cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
My Thoughts: The Last Airbender · 1:32am Dec 22nd, 2015
Wow, what a pretty mess.
More behind the cut, but that honestly sums it up mostly.
And... That's really all you can say about it. A pretty mess. It's the whole first season of a show boiled down into story concentrate. A fraction of the running time, by a director with a flare for visuals but that clearly doesn't get the source material at all.
I know that The Nostalgia Critic already commented on this, but I think the worst miss-step was the bending itself. ('Chi' style magic mixed with martial arts based around the four Elements for those that haven't seen the movie or show.)
Imagine if they made a MLP: FiM movie, and every single time a unicorn as much as levitated a pen they needed to do this elaborate Latin chant in a circle of runes, with the actually elaborate stuff taking literal minutes of screen-time. The pegasi needed long, ritualistic cleansing for moving as much as a single clouds while counting their prayer beads. And the earth ponies needing to eat a certain amount of dirt per day, or they lose their gifts from Mother Gaia.
Technically none of that is outright wrong for a magic system, but it sure isn't how FiM does it.
And the bending in TLA is the same sort of deal. The tiniest effort by anybody that isn't the Avatar (chosen one that can learn all four elements) takes freaking forever, and usually produce frankly embarrassingly piddling results.
Again, to use FiM as the example, imagine if the 'movie' version of Rarity could only levitate a single needle & thread with great effort while still being presented as a telekinesis wis, and was in turn in utter awe of her alicorn friend Twilight that can lift a whole pony.
[Insert gif of Twilight levitating that ursa and water tower while still mortal here.]
Again, the director clearly didn't get the source material aside from an admittedly impressive recreation of the original show's visuals and scope.
And its a damn shame too, because the props, the effects and the locations all look downright spectacular, but there's so little care in getting the actual themes and tone right that the world just feels pointless and hollow.
Strange thing is? I actually still recommend this movie. Its such a big-budget mess that gets such big, basic things utterly wrong while nailing so much pointless detail that it was honestly fascinating to watch.
For admittedly all the wrong reasons, but still fascinating to see.
Oh, unless you're a bigger fan of the show then I am, I guess. In that case it's quite plausible this movie will make you bite your TV in half by pure fan-boy rage alone.
Still, I think there's a lot to learn from this movie in how even minute differences in a magic system can make something go from epic and interesting, to dull and boring, and that's a lesson every creator should try to take to heart.
Edit: Now with 110% more spelling.
If anybody is curius about who this 'Nastolgia Critic' I mentioned is.
Yeah, I liked it... kinda.
I mean, it was what actually sparked my interest in the animated series. When it came out my friends dragged me to see it, and they absolutely hated it for being a watered down entire season. And to their assurances that there was so much more that the movie just skipped over, I watched the first series, and I loved it. So ultimately it felt to me like it was more of an introduction to the show for an audience that normally would have overlooked it. (An animated cartoon? Why would I be interested in something like that?) Rather than being made for the existing fan base.
Gah! There are so many basic spelling errors in this review I want to GAH!
But yeah. That movie was like watching a train wreck in motion.
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In my defence, I'm currently not on my regular computer, and the one I'm using doesn't have a spell-checker installed.
Thought I did decently myself without that, but fair enough. I'll make sure to fix the blog as soon as possible.
Thanks for pointing it out.