The Last Airbender

I admit that I am a huge fan of Nickelodean's Avatar: The Last Airbender series. It has all the appropriate elements (no pun intended) to hold my interests--a likeable hero, a heroine who is a bit too connected to her emotions, decent martial arts action, and magic. The DVDs got me through finals week my last semester of college, and it is one of the few shows that Brian and I can agree to watch (and in fact we often were put out that the other had skipped ahead in the series).



Needless to say, I was a little more than excited when I found out that they were taking it to the big screen. Brian was even more excited than I was, I think, and so it seemed the obvious choice for our impromptu movie date on Saturday.

SPOILER ALERT - If you still plan to see this movie, don't read any further...

Brian and I were a few minutes late coming into the movie (three minutes maybe?) and in that span of time Sokka and Katara had found Aang, broken him out of the ice, and watched him get captured by Zuko. As we found our seats, Sokka and Katara had a heart to heart with their grandmother who encouraged them to accompany the Avatar to aid him in his destiny because it is their own destiny.

The first thing that struck us both was the very, very poorly written script. Even if the actors' delivery had been brilliant (and none of them delivered brilliantly, with one outstanding exception) the movie didn't stand a waterbender's chance in the Fire Nation because of the choppy, dumbed down script with its painful dialogue and narration.

The most painful part of the movie was (for me, at least) watching Jackson Rathbone of the Twilight franchise try to throw enough emotion at the script to make it work.

He really is adorable without all the vampire makeup and stupid Hollywood hairstyles, but you'd never know it from watching this movie (or the Twilight films, for that matter). I would dearly love to see him cast in a role where he could shine.

See? Isn't he cute? He was even on Stephenie Meyer's short list for actors to play Edward prior to the actual casting for the Twilight film. He can sing too, if tween girl fans are any indication of talent.

The only actor who seems immune to the horrible script is Shaun Toub who plays Uncle Iroh. I'm not sure how he did it, but when I walked out of the theater all I could think was "how on earth did they build such a terrible film around such a talented actor?"--kudos to him for managing to magically make the script work.

On a happier note, I was rather pleased that Appa wasn't left out of the storyline; however, I was rather amused to see that--rather than create a new creature using all that fancy CGI that was supposed to be the movie's big draw--the creature from The NeverEnding Story got dusted off and repurposed. Bravo.

Brian and I had a lovely time poking fun at the movie and discussing Paramount's possibly racist casting tendencies (see the following article for an interesting take on that: http://splinterend.tumblr.com/post/749364670/facepainting), but unless you're into that sort of cinematic experience I'd watch something else--anything else.