So, Avatar: The Last Airbender was made into a movie; you might have heard of this. Because James Cameron made a little film around the same time also called Avatar (you might have heard of that), the filmmakers decided to drop the "Avatar" from the title of their movie. Thus, it's just called The Last Airbender.
It is pretty universally agreed upon that this is a terrible movie. Whether you watched the show or not, the general consensus is that this film is garbage. And now I'm going to watch it, because it makes a nice companion piece to my liveblog/review of the show.
I personally feel that it is unfair to judge any adaptation solely by what it is adapting. A movie must ultimately stand on its own, sink or swim based on its merits as a piece of cinema. At the same time, it is an adaptation; it is important to be able to look at what it is adapting, changing, modifying, or removing. It's important to look at how those changes affect the film.
In order to accomplish both, I am going to bifurcate myself into two people for the duration of the review. All of my knowledge of the series will be dumped into text of this color, while analysis of the film as a film will be in this text color.
Before we get started, some interesting info. This film was directed by one M. Night Shyamalan, who is most famous for once being a promising film director who has slowly descended into crap in his latest work. So again, like James Cameron (Zing!). I'm familiar with some of M. Night's work. By which, I mean I watched Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense. I don't seek out crappy movies, so I've avoided his more recent stuff due to bad press. So I don't know much about his descent into badness.
The story behind this movie's creation, at least as I heard it, was that one of M. Night's children was a fan of the show and eventually got him to make this. Which is proof enough why children should never be trusted with anything.
As in my last liveblog, this presents my opinion of this move. As before, you should find that most of these opinions do at least have some evidential support, even if you disagree with the conclusion. Granted, since pretty much everyone hates this movie, you're probably not going to find much praise in the following pages.
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