The Last Airbender Review

I've heard many people vehemently speak bad on this movie. And for all the I hated this movie posts and tweets I've seen I only found one actually reason...it's more of a review that you can find here. So I decided that even after all the negative reviews, I as an Avatar fan will venture to see this movie.

More after the jump

Let's get to what I enjoyed about the movie.

The visuals were very well done. The sets were quite accurate, especially the Northern Water tribe kingdom. The part where they entered the city and the camera panned to show the exterior of the kingdom took me back to the cartoon. Kudos to the art director and set designers.

The CGI effects were good the water bending in particular really impressed me. One scene in particular involved a huge wall of water being bended had me in awe.

The story line stayed true to the source material. Any one that watched the cartoon would instantly remember the most important scenes and those scenes happened quite often. The director did use some creative license with certain scenes and the flow of the movie, but he kept true to the material and gave you exactly what you needed to keep up.

The music score was breathtaking and complimented the visuals nicely. The audio and visuals really capture your attention and give you a nice experience. The action was good, with fight scenes that were stylized and incredibly fluid. The fight scenes had an old martial arts film appeal that I enjoyed.

The actors that played the individual characters for the most part captured the personality of their cartoon equivalents. I especially enjoyed the way Sokka and Katara interacted. They had the brother sister relationship down to a "T". There were even a couple of moments in the movie that mirrored the cartoon which I thought was a very good touch on the director's part.

With all the good this movie brought, it also brought some things that I found to do the movie an injustice.

The first thing is The name of the lead character. If you have seen the cartoon you know the name of the lead character and to have his name changed like that to me was an insult. Every other character's name stayed intact but his. They completely butchered his name and it made it difficult to grasp even by the end of the movie. I recently saw a review where the reviewer also noticed that some other names were not accurate to the source material.

There was no real character development other than the realization in the lead character that yes he is indeed the Avatar. The actors indeed had the personalities of their characters but from the beginning of the movie they had the mindset of that character from the end of the movie.

The fact that they wanted to fit a 20 episode first season into an hour and a half movie brought with it a very rapid pace to the story. This coupled with some bad editing during the first 30 mins left a bad taste in my mouth.

All and all I enjoyed the movie. I have seen, read and watched many of the bad reviews people had with this movie. Some of what they say are true. The acting was less than stellar, the pace was IMO too quick even though by the end it had slowed down. Of course by then the movie was over. But most of what I have gathered from the reviews is that M. Night didn't stay faithful to the source material. I disagree with this and I'll tell you why. He stayed faithful to the story. Anyone who has watched Book 1 will see this. He did however take liberties with some aspects of the movie. He made the movie his own work. When you paid to see this movie, you were not paying to see Nick's Avatar: The Last Airbender, if that's what you were expecting you could have watched the cartoon for free. What you paid to see was how M. Night saw Avatar, his vision of the four kingdoms. Being an artist I borrow from other artists all the time, but when you see my work you don't say "Oh he got this from this artist or that artist." No see my work, you see how that artist or artists inspired me. You see their work reflected in mine. I understand that their will be comparisons. I myself gave you some in my review, but when everything is said and done, I looked at this movie from a place of not wanting it to be like the source material but to see how the source inspired M. Night to create his movie and I think he did a pretty good job not great but not bad.