The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender
Rated: PG
Grade: C

So I placed a lot of hope on this movie. It wasn’t horrible… and those two statements that close together kind of indicate how I feel about the movie.

So here is where I’m going to make excuses for the movie.

The first movie in a trilogy has a lot of responsibility. It has to introduce all the characters. It has to explain what they can do and why. It has to introduce the world that the movie takes place in. It has to have an arc so that the movie stays interesting… really most movies have to have 3 arcs. Point is it has to do all those things while staying a movie. It’s a tall order. X-men and Superman Returns sucked at this. Spiderman, Batman Begins, and Iron man did a great job of this. This movie did this worse than any movie I have ever sat thru. The Last Airbender randomly used narration to move the story along, badly. It broke the flow of the movie… course there wasn’t really a flow at all. You learn they can bend things, cause you hear it. You learn Ang is the Avatar cause of a narrator. You learn people are in love… sorry cartoon movie, in like, thru narration. You even learn about the rebellion that is central to the entire movie (and trilogy), not by seeing, but hearing about it. The Last Airbender Failed.

Making a movie from a cartoon is rough. So many movies have failed doing this. I saw Speed Racer and really enjoyed it. I saw it in an IMAX and I was by myself in the theater. I even went out and asked for them to turn it up. The volume got turned way up.. that movie they didn’t take themselves seriously at all. It was a live animated cartoon. FLASHY lights, colors, loud music and a clear-cut good and bad!
So again… I saw that movie and no one else was there.
This is a picture of my wife at the theater today:


So it was empty…
It was normal volume and a theater that didn’t have reclining chairs… so not exactly the same awesomeness…
In a cartoon where people can control fire and there is a bison that has 6 legs and it can float/fly, it does pretty well. At times it takes itself way too seriously. Other times it handles itself perfectly. It doesn’t fail, but it isn’t fantastic.

So that brings us to the graphics. I saw this in 3D. It was good. I mean it was obvious they didn’t film it in 3D and it was all done in post, but it was done well in post. The fire looks cool and the battle scenes at the end made me giddy. It’s hard to make a bison that flies but yep, it didn’t look real, cause it isn’t real. It was good though.

The acting was horrible at the beginning and better at the end.
The pacing was horrible at the beginning and better at the end.
That’s kind of the theme of this movie.
The first hour and fifteen minutes are pretty bad.
The last thirty minutes were pretty awesome.

Giggles and glee and what not… they stop talking about what the story is about and they show it. It’s pretty cool.
So it gets a C from me.