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So I tried to watch "The Last Airbender" last night...

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Yep. The movie is a damn shame. TLA deserves a good live action trilogy (at least) and this movie ruined the best chance of that happening in it's prime. Maybe in another 10 years or so.
 

Zoe

Member
So bad. Did they even watch the series?

When I watched the cartoon, I thought it was odd that they didn't pronounce it that way /shrug

Guess he thought he was "fixing" it, just like how he thought it was appropriate to make the Wind people mixed races because they were nomads.
 

Magwik

Banned
But is it better or worse than Dragon Ball Evolution? Is it even possible to compare these films to each other without descending into chaos?
 
My favorite part is how firebenders need fire to bend, but like people didn't bother immediately to put out the fire. That should be strategy #1.

But is it better or worse than Dragon Ball Evolution? Is it even possible to compare these films to each other without descending into chaos?

probably better than Dragon Ball Evolution in the sense that it at least attempted, in a really shitty manner, to adapt the material with some changes to details. While DBE just heard "Dragon ball" and someone else said "did you say high school?"
 
But is it better or worse than Dragon Ball Evolution? Is it even possible to compare these films to each other without descending into chaos?
It's better but that's not a high bar. TLA at least looks like the cartoon come to life
minus the races of most of the characters
, and is really just a bad retelling of the cartoon. DBE barely tries to resemble anything of its source material.
 

Cheerilee

Member
When I watched the cartoon, I thought it was odd that they didn't pronounce it that way /shrug

Guess he thought he was "fixing" it, just like how he thought it was appropriate to make the Wind people mixed races because they were nomads.

I don't think he deliberately tried to "fix" the races. He understood that the Water Tribe was Native American (although his daughter thought Katara was the brown kind of Indian, like her), the Fire Nation was Japanese, and the Earth Kingdom was Chinese.

But then he went to the casting agency that delivered Haley Joel Osment to him and asked for some multi-ethnic kids, and they gave him a bunch of white kids (he didn't know that there are specialist agencies you need to go to for ethnics).

He cast a minor white celebrity as Zuko (because he thought Zuko was an important role), and came up with the "mixed" excuse for Aang. Then he cast his second-choice Katara and Sokka as Chinese, because he knew he couldn't fit that many white people in his movie, and decided to cross the Earth Kingdom bridge when he got to it.

Then his white Zuko bailed on the production and he found Dev Patel to replace him, and instead of using this as an opportunity to diversify the cast, he thought he could afford to bring his first-choice white Katara and Sokka back into the mix and move the Chinese people over to the Earth Kingdom. The fix for one problem allowed him to solve two more problems.

He didn't realize that in the context of his one and only TLA movie, he had just made all the good guys white and made the "bad guy" his own shade of brown, making himself look like a self-hating racist.


Edit: Those Earth Kingdom guys wearing green and dancing the rock through the air were once meant to be wearing blue and guarding Princess Penis-Head. Neither fate is an upgrade.
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
I think you mean it's a definition of a Deus Ex Machina, MacGuffin is something used to move the plot along.

Aang wasn't ready to fight Ozai and would have lost to him, they had a whole episode about Aang not being ready. The Lionturtle made Aang ready to fight, allowing the plot to move forward. Thus a macguffin in my estimation.
 
Is there an acknowledgment anywhere online from M. Night about how bad this movie was?

It was bad, and I love Signs, Sixth, and Unbreakable.

Dude flamed out harder than anyone I can remember.
 

a.wd

Member
This film was so, so, so bad on so many levels. It ruined m night and Avatar and was so tone deaf racially.

Awful, and such a shame.
 
Aang wasn't ready to fight Ozai and would have lost to him, they had a whole episode about Aang not being ready. The Lionturtle made Aang ready to fight, allowing the plot to move forward. Thus a macguffin in my estimation.

Well, a MacGuffin is vague, but it's generally used to refer to the object that motivates the villains. As in, "the villains are out to get X, so the hero must stop them," and what X is has little impact on the plot. The Lion Turtle isn't really that.
 

cobell

Member
Are you sure you want to know the answer? It makes him come off as... well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYV_w5yZ_M

He blames American critics not getting him and his European sensibilities. Though mind you, I think this was during press tours, so it's not like he could just say he thought they were awful (not that I believe he thinks he made a bad movie).
 

Cheerilee

Member
Is there an acknowledgment anywhere online from M. Night about how bad this movie was?

It was bad, and I love Signs, Sixth, and Unbreakable.

Dude flamed out harder than anyone I can remember.

No. He literally cannot understand what happened to his career. In his eyes, all of his films have been gold, some slightly more or less than others, as he tried to fine tune exactly what it is the audience wants, but nothing that he does computes with with his critical or box office reception.

He can't see any difference between The Sixth Sense and Lady in the Water. His only theory was that people got tired of his Shyamalan Twist, so he took a breather and then made After Earth, a movie where he basically threw out his entire rulebook, and people said it was his worst movie yet.
 
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