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The Last Airbender

Walking home today with Jen after seeing The Last Airbender at the cinema this afternoon, I realised two things; my girlfriend is hilarious when she’s a little bit angry and annoyed and M.Night Shyamalan’s career as a filmmaker is absolutely, positively and definitely over.

My knowledge of Shyamalan is based on three movies; The Sixth Sense, The Village and The Happening and let’s be honest, the only thing that makes the first two movies in this list bearable is the casting of Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense and the twist at the end of The Village. I’d point out that Zooey Deschanel’s presence in The Happening is a plus point, and don’t get me wrong I think Zooey Deschanel is brilliant, but not even she can save that movie. So going into the cinema this afternoon it’s safe to say I was relatively unaware of how much this movie would suck balls. Sorry, there’s not really any other way to say it.

When myself and Jen go to the cinema it’s for one of two reasons, to go and see a film we’ve both been looking forward to or to go and see a movie just because we can. It’s not very often we go to see a film knowing that what we’re about to pay for is going to be a waste of money. The ‘legend’ of The Last Airbender’s suckiness (I don’t care if it’s not a word) started when Andrew posted on his Tumblr blog how awful it was. Shortly afterwards we looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes, a movie rating aggregator site, to figure out whether Andrew’s opinion was unanimously recognised. Needless to say it was. Rotten Tomatoes currently has the movie standing at a 7% ‘rotten’ rating from the top critics the site recognises.

Rotten tomatoes is an odd website, sometimes it’s the most informational site and provides excellent reviews and others it’s just totally wrong. This isn’t really something to be surprised at, a review by nature is subjective and what one person thinks is good, another might think is terrible and the proof for us was in movies such as Wild Target and Robin Hood. In our opinion Rotten Tomatoes got these two movies completely wrong, Wild Target got 11% and we thought it was a sweet, funny and well acted comedy with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Robin Hood got 43% and needless to say for anyone who follows Jen on Twitter, we found it the most boring and horrid film we’ve been to see this year. Yet. The point of this long-winded explanation is just to point out that Rotten Tomatoes isn’t to be relied upon to decide the films you go to see at the movies, not usually anyway. This time, a movie with reviews such as;

“After the first five seconds, it seems as if you have been watching it for around two-and-a-half hours, and that this time has passed in four-and-a-half days.” – Guardian UK (Peter Bradshaw)

“The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.” – New York Times (A.O. Scott)

…The Last Airbender was not to be missed. If someone tells you a movie is horrible, you kind of have to see it anyway to see for yourself. I suspect that the majority of the small profit this movie has made is down to this. More on the budget later, it’ll blow your mind! (It won’t, it just sounds a bit dramatic don’t you think?)

Anyway, let’s make our way back to the original point of this blog post shall we? The Last Airbender is a live-action adaptation of what I’m told was a popular children’s cartoon in the early 2000’s. Avatar: The Last Airbender was a three season show airing on Nickelodeon starting in 2005 and the basic premise is this, people are able to ‘bend’ the four fundamental elements of the world. Herein lies the first problem I have with this movie; a person who is able to manipulate one of these elements is titled…you guessed it….a bender. Now I consider myself to be a relatively mature person, although I’ll admit sometimes I can laugh at the most childish of things, but I could not get past what seemed to me to be a massive cock-up in scriptwriting. I gather from Jencyclopedia (the name given to the wonderful knowledge my dearest Jen possesses) that the term ‘bender’ only has negative connotations relating to homosexual men  in the UK and Western Europe and that in the US and the rest of the world, the term has never been used in this way. I understand why it’s been left in the script, it’s too integral to the storyline to replace the word and anyway it’s not offending anyone, but if it makes me spit out my drink in the movie theatre then I’m sure other people are going to have the same reaction. I’m not suggesting that this is in anyway a review of the movie, it’s just something I wanted to point out before I started. Take it, if you will, as a sign of things to come.

Bending is a rare skill. Air benders are extinct (just ignore the title of the movie for a second), earth benders have been prohibited from using their skill by the fire benders and the water benders seem to all reside in the north pole for some reason. Legend states that only one person can master all the elements, only one person can be a universal ‘bender’ (see, it’s still funny!) and only one person can unite the ever unrestful nations of the world, The Avatar. Aang (The Avatar) is the last airbender, he’s been hidden in some kind of air bubble under ice for a hundred years after running away from his airbending ‘crew’ for being told his status of ‘Avatar’ would prevent him from having a family. I’m not certain how old Aang is supposed to be in this movie but my guess is around 13 and I know for one that at that age, I was not worried about the potential of starting a family. So, despite that particular plot-hole we cut to Jasper (I don’t know the guy’s name, he’s just referred to as Jasper because that’s who he plays in Twilight) and his sister (who is absolutely the worst actor in the whole movie) who happens to be a water bender who are hunting on an ice lake. They come across a light in the ice, crack it open and are somehow not aware that cracking ice is a dangerous move when all around you is ice. The bubble in which Aang was trapped is released and the Avatar is rediscovered after 100 years.

Now, you have the basic story. It’s truthful to say at this point that you can probably guess the rest of the storyline just from reading the above. The fire benders are the bad guys, for some reason (one that’s not explained in the slightest), they want to wipe out everyone and everything on the planet except them. Meh, since when did democracy work anyway? The fire benders armed with their black, steam powered boats, their fire cannons and their drill-hats pursue the Avatar along with Dev Patel’s character who wants to capture him to regain confidence from his father, some kind of ruler of the fire benders. As it turns out, The Avatar who is supposed to be able to control all elements can only control air because he ran away before he was taught to control the rest. Is there another plot-hole here? If the Avatar can be taught the other elements why can’t everyone else?

