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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Last Airbender

Dev Patel as Zuko

Image via Wikipedia

I have much to say.

I liked the movie. I didn’t love it, but I liked it. I’m really happy that the kid who played Zuko in the series got his part in the movie. The rest of the actors: meh. I like seeing Jackson Rathbone in more movies, since he was horrible in Eclipse and I really want to like him. In this, he was good. Again, not great, but good.

If you’ve seen the show, don’t bother watching the movie. Nothing new. It was fun to see a live-action film of the great story, but I expect a lot more when I see “written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.”

The fights were well-choreographed, the bending was well-done, and the movie kept pretty well to the plot of the show. But there was very little character development. Bottom line: the plot was too much story for a two-hour movie. I feel like this was a six-hour epic that got hacked down to two hours. I hope that’s the case, because then when the DVD comes out, there will be a director’s cut with all the character development and Apa’s and Momo’s names back in.

As it stands, this was a movie about Zuko that focused a bit on Aang. What little character development there was focused on the prince, but the Avatar had more screen time (I think).

It was cool in 3D, and it added a bit of fun to the film without any of the gliche gimmicks.

I’d say see it, especially if you’re a fan of the series, but it felt a bit like watching the third Harry Potter movie. There was nothing new, and all the good stuff was pulled out to make it fit into two hours.

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2 comments:

  1. Agreed.
    They HAVE to do at least one (probably 2) sequels to finish the story line. It was definitely like watching the cartoon in live action; as you say "nothing new".

    It was SLIGHTLY annoying that they pronounced Aang differently than the series. The series pronounces it as a long "a" while the movie made it rhyme with "pong".

    As for the concept of the story line in general... The mythology is pretty cool, four elements, four nations, four types of magic ("bending"). Bending looks like doing chi, and in fact is referenced a few times in the series. Very clever and a lot of room for future story lines, but will they?

    ALSO, lots of room for games, but so far I have only seen the Wii game which is a standard console game "run around, kill things". An MMO would be pretty SCHWEET.

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  2. It irks me that they pronounce things differently also, but I prefer the movie pronunciations, because Iro is pronounced "ear-o" not "eye-ro".

    I think what happened is when they recorded the show, they handed the script to a bunch of twelve-year-olds and said "read this." Nobody bothered to say "no no. It's pronounced "ong." See how their's two A's?"

    I agree it would be fun to see some games, but they would all be kid-centric and inevitably such.

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