Jul 28, 2010

The Last Airbender

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT, SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB

I can summarize this entry with "The last airbender is the worst movie of the year and one of the worst tv to movie adaptations ever made", but if i did that I wouldn't get to rant about it, would I?. The tubes need some more clogging, that's what I'm here for.

Oh where do I start. I have no idea. Every second of this movie is so full of bad moviemaking that I could literally write an essay about what is wrong with this movie. Yes it's that bad. I would go as far as to say that is Manos: the hands of fate bad. I've talked about watching that one before.

After watching this movie, I sat down for a while, thinking about what could I say was good about this movie. My mind was blank. I thought "maybe the show wasn't that good after all, maybe I have a bad case of selective memory". So I watched the first two episodes of the original tv series that very night.

Nope, the show's still great.

So, for the hell of it, I would point out the things that weren't completely atrocious about this "movie":

-God Bless Mr Toub who worked with this trash of a script and managed not to look like a complete retard all the time, like all the other actors in this movie. Every time he was on screen I forgot I was being lobotomized by this movie.
-The Northern water tribe country was well crafted, the architecture was one of the few things well executed from the original series. But then again, walls and pillars don't have to recite an script.
-A few moments of the fight where Aang and the Blue spirit (Zuko in disguise) battle a horde of fire nation soldiers were pretty decent.

Does 1 decent actor, 1 decent set, and 1 decent to sub-par fight scene save this movie from craptastic grandeur? If you've been paying attention, you know the answer to that.

As I said, If I listed all the reasons to why this movie is a steaming pile of gorilla dung, it would be too long for anyone to care about reading.I could point out how this is one of the most hollow scripts with the most soulless dialog I've ever had the displeasure to watch, how everything they brought in from the series has been twisted, transformed, and disfigured for the worse. How Sokka is a lifeless idiot and a duplicate of Anakim, but with even less personality and zero sense of humor. You would think that a comic relief character should have some, but M. Night appears to disagree.

And then we have Katara, which went from a strong kid which was more of a leader than Aang ever was to yet another mumbling, lifeless idiot. Aang? a soulless skull of a character, a character you feel no emotion towards, in spite of the supposed predicament he's in... a disfigured parody of its tv series counterpart. Zuko and Iroh were OK i guess. Zuko worked better because in the series he's an emo kid full of angst, and that's how every major character is portrayed in this movie.

The story? suffice to say, nothing makes sense at all. We move from scene to scene with either no explanation whatsoever, or with a voiceover with Katara telling us what happened in her best interpretation of a speech synthesizer. "Sokka and the princess became friends very quickly"... oh right, I'm supposed to imagine them doing stuff that would make them become friends, instead of actually seeing and experiencing that. Well, that helps me like the characters more, I guess?

I am not going to go into detail because as I said before: if I do this would get a tl:dr tag (It's already long). But I assure you If I were to nitpick this movie, and I can, I can point out flaws in every single aspect of this movie. It's just a disaster.

I don't have to say that this movie pissed me off quite a bit because it's very apparent in this rant, and I don't think I've been this disappointed at a movie before, not even with the phantom menace or attack of the clones. I can resume my reaction to this movie with the 5 stages of grief

1- Denial: as I watched this movie, I was in a permanent state of denial. "It can't be this bad, it must get good at some point... "
2-Anger: "That's it??? is this gargantuan boodle of horseshit is the last airbender movie??" then I proceeded to nerdrage accordingly.
3-Bargaining: "Maybe the original wasn't as good as I remember, maybe if I watch the original again I will see everything was crappy all the time, yeah it will make everything ok again"
4-Depression: "Ugh... I was wrong, only the movie is absolute shit. My faith is lost, how can I trust any movie again not to take a dump on something I really like?"
5-Acceptance: "Well, it was crap, but at least I have the excellent original series that I can watch over and over and pretend this movie was never, ever made"

Final verdict: I don't recommend this movie for kids. Kids won't have fun because nothing fun or funny happens. There are no bright colors to distract them either. No playful Momo being a rascal with Sokka, no funny Appa. No careless, lighthearted Aang. No angsty but likable Zuko. Nothing at all for a kid. I don't recommend this movie to fans of the show, as it takes a dump on everything that made the original show a great series to watch.

I can't recommend this movie to people who like good movies, because a good movie, this is not. I can't recommend this move to people who like to watch bad movies and laugh at the badness because this isn't one of those movies. It's one of the movies you feel cheated and lobotomized, and feel genuinely sorry for the two actors that were actually trying to do a good work.

I will recommend this movie to the hacker that fucked me up and grabbed my wow and rapidshare accounts and tried to ran away with them. Fuck you.

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