I once watched a cartoon series on Nickelodeon, Avatar: The Legend of Aang (alternately titled Avatar: The Last Airbender in North America), and enjoyed every moment of it. It was vibrant; the characters, especially Aang, were dynamic and full of life. There was action and even humor--something that made the whole series so lovable and garnered so many fans across the generation.
So when I learned that a live-action movie based on the series was going to be released in cinemas, I was eager to finding out how it was going to fare in the box office. (I did not have the motivation to check it out myself as I wasn't very keen to spend any money as a true fan would.) Would it be as spectacular as its source material? That was my very expectation, until...
...I heard that the movie was a critical disaster. Now I have watched the movie to understand how it was such a critical flop. Talk about false advertising. I had researched on the web to study Nickelodeon movies and understand how they fared in the media--and it was not favorable. Like mainstream movies, most of the Nickelodeon movies were either negatively or positively received even if they grossed at the box office; and this one was no exception. However, this is not the first and only movie to receive any nomination for a razzie, but is the only movie to win more razzies than Imagine That (2009).
So I reluctantly purchased the DVD by chance, and I shall now take my time to see why the movie was universally condemned.
Firstly, you do have to be very incensed at they way they mispronounce their character names: in the movie, "Aang" is pronounced as "Ahng" instead of "Ang" (rhymes with "bang"); and there are many more deliberate mispronunciations to come.
Remember the animation? Doesn't Aang look so lively and high in spirit? Isn't this what movie-goers were expecting from him and his friends? To be a child, a 12-year-old who wants to have fun and be a normal person aside from the worldwide tensions? I mean this is what made the series so popular that even I couldn't get enough of it (now I wish I did watch every episode in each season). Why should he be enraged at moments which were not relevant in the series (such as the death of monks)? That is just atypical.
Even the backgrounds in the series could captivate our eyes nonetheless; a lush and aesthetic view to boot. We all knew Aang was hard to detest, and he would truly live in us as a lovable boy.
But this movie brings this poor boy and the series to disrepute, and I wish Shyamalan HELL!
So Aang (Noah Ringer) cannot have a normal life? He cannot have a family? That's why he ran away from the monastery?! Come on, man! How can you change the Avatar's back story like that??!! Look at Wikipedia and see for yourself why Aang ran away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender). That's not the Aang we all know from the animated series. In fact, from the first few minutes, he have seen nothing from the series: Aang is just blank in his personality, he is no more playful but is now hard-laden like a wooden statue. We don't even see anyone having fun or making jokes with each other; it's all just bad acting and flimsy dialogues which I fail to understand. Humor is just desiccated.
Here's what's even more deficient: there is no chemistry between Aang and Katara (Nicola Peltz). In the animated series, we have witnessed hilarious moments where Aang has always shown his strong affections to Katara, which we all delighted in. But here, there is not even a slight spark of romance between the two of them.
In fact, all of the actors are terrible in their job; they are all lifeless and frigid. You can always see by their facial expressions how they only do their jobs by infuriating us viewers, critics, and fans of the animated series. Throughout this film, you can always see from Aang's face that he is always miserable and has no living spirit whatsoever.
You can also see from the cast that they do not resemble their animated counterparts in anyway: in this movie, the protagonists are all white while the antagonists are all dark-skinned while the reverse is the case in the animated series. Does this suggest any intentional racial degradation still blighting in Hollywood in this day and age? (Of course we still are reminded that the characters here lack the personalities of their anime equivalents.) I do not want to be derisory in terms of race, but isn't it even ironic that Shyamalan gave the dark-skinned cast the roles of villains and the white cast the roles of heroes while he himself is dark-skinned? I'm sure it is.
And by the way, what's with Iroh?! That's not him at all; it's the Train Man from The Matrix Revolutions! Bogus!
In the animation, you can see how the special effects define the moment Aang enters the Avatar State. None of the effects in the movie could surpass the power of the Avatar which was correctly depicted in the animation. This is so inadequate. In fact, the 'special' effects in the movie do not deserve to be called special; rather just rudimentary as opposed to the ones in the animated scenes.
