Twenty-six views of Mount Fuji

[unixronin]

...No?

Well, OK then, would you settle for two reviews of The Last Airbender?  (Or three, I suppose, this being something of a meta-review.)

First up, Howard Tayler's review at Blógünder Schlock.  Money quote #1 (and his Twitter review):

If you love the Airbender anime, the movie is abominable.  If you don’t care, the movie is merely “very bad.”

Howard suggests that this may be M. Night Shyamalan's last movie.  In an ideal world, he'd probably be right.

I can’t imagine the people who hire directors looking at this film, seeing the byline which states the film was “written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan,” and deciding to ever give him responsibility over the disposition of their particular intellectual property.  Or money.  Or a camera.

But then again, we're talking about Hollywood.

Now that you've seen the god's-eye view from Howard Tayler, next up comes Charlie Jane Anders' view from the trenches. And she is savage.

And The Last Airbender is a lavish parody of big-budget fantasy epics.  It's got everything: the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum.  No expense is spared — Shyamalan even makes sure to make fun of distractingly shitty 3-D, by featuring it in his movie.

From Anders' description, Shyamalan screwed up The Last Airbender as badly as ... whoever, I can't even remember who directed it and don't really care, screwed up I, Robot, which ended up as your basic generic Hollywood interchangeable-hero blow-lots-of-shit-up action flick that had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the Isaac Asimov stories it was ostensibly based on.  Time after time, it aimed itself directly and unmistakably at a scene directly out of one of Asimov's stories, and with unerring accuracy, completely missed the mark every time.  Shyamalan appears to have achieved much the same with Airbender, except for the part about I, Robot being a decent generic mindless action flick if you pretend the title is sheer coincidence.

All the story beats from the show's first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary.  Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean?  We never know, because it's time for more stuff to happen.  You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place.

Plus, even if Dr. Susan Calvin was recast from a brilliant but socially crippled spinsterly-genius roboticist into a generic supporting hottie, at least the human cast of I, Robot had some acting skills and put a little effort into giving a damn.  Airbender?  Sadly, not so much.  But then, perhaps you can forgive them for being disinterested, when half the movie happens in voice-over.

Oh yeah - that's another one of the ways in which this movie pokes fun at the very idea of epic fantasy: the endless confusing voice-over, in which tons of important story developments happen off-camera while we're looking at a picture of a tree or a CG mountain.  Because why do we privilege the story of the hero's progress over the tree?, Shaymalan asks.  Why does the original Star Wars insist on showing us Luke Skywalker training with a lightsaber, instead of telling us that Luke Skywalker trained with a lightsaber while showing us a tracking shot of some rocks?

The casting fail continues, apparently, with the dialogue-crippled Katara being cast as the sole blue-eyed Caucasian mysteriously arising from an entire village of comic-opera Eskimos.  It's not Katara whom I think is miscast here, it's the entire rest of the Water Nation; the Water Nation, in the anime, always came across to me far more as Finns and Lapplanders than as Inuit.  So, from my perspective, Shyamalan actually made one casting decision right (well ... OK, three; there's also, as Anders notes, Zuko and Toub, though I'm not sure Shyamalan's Toub looks jovial enough), but made up for it by completely screwing up casting the entire rest of the Water Nation.

I trust Howard Tayler on this one:  If you love Airbender the anime, skip Airbender the movie.  But you won't ever regret reading all the way to the end of Charlie Jane Anders' review.  It's savage, yes, but it's not just a review of Airbender itself, it's also an analysis of the meta-movie, and a brilliant and incisive dissection of what's wrong with the "creative" process in today's Hollywood.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

they didn't even include all four "books"...

i think i've seen all of book 1 and i can't recall if i saw book 2, but they certainly didn't get beyond that...

so, trying to compress 1-2 SEASONS of anime into a 2 hour movie? oh, jumpy mc jumpy it was.

pretty? sure, it had its moments, but they moved so fast, and skipped so much, that it made IronMan 2 seem like a complete epic ;)

good thing i got my ticket cheap, and had dinner along with it. good burger, the chili was excellent, and i'd definitely eat that again :)

now, at some point, i should definitely see all the airbender "book" seasons back to back to back to back.

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[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We have books 1 and 2, I think. Need to get the other two.
Or maybe we only have book 1 ... I'll check later.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

We've got Book 1. Couldn't find the others when we went looking and had the disposable income.

[guppiecat]

I believe the movie is only Book 1. There are only three books of the cartoon, as each book is the element that Aang must learn that season.

The last disk of Book 1 is when the show really starts to change from a fun little kids show to a fun little kids show with serious character development and major world shit going on. I enjoyed Book 1. I really liked Book 2. I was utterly blown away by Book 3. I think I watched that whole season in a single weekend.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I concur that the anime is truly excellent. We need to get the other three books, when we have money for non-essentials again.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

yup :)

i need to see these. don't need to own them, but so it goes.

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[glitch25.livejournal.com]

Good to know my instincts were on target. I never was into the original anime, and while the trailer looked interesting in terms of a general movie, knowing Shyamalan was attached gave me pause.

[fair-witness.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I'm not sure I see the point in a live-action movie version that tells a (badly, by all reports) compressed version of the animated series' first season. Why not pick up where the animated series left off? It's not like the characters stopped growing at the end of the final fade to black - in fact, without giving any spoilers, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the Aang Gang finishes the animated series with the attitude of, "Okay, we got that done. Now we've got a bunch of other work ahead of us." Great opportunity to tell a story about what happens after the big war is won, because peace treaties are only the first step.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Bear and Bug saw the movie. They are fans of the series (Bear has purchased at least the first season). They mentioned that the movie was hard to follow, but they did not feel like they wasted their money either. I am positive that the race casting never entered into their understanding of the movie (They don't care, and they shouldn't care.)

I have no desire to see the movie. My children have no desire to see the movie again. It may have been bad, but it is not so bad that the fen in my household didn't have a good time with it.