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Trust Weighted
Pretty Bad
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26Trust Points
MJ5K's Review
Summary - Bad 1.0
M. Night Shyamalan! How could you?!?!!! ****deep depressing sigh**** As a fan of the Nickelodean Television Series Avatar: The Last Airbender(the film couldn’t be called Avatar, looked like some other movie was using it) I can tell right off the bat that this is one of the worst adaptations of anything I have ever seen.
The film centers around four nations: Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. The world has been off balance since the Avatar, a young airbender named Aang(or Ong as his name is mispronounced), was lost for 100 years. Once he reemerges, war breaks out and he is the only one who can bring peace to the four nations.
Despite some flashy CGI, decent action sequences, and a fast pace, The Last Airbender suffers from a rushed and convoluted story, horrible acting, underdeveloped characters, laughable dialogue, and poor casting choices. Fans of the show will ultimately be dissapointed and average movie goers will laugh at the rushed plot and poor acting. M. Night Shyamalan, this was your last chance at redemption, buddy, and you failed. Get it right with the sequels!!
Acting - Pretty Bad 1.5
Oh boy, is the acting something. Noah Ringer, the boy who played Aang(or Ong) has to be the worst thing to happen to child acting since Jake Lloyd. He’s so over the top and bland. He acts as though he’s not even supposed to be there.
A good majority of the actors in this movie were terribly miscast. Case in point: Daily Show correspondent/Spiderman Pizza guy Aasif Mandvi as the villainous Commander(he was Admiral in the show) Zhao. Did they just run out of Indian actors?
And while I’ll admit Shaun Toub did a commendable job as Uncle Ihro(or Eerho as his name was also mispronounced), he too was sadly miscast. Uncle Ihro is a fat old man who is short, likes tea, and supplies comic relief. There was none of that in the movie.
The only actor who was even slightly good was Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame as the banished Prince Zuko. He was also one of the few characters the film got right.
Everyone else was just dreadful.
Male Stars - Bad 1.0
Female Stars - Pretty Bad 1.5
Female Costars - Bad 1.0
Male Costars - OK 2.5
Film - Pretty Bad 1.5
Where to begin?
Direction - Bad 1.0
I remember a while back in an interview M. Night said "I felt like a student shooting this film." Trust me when I say a student filmmaker would do a better job with this movie. M. Night cannot direct his actors and he rushed the whole thing. The editing was equally bad. Something tells me he brought the studio a 5 hour movie and they forced him to cut it down to 90 mins.Dialogue - Pretty Awful 0.5
Like I said, the whole plot was rushed. All M. Night did was copy and paste the plot points off of Wikipedia and use it as the story. Now, given there's actually a lot going on in the show that would seem hard to make into a movie. But he didn't need to cram everything into a 90 min movie! And what about the characters? Well, there were none. Each character in this movie was like wallpaper, they were just there. Even the pets. Appa, the flying bison, and Momo, the leamur, served as comic relief on the show and even had personalities of their own. In the movie, they didn't do anything. There wasn't much need for them to even be there. The so called "romances" the film went for were underdevoloped and I could care less what happened to anyone in this movie.Music - Good 3.0
I will say, though, one of the few good qualities of the movie was the score by Hans Zimmer as it reminded me much of the theme he himself composed for the *Pirates* trilogy.Visuals - Barely OK 2.0
The special effects and action were alright. But the story and the whole film just didn't do it justice. The special effects were pointless.Edge - Tame 1.3
Sex Innocent 1.0
Violence Fierce 2.0
Rudeness Polite 1.0
Reality - Fantasy 5.0
Do you know anyone who can control the elements? Didn’t think so.