Look at the choreography: most of them, even Aang, do not perform it as astoundingly as their animated counterparts; they act like it takes complex rather than simple maneuvers to do it. In fact on this note, every fight sequence is just so sub-par that you would just be bored to death just before the next sequence of events.
I would like to point out that while typing I could not even be bothered to watch every minute of this scum. I can see that it would have been better than to even watch it painfully if I had always been watching every episode on TV. I would have been dreading every moment of it to the depth of my stomach.
How impressive(!) I shall again do my best to finish my review after watching this disappointing glop! But I do know one thing: this movie now belongs to Wikipedia's list of the worst movies of all time, and if I were to watch the entire animated TV series, I would surely be much harsher and unreserved in my review. AND IF HE THINKS THAT ANYBODY WOULD WANT A SEQUEL, FORGET IT!!!!!!!!!! We'd rather have a reboot than a sequel. Or better yet, a termination of the trilogy altogether !!! I'll tell you now: this has to be the worst movie ever since Battlefield Earth (2000)--in fact, this is the Battlefield Earth of Nickelodeon Movies--and if a sequel were green-lighted it will be the biggest box office bomb since Cutthroat Island (1995)!
Oh by the way, I found a link which displays all the 61 episodes of Avatar. Watch it and see for yourself if you haven't watched the entire series before.
http://www.animedreaming.tv/anime/avatar-the-last-airbender/
This just in: I have just watched episode 57 (season 3, chapter 17) of the series and discovered that it was an acid test to the Shyamalan movie. If you have watched this episode, you would have realized that it was a giveaway that this movie was in production and was predicted to be universally condemned despite its abundance of 'decent' special effects. This episode proved that turning any of the seasons of this series into a movie would be a disastrous step; hence the producers of the show created this play as a parody of the movie before its release into the theaters. I have seen for myself the overwhelmingly negative reception that would have been (and has been) garnered from the play that parodies the movie, and understood that the producers of this show were dismayed that the live-action version was green-lighted despite the poor script and miscast of the characters. In other words, the play was an analogy while the episode itself was a simulation experiment.
So when I learned that a live-action movie based on the series was going to be released in cinemas, I was eager to finding out how it was going to fare in the box office. (I did not have the motivation to check it out myself as I wasn't very keen to spend any money as a true fan would.) Would it be as spectacular as its source material? That was my very expectation, until...
...I heard that the movie was a critical disaster. Now I have watched the movie to understand how it was such a critical flop. Talk about false advertising. I had researched on the web to study Nickelodeon movies and understand how they fared in the media--and it was not favorable. Like mainstream movies, most of the Nickelodeon movies were either negatively or positively received even if they grossed at the box office; and this one was no exception. However, this is not the first and only movie to receive any nomination for a razzie, but is the only movie to win more razzies than Imagine That (2009).
So I reluctantly purchased the DVD by chance, and I shall now take my time to see why the movie was universally condemned.
Firstly, you do have to be very incensed at they way they mispronounce their character names: in the movie, "Aang" is pronounced as "Ahng" instead of "Ang" (rhymes with "bang"); and there are many more deliberate mispronunciations to come.
Remember the animation? Doesn't Aang look so lively and high in spirit? Isn't this what movie-goers were expecting from him and his friends? To be a child, a 12-year-old who wants to have fun and be a normal person aside from the worldwide tensions? I mean this is what made the series so popular that even I couldn't get enough of it (now I wish I did watch every episode in each season). Why should he be enraged at moments which were not relevant in the series (such as the death of monks)? That is just atypical.
Even the backgrounds in the series could captivate our eyes nonetheless; a lush and aesthetic view to boot. We all knew Aang was hard to detest, and he would truly live in us as a lovable boy.
But this movie brings this poor boy and the series to disrepute, and I wish Shyamalan HELL!
