that they would mean nothing to someone not already enamored with the characters and the world. This was roundly confirmed when talking to my 3 uninitiated friends.
But then, there were a lot of moments that elicited the opposite response. Because of my love for the show, it felt like twisting knives in my lower intestines to watch them play out, and my 3 friends didn't find them to be particularly low moments for the movie.
There's an expression that most people are familiar with that tells us that the whole is greater than the sum its parts. The individual parts of a car or computer, for example, are usually not that useful or spectacular on their own. It is when they all come together that some better is created. This film is an example of the opposite phenomenon. This movie is worse than the sum of it's parts. It has so many fantastic component parts. The music was grand, the cinematography was beautiful, the set production usually left little room for criticism, the costumes helped take you to a different world, the martial arts choreography feel short of my expectations, but only because they were very high, and the special effects were great. And all of that came together to make a movie than was more disappointing than any one part.
A lot has been said about the pacing of the movie, and fans and non-fans of the show agree, what you've been told about the pacing is absolutely not an exaggeration. The film moves at a whiplash-inducing pace from the beginning of the film until Aang, Katara and Sokka get to the Northern Water Tribe. Once they do, the pacing of the rest of the movie is brought back from escape velocity and comes back into Earth's atmosphere. There was no surprise in the least among my 5 friends when I told them entire sections of story were scripted, filmed, then cut entirely from the film. They all knew there were cuts made before being told. It was jarringly obvious. So, is the pacing the real problem with The Last Airbender? No, it's not. Under different circumstances, this movie could have worked with this kind of pacing, and adding more running time to fix the pacing could have easily done nothing but prolong the agony. The pacing was not what made this movie fall apart.
There has been a lot said about the acting. Film acting is a craft that I have a funny perspective on. Generally, if an actor's performance is good, I give him or her a lot of credit for their talent. However, I tend to blame poor acting on directors. A director tells an actor how he/she wants an actor to perform a scene. It is generally the director who decides when the actors have given to the camera the performance he/she wants, and the director decides when the footage that's been shot is sufficient and that it's time to move to shooting the next scene. If I cringe at a performance or individual line of dialogue in any movie, my thought is "How was the director happy with this take? Why did he/she tell the actors to act this way?" This is sometimes unfair, and the director doesn't always have his choice or actors, and sometimes a big name actor has more clout than a director. That was not the case for this movie. So did the performances ruin this movie? No, they did not.
So what did ruin this movie? Two distinct, yet related, things made this movie just awful. The first was that each character had between zero and very, very little character development. The second was that there was no sense of a connection between any of these characters. I'll talk about the second thing first. The relationships between these characters were not developed at all. I had no sense of any bonds between Katara and Aang, and I'm not talking Kataang romance, I'm saying they seemed like strangers from start to finish. Aang and Katara's relationship in the show was more developed and defined by the time Sokka and Kanna kicked Aang out of the Southern Water Tribe village at the end of the first episode, and I am not exaggerating in the least. The show makes fun of itself on occasion for the frequency of group hugs, but there is something to be said about why it doesn't feel trite or forced in the show. You do get a strong sense of love and connection among the group in that first season (which only grows in later seasons). In the show, when Katara protects Aang from Zuko while he crosses over into the Spirit World at the Spirit Oasis, you know Katara is protecting her very dear friend, someone she cares about She's not protecting "the Avatar," she's protecting her friend. When Zuko comes for Aang in the same scene in the Spirit Oasis
she tells the meditating Aang that she always knew that he was real and would return. It's a scene from the trailers that I assumed took place at the Southern Water Tribe, when they had just met, but it was actually near the end of the movie.
Aang is essentially a stranger to her, an important stranger she needs to protect at any cost, but a stranger nonetheless. The only sense of connection that existed between Katara and Sokka came from the fact that we knew they were brother and sister, and because we are human beings with an understanding of the sibling relationship (direct or indirect for only children out there), we inferred a connection, but the movie never saw it necessary to demonstrate it in any way, shape or form.
Those were the characters whose relationships had zero development. Zuko and Iroh are an example of one of the relationships that showed very, very little connection (a opposed to none at all). We see that Iroh cares about Zuko, but very little of Zuko's feelings about his uncle are shown to the audience.
