Re: Avatar: The Last Airbender Movie
Just came back from the midnight showing. And as soon as the end credits started rolling a man 4 rows in front of me let out a very loud, very long "BOOOOO!!!"
No one in the theater disagreed with him on that sentiment.
The movie is terribly rushed, trying to fit in a whole season's worth of plot points into under 2 hours was a HUGE mistake. The plot chugs along at a ridiculous breakneck pace allowing almost nothing in the way of characterization or character development. Katara, for instance, is barely explored at all in the whole film and is little more than a set-piece for the majority of the show. There are NO scenes showing Aang developing his friendships with Katara and Sokka that is so monumentally important to the plot of the series. They're just kind of with him throughout the movie and we're meant to understand that they're friends from their proximity to him. The acting is, for the most part, subpar, but I don't really blame the actors themselves because the dialogue they had to work with was so awful. Damn near every piece of dialogue in the whole movie is lifeless exposition ramming home each new plot point before quickly jumping to the next scene of the same. I will say that Shaun Toub and Aasif Mandvi acquitted themselves nicely as Iroh and Zhou respectively and made their scenes fairly bearable despite these handicaps. I'm not even going to get into the questionable pronunciations used throughout the movie because, in all honesty, it didn't bother me anywhere near as much as the misses in the plot, pacing, and dialogue.
I'm a huge fan of the cartoon and all this movie had to do to win me over was NOT be the worst thing I've seen this year. That said, if you're going to see one movie this weekend it should probably be Twilight.
I'm dead ****ing serious.
1/5