You get the idea, I’m not going to describe the whole movie to you. It would be pointless, boring for you to read and should you actually want to go and see this movie, might contain spoilers of some sort. I am however going to say a bit about the quality of the movie in terms of script, visual effects, score and acting. In my opinion pretty much all of the categories should score a fail. The script contains potentially the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a movie. Jen hit the nail directly on the head when she pointed out that any Mary-Kate and Ashley movie from the 90s and 00s had better dialogue than The Last Airbender. It’s laughable, it really is. I know this movie is a kid’s movie, I know it’s not meant to be sophisticated or have a huge vocabulary but it really was like watching a CBBC show that just happened to be on for nearly two hours. The acting is unbelievably wooden but I’m not going to say that all the people cast in this movie are bad at their job, I just think the script is so bad they can’t act to their full potential. Dev Patel is overrated in my opinion, yeah he was funny in Skins and he was alright in Slumdog but nowhere near as good as the ‘Oscar crowd’ suggest. In this movie he’s terrible, he shouts because he’s told to act angry but instead he looks like he hasn’t been to the toilet in four days and is dying to let one loose.

We figured that if anything was to save this movie from being ridiculously bad, it was going to be the visual effects. We were wrong, very wrong. The 3D conversion is so bad I’m almost convinced that the studios went ‘…we need to make more money from this, guys! Make it blurry so we can charge people to wear glasses and say it’s in 3d’. It really is that bad. The 3D is virtually non-existent except in the scenes where the water-bending is taking place and even that isn’t anywhere near as impressive as it could have been. The 3D trailers for Despicable Me and Megamind before the movie showed what can actually be achieved with 3D and The Last Airbender didn’t hit anywhere near the mark it should have. Granted that this isn’t animated but Streetdance 3D (which we went to see on a boring afternoon) isn’t and the 3D in that is 10 times more impressive. Another problem I have with the graphical display is considering the budget of $150m this movie had, I should have been able to see every detail of the magical kingdoms but instead it seems as if Shyamalan told his cameramen to zoom in to the actors as close as possible throughout the entire movie so that he didn’t have to pay the visual FX guys too much to fill in the background with loads of CG. The penultimate scene shows Aang finally mastering water bending and creating a huge wall of water from the sea which should have been amazing to watch. The score was brilliant at this moment, but the scene was so dark you could hardly distinguish the sea from the sky. Again it seems like the director told the animators to darken things down so they wouldn’t have to spend too much time on the detail of the waves, sea and sky. Obviously I have no idea if this is true.

I could go on, I could carry on and say more bad things about this movie but it can pretty much be summed up with this, it was boring. After twenty minutes I started to wish the movie was over but it dragged on and on. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t entertaining, it even got past the point of being laughable at the end because it was just, plain boring.

One thing has been bugging me whilst I’ve been writing this ‘review’. I don’t like movie critics, I generally don’t like how they have a pompous attitude of ‘I don’t like it, so you won’t either’ or how they seem to be regarded by the press and movie industry as Gods of some variety. Mark Kermode, who I detest with a passion, is a brilliant example of this. Am I being hypocritical by writing a review and telling you how bad this movie is? I don’t think I am, for one reason; you should go and see this film for yourself. Like I discussed earlier, one of my favourite films from the past year has been one that got low reviews from critics so who am I to say this movie is terrible? I’m no-one, just a humble movie-goer who wanted to discuss his opinions with anyone who feels like reading them.

To address a point of an internet friend of mine, some people may love this movie because they grew up with the cartoon and seeing a favourite character of yours come to life in live action may be magical or brilliant for you to watch. As I’ve admitted I’d never heard of Avatar: The Last Airbender for this movie so I can’t be a judge of that.

I said earlier that I’d mention something regarding the budget of this movie which would ‘blow your minds’ and I think it’s a fitting way to end this rambling review of mine. The budget for this movie was $150m, the budget for Inception was $160m. Inception, the best film of the entire year (if not my favourite movie ever) in my opinion was made on a budget of only $10m more than The Last Airbender and the contrast in quality is amazing, and that’s a ridiculous understatement. In future, I suggest this to any movie studios who want to throw some money at a film-maker. Give it to Chris Nolan, he’ll make you a film worth watching.

Hard Candy

If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen some of my tweets relating to a movie I have rented called Hard Candy. Starring Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson, I loved this movie so much I felt I had to write about it. You can sum this blog post up in just a few words,

“YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE!”

Seriously, I’m not just typing this, I want everyone and anyone who reads this post to go out and buy, rent, steal or use some other means to get your hands on a copy of this movie. 

I really want to write a lot about how this movie made me feel, but just in case you do go out and buy it, I’ll try and avoid spoilers. 

The basic premise of the movie is that Hayley (Ellen Page) meets up with a guy she has been chatting with on the internet called Jeff (Patrick Wilson). At first, you get the impression that they are both consensual in their meeting and with their ‘attraction’ towards each other. Let me say at this point that Hayley is 14 years old, whilst Jeff is much older. Now considering the plot revolves around issues of pedophilia, I found myself at some points of the movie, being annoyed with myself at how I felt about the characters. A review I read said that I would be ‘pissed-off with myself” for feeling the way I do during the movie and I can honestly say I do. 
Jeff gets the tables turned on him in the movie, with Hayley getting her ‘own-back’ as it was. If your male and watching this film, be prepared for about 40 minutes worth of grimacing and squinting at the screen as it contains the most gruesome ‘castration’ torture scene ever.

 This movie is so subtle and yet so powerful, it’s left me thinking about it an hour after I’ve finished watching it. I’m not the best at writing movie reviews, so I’ll leave the final remark to the Director of the movie;

Roughly 50% of our audience love this film, around 25% come out of the theatre wondering what they thought and the other 25% hate us for making it.

You MUST watch this movie. You MUST!

Andrew.