Then there's the issue I described as the first problem above: the development and definition of the characters themselves, not their relationships with each other. Let me be clear about this. If you are not already familiar with these characters from the show, you learn nearly nothing about them and really don't care about them at all. If you have seen the show, you're lucky enough to bring the animated characters in your mind, with you into the theater. The movie is to character moments (moments that you feel you better understand the character) what water is to a desert. The best moments for Aang are his few flashback scenes to his life at the Southern Air Temple, other than that, there was very little to give you a sense of who he was. Zuko had a few scenes, but the sense my 3 uninitiated friends got of him was still but a shadow of the sense you get of him in the show by the Book 1 finale. Appa was purely a vehicle in this movie. Any sense that he had a personality or that Aang had any affection for him, let alone love for him, it was left of the cutting room floor. Aang never once even pet him. He might as well have been a giant glider with seats that Aang powered with airbending. It would have cost ILM less and taken nothing away from the film I saw. Take anyone who has seen this movie but never the show, and ask them to describe the personalities of Katara and Sokka. They will probably have difficulty coming up with any adjectives at all. There is a company mantra at Pixar Studios you will hear on just about any of their DVD special feature documentaries, and it is "Story Story Story." For Pixar, story comes first. Everyone who has ever worked at Pixar has forgotten more about making a great movie than I will ever know, so it's with much humility than I disagree and say that I believe characters are the lynch pin of any movie, and while this film keeps much of the show's story intact, the great divide (see what I did there?) between the show and movie is in the portrayal of the characters. And that is the difference makes the show full of so much charm, and the movie completely devoid of it.
What's so heartbreaking about all this is that, as any fan of the show who's been following the news about the movie knows, most of the movie is plucked right out of the show. Obviously, not everything in the show is in the movie, but most things in the movie are from the show, and some of the best moments were actually produced without adapting a scene from the show. For example, there is a scene where
Zhao has invited Zuko and Iroh to dine with him and his men on his ship. Zhao raises his glass to toast Zuko, but instead of toasting him, he reminds his men why the Firelord banished him, and tells his crew that Zuko is not even allowed to wear a fire nation military uniform, but that he (Zhao) was making an exemption for him at this dinner, allowing him to wear one "as a child who wears a costume." Obviously, Zuko is boiling over by the time Zhao says that part, and he stands up, walks over to him, and whispers to him that when his father accepts him back, that Zhao would be beneath him.
that scene actually works really well, and one of the biggest deviations Shyamalan made from the source material. Also, all the flashback moments for Aang
Giving Gyatso the necklace he made for him, opening his eyes when everyone's eyes were supposed to be closed, and Gyatso gesturing to him to close them without even opening his own eyes, and the leaf floating through the air landing on a young Airbender's head.
None of that was from the show, and all were fantastic scenes by themselves and contributed to the audience knowing Aang.
When I asked my 5 friends if after seeing this they wanted a sequel to get made, the three uninitiated could not have been more surprised by the fact that I even brought up such a ill-conceived notion. My two other friends still really wanted to see Book 2 adapted. I said "Imagine if they did to Toph's personality what they did to Sokka's in this one." The thought made them cringe, but they hoped something could be changed for a sequel. Have someone else write the script. Or have someone else direct. Or both. The good news is that two of those three uninitiated friends expressed real interest in seeing the show now after hearing us discuss how much was lost in the translation.
In conclusion I have to say this: If you're a fan of this show and have been excited for this movie, go see it. Even if you end up not liking it, you will need the closure. No flowery worded bad review is going to give it to you. Do yourself a favor and see it in a theater, because there is some beautiful photography and that will be lost on a computer desktop monitor, though you can skip the 3D. It wasn't atrocious or anything, but it really added nothing. If you don't want to pay to support a bad film, buy a ticket for Toy Story 3. If you don't want to pay for a bad experience, sneak in then buy a ticket later if you feel it was worth the price of admission to square your conscious.
As an afterthought, I have heard talk recently about how M Night did not in fact have final cut and how Paramount went with a shorter cut because they didn't have time to convert the whole movie into 3D once the decision was made and still make the July 4th weekend release. I have seen no substantiation or citation for this claim, and dismissed it as speculation reported by some as fact. Having seen the movie now, I still don't have any citation for that claim, but I can see why someone thought that. If there is validity to this claim, and a director's cut eventually is released, I will watch it, like I said before, if for nothing else, than for closure.
Last edited by Mindbender on Thu Jul 01, 2010 1:33 pm, edited 5 times in total.
@Mindbender Thank you for that review! It was very honest and truthful and actually gave me more courage for when I see the movie tonight.
I'm curious as to how the actors and M. Night are reacting to all of the reviews though...
Azula: Well, then, maybe you should worry less about the tides, who've already made up their mind about killing you, and worry more about me, who's still mulling it over...
by jrc444 on Thu Jul 01, 2010 12:33 pm 
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