Le dernier maître de l'air

I have been a fan of the series for a long time and ever since I heard that there was going to be a live action version, I was looking forward to it. I live in Europe so I had to wait till last weekend to see it. I did read all the bad reviews on IMDb, but I thought it's probably just people dissing the movie because they are upset over the casting. But oh my god was I wrong! This movie is the an absolute disgrace to the series. Really, it's a disgrace to professional film making! And it's not even the acting or the casting that are bad. It's the writing and directing all the way. Yes, the acting was bad, too, but I don't think it's really any of the actors fault. Every single actor had at least one moment that showed that they had great potential that the director failed to bring out - even Noah Ringer really sounded like Aang sometimes. They just needed someone directing them... About the screenplay: I don't know what Mr. Shyamalan thought while writing that screenplay. It was like watching random scenes from the first season of the cartoon with no connection and no seg way. The little dialog the movie did have was stiff and unnatural. There was no character development. A story like this needs to be told in an epic way, not in what seems like a theater student mash up! Where did all the budget go? Another thing that was wrong with the movie: The music! The music was horrible, a mere shadow of what we heard in the cartoon. How can the same person who composed the music for The Dark Knight do such a horrible job on another movie. There was no recognizable theme at all! Why does Shyamalan hire his friend who clearly didn't care for the movie or try hard, when he could have just hired the cartoons composer. The music from the cartoon was perfect and more than worthy of a big Hollywood production. There is much more I could say about this movie but I think it amounts all to the same thing: M. Night Shyamalan ruined this movie, and that saddens me greatly. I wish he had cared, but the end product proves he didn't.

I watched this reluctantly for the first time recently to see if it was bad as I had heard and I was wrong, it was even worse than I could have imagined. I was unable to even finish the movie. I wish I could rate it lower. I understand that adaptations are difficult to reflect in the same light as the original content but the direction style, casting, writing, acting, and animation of this movie was lazy, disrespectful, and devalued the core ideals of the series. The movie proves painful to watch. I grew up watching the series and still now as an adult I am still constantly in awe of how wonderful of a show it is. So I wholeheartedly recommend to forget you even laid eyes on this movie and go watch the series in all it's glory.

After waiting extremely eagerly for this movie, I sat in the theater and was extremely eager for it to END. Ear-oh? Oong? Soak-ah?! Could they have butchered the names anymore than they did? Worse, the entire movie felt like a string of clips put together for an hour and a half and not like a movie at all. All the major parts of the Book of Water were skimmed over, while things like the freeing of the earth nation village (while important) were given screen time that could have been given to major events like the southern air temple.

The actors were dismal, with the exception of Dev Patel as Zuko and to a lesser extent Shaun Toub as Iroh, who wasn't an accurate portrayal of Iroh visually but at least captured the character's wisdom much better than many of the other actors on board for the movie. He however failed to provide many of the aspects of Iroh that made him endearing in the series.

I will give that the northern water kingdom was gorgeous, but that's about all I have to say kindly about this movie.

If you love Avatar: The Last Airbender as the series, I recommend giving this movie a miss. It's heartbreaking how they butchered something that had such fantastic and barely needing change source material.

The Last Airbender (2010)

1/2 (out of 4)

After being freed from an iceberg, Aang (Noah Ringer), a long lost Avatar who is the only one able to bend the four elements, finds himself doing battle against the Fire Nation who who attempting to take over all three Nations (Air, Water, Earth). M. Night Shyamalan's THE LAST AIRBENDER is based on the very popular television show, which is something I've never seen so I pretty much walked into this not knowing what to expect from the story. I'll admit by the ten-minute mark I was pretty much lost in regards to the story and each passing minute I found myself growing even more confused. I then had to do something I never do, which was stop the movie and call someone familiar with the TV series and this film to try and find out what the heck was supposed to be going on. I painfully sat through the rest of the movie and afterwards I started to read other reviews and I was happy to see that I wasn't the only one who couldn't make any sense out of this material. I will say that I think Shyamalan has gotten some pretty bad beatings over his recent films, which I think were unfair but there's no doubt that he deserves the majority of the blame here, although I think a very strong argument could be made that those who hired him should be on fans hit list more than Shyamalan. The biggest fault of his was the screenplay, which simply doesn't make any sense as the story is always jumping from one place to another and none it ever seems connected. From what I've gathered he was jumping around so many parts of the show that unless you're familiar with it you weren't going to know what's going on here. Even worse are the actors who are all extremely bad and come off even worse when they have to say the bad dialogue. I don't like to attack child actors so I won't mention any of them by name but what were the producers thinking when they agreed to cast them? Surely there were more talented people out in Hollywood. The special effects are all poor, the action badly directed and even worse is that there's simply nothing here to care about. Some nice cinematography is about the only thing going for this turkey, which is every bit the misfire its reputation would have you believe.

No story, no history, absolutely dreadful script and acting that is frankly despicable. You can't write. You can't make up a world arbitrarily with no fleshing or effort. The Happening and Lady in the Water were terrible. This is much worse.

Shame on you you lazy lazy man. The talent is there. Your ego is simply unable to get past it. Go away and let someone hungry and brave who doesn't live in a fantasy world in their own nether-regions produce something.

You owe me my ticket and the complete waste of one and a half hours of my life. Tosser