So Aang (Noah Ringer) cannot have a normal life? He cannot have a family? That's why he ran away from the monastery?! Come on, man! How can you change the Avatar's back story like that??!! Look at Wikipedia and see for yourself why Aang ran away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender). That's not the Aang we all know from the animated series. In fact, from the first few minutes, he have seen nothing from the series: Aang is just blank in his personality, he is no more playful but is now hard-laden like a wooden statue. We don't even see anyone having fun or making jokes with each other; it's all just bad acting and flimsy dialogues which I fail to understand. Humor is just desiccated.
Here's what's even more deficient: there is no chemistry between Aang and Katara (Nicola Peltz). In the animated series, we have witnessed hilarious moments where Aang has always shown his strong affections to Katara, which we all delighted in. But here, there is not even a slight spark of romance between the two of them.
In fact, all of the actors are terrible in their job; they are all lifeless and frigid. You can always see by their facial expressions how they only do their jobs by infuriating us viewers, critics, and fans of the animated series. Throughout this film, you can always see from Aang's face that he is always miserable and has no living spirit whatsoever.
You can also see from the cast that they do not resemble their animated counterparts in anyway: in this movie, the protagonists are all white while the antagonists are all dark-skinned while the reverse is the case in the animated series. Does this suggest any intentional racial degradation still blighting in Hollywood in this day and age? (Of course we still are reminded that the characters here lack the personalities of their anime equivalents.) I do not want to be derisory in terms of race, but isn't it even ironic that Shyamalan gave the dark-skinned cast the roles of villains and the white cast the roles of heroes while he himself is dark-skinned? I'm sure it is.
And by the way, what's with Iroh?! That's not him at all; it's the Train Man from The Matrix Revolutions! Bogus!
In the animation, you can see how the special effects define the moment Aang enters the Avatar State. None of the effects in the movie could surpass the power of the Avatar which was correctly depicted in the animation. This is so inadequate. In fact, the 'special' effects in the movie do not deserve to be called special; rather just rudimentary as opposed to the ones in the animated scenes.
Look at the choreography: most of them, even Aang, do not perform it as astoundingly as their animated counterparts; they act like it takes complex rather than simple maneuvers to do it. In fact on this note, every fight sequence is just so sub-par that you would just be bored to death just before the next sequence of events.
I would like to point out that while typing I could not even be bothered to watch every minute of this scum. I can see that it would have been better than to even watch it painfully if I had always been watching every episode on TV. I would have been dreading every moment of it to the depth of my stomach.
How impressive(!) I shall again do my best to finish my review after watching this disappointing glop! But I do know one thing: this movie now belongs to Wikipedia's list of the worst movies of all time, and if I were to watch the entire animated TV series, I would surely be much harsher and unreserved in my review. AND IF HE THINKS THAT ANYBODY WOULD WANT A SEQUEL, FORGET IT!!!!!!!!!! We'd rather have a reboot than a sequel. Or better yet, a termination of the trilogy altogether !!! I'll tell you now: this has to be the worst movie ever since Battlefield Earth (2000)--in fact, this is the Battlefield Earth of Nickelodeon Movies--and if a sequel were green-lighted it will be the biggest box office bomb since Cutthroat Island (1995)!
Oh by the way, I found a link which displays all the 61 episodes of Avatar. Watch it and see for yourself if you haven't watched the entire series before.
http://www.animedreaming.tv/anime/avatar-the-last-airbender/
This just in: I have just watched episode 57 (season 3, chapter 17) of the series and discovered that it was an acid test to the Shyamalan movie. If you have watched this episode, you would have realized that it was a giveaway that this movie was in production and was predicted to be universally condemned despite its abundance of 'decent' special effects. This episode proved that turning any of the seasons of this series into a movie would be a disastrous step; hence the producers of the show created this play as a parody of the movie before its release into the theaters. I have seen for myself the overwhelmingly negative reception that would have been (and has been) garnered from the play that parodies the movie, and understood that the producers of this show were dismayed that the live-action version was green-lighted despite the poor script and miscast of the characters. In other words, the play was an analogy while the episode itself was a simulation experiment.
No comments:
Post a Comment