Shyamalan's Last Airbender: The good, the bad, and the ugly

So I went to see Shyamalan's Last Airbender in the theatres, and this was my reaction:

Now, for starters, because I heard that the movie was going to be directed by Shyamalan, I didn't have high expectations in the first place.

So I decided to go in and just try to enjoy the movie without trying to compare it to the show and lamenting about the exclusion of this and that, but it was so bad that I couldn't just get into enjoying it.

The Good:

- They did a good job animating Appa and Momo. They looked pretty much how I expected the animals to look in live action.

- They did a fairly good job with the costumes. Of course, Katara and "Soh"-ka were technically dead since their robes were wrapped the wrong way (anyone who's familiar with Japanese kimono should be able to get the joke.), but I spent much of the movie enjoying the costumes.

- They also did a good job with the sets. The Fire Nation ships looked great and the city of the North Water tribe was amazing. The inner sacred pool in the same city was also beautiful.

- The bending special effects were amazing. I loved the water effects, and I have to admit, the fire burning off of General Zhao's hand looked pretty cool.

- I also enjoyed the live action interpretation of the opening bending sequence.

- The best acting was done by "Ee"-roh, even though "Ee"-roh had a completely different personality from the actual Uncle Iroh, besides the five-second clip of him drinking tea. I'll not blame the change in personality on the actor, but on the director and the writer. It's obvious that Shawn Toub did the best he could with the resources he was given.

The Bad:

- Most of the camera work in this movie was unimaginative, especially in the Earth Nation village where all the camera did was stand back and swivel back and forth. The pan down the bridge in the North Water city was acceptable, though.

- Occasionally, the bending motions came across as kind of cheesy and poorly done. This could be the fault of multiple causes, such as poor acting on the actor's part, Shyamalan trying too hard to impress (when it comes to the motions for bending, I believe less is more and Shyamalan tried to do too much in places), or the unexpressive camera work. (While watching the fire benders do synchronized bending in an episode of Book 1 I watched later the same day, I noticed how uncheesy it looked because the camera did interesting things like switch to the benders' feet.) However, the synchronized bending done by "Oong" and Movie!Katara was acceptable, even if it was poorly synchronized and the motions between the two benders differed too greatly.

- As I've been poking fun at throughout this entire review, many of the names were pronounced wrong. I can't figure out how that could happen since Avatar is an American cartoon so the team did not have an excuse to pronounce the names wrong.

UPDATE: I just heard that the reason why Shyamalan used these pronunciations was because he wanted to use the actual pronunciations of the names as they would be in the regions that the nations of Avatar are based on. I still hold on the use of the original pronunciations used in the show, which I believe can be justified by the Avatar world having a dialect that is different from our own.

- I didn't quite like the change in Zuko's hairstyle or in the design of the airbender tattoos, but they didn't bother me particularly.

- While it didn't bother me all that much either, "Oong"'s Avatar state was kind of creepy and made me think of blind possessed choir boys.

- I noticed that the entire part of the plot where Aang hears about the comet has gone missing, which takes away his main motivation to get to the North Pole as quickly as he can. Are they saving this for later movies?

The Ugly:

- Oh, god, the total LACK in character development and characterization. Where is Aang's playful and childish nature? Where is Katara's idealism and passion? Where is Sokka's sarcasm and closed-mindedness? Where is Zuko's pride and sustained fury? GONE. All of it gone. Even the subplots that could have given the cast a little personality were gone. I mean, even the first ten minutes of the film, in contrast to the first five minutes of the first episode, put no effort into expressing Katara's and Sokka's personalities, or the relationship the two share. I mean, I even would have been happy to see Sokka being sexist, but even that was gone. I mean, even the Lady in the Water cast had more personality than this.

- When I came in to see the movie, I was looking forward most to see how well Dev Patel could pull off Zuko. See, since I was impressed with his acting in Slum Dog Millionaire, and I had started to get past the Aang Ain't White thing, I believed Dev could do it. Unfortunately, Shyamalan, like other bad directors have a nasty habit of doing, had crushed the good acting out of Dev and and his portrayal of Zuko turned out almost as bland as anyone else in the cast. There was a glory moment where Dev truly played Zuko properly (in the company of the Fire Nation, to what I think was Zhao's ear), but it did not reappear.

- The acting of Movie!Katara, "Soh"-ka and "Oong" was very bland and did very little to bring out what personality the characters had left.

- The story presentation was flat and very lacking in pacing and suspense. If I had not watched Avatar, I would not have been able to understand the plot as it was presented, or the story concepts since they were very rushed in their explanation. The characters seemed to rush into moving the plot with no explanation or motivation, like they were controlled by some outer authorial force. It was this, the bad acting, and the total lack of characterization that prevented me from being able to enjoy the movie.

~*~

So it was a horrible movie, and I have the feeling that Shyamalan and the writers did not actually watch the show but skimmed over a few scripts, but to quote Sokka: "But the effects were decent."

Not that I think that translating Avatar into a live action film series is impossible. I think it could be done, it's just that Shyamalan did it totally wrong. Next time, Shyamalan, let me handle things like this.