Cut to rolling landscape that a helpful bit of text tells is the "Southern Earth Kingdom." We see the Gaang- NO! OK, what now? I will not have you dignifying these cardboard cutouts by calling them the "Gaang." That is reserved for actual characters. Very well then.
We see the group breaking down camp. The hairy beast flies off... for some reason. Aren't they going to go riding him, since they're heading out for the day? Anyway, Katara asks Aang if he's OK, and the back of his head says that he's fine. When Katara says that her grandmother thinks that he might be the Avatar, Aang ducks the question and asks about how much territory the Fire Nation controls. Katara says that they control many small villages, but not big cities like some place called "Ba Sing Se."Name drop! Sokka then turns the conversation back to Aang being the Avatar.
So, the three of you have been traveling for what must be days. You saw Aang get all glowy and whip up a whirlwind. But you didn't think to ask him what happened, how he did that, how he started glowing, or whether he's the Avatar? In all that time?
Before Aang can answer, a random boy runs up to them, followed by several Fire Nation soldiers (this explains why their noble steed left. If it weren't for him leaving, we wouldn't have an episode. Oh, I mean "scene"). They say that the boy is to be arrested. When Katara asks why, one of the soldiers says that the boy earthbended small stones at them, and "it really hurt."
Ladies and gentlemen, the armies of the Fire Nation: pussies who can't deal with one boy flinging stones. Hell, he didn't even have to use magical earthbending powers; he could have been throwing them. I'm supposed to see these people as a threat? More importantly, why are they talking to three random children? They don't have to justify themselves to anyone; they're the badguys. Just go over and take him.
Anyway, Katara actually grows a pair and says that they're not taking him. Sokka draws what apparently is his only weapon, and Katara uncorks her pouch and draws a stream of water. Hey, that's pretty clever; a waterbender finding a way to carry water around to use as a weapon. It was in the show. Rest assured that if it wasn't, M. Night would never have thought of it. More on that later. The group of guys with spears backs away as Katara bends her water around, then she does a silly looking dance move and... traps her brother with some ice. Who was behind her. They are promptly captured.
What in the hell is wrong with you, M. Night? Is this really the most appropriate moment for Komedy!? This scene should be where we establish that Katara can throw down. Or that someone can. But no; Katara fails and they are captured. Oh, and could you make that ice look any more fake?
OK, I spent a fair portion of my review of the series busting Katara's balls for a moment not entirely unlike this. But that was primarily about how Katara went from epic fail to OMGWTFAWESOME in a couple of months. And even in the show, when Katara hit her brother behind her, she at least had the good sense to turn around and do the move again. So she did eventually hit her target, which showed that, while her bending was weak, she wasn't a complete moron and could compensate for poor skills with quick thinking.
Unlike this Katara, who is a moron. They could have had the guards break out laughing, while Katara pulls the ice off of her brother and tries the move again, turned around. It would hit them, piss them off, and they'd be captured after a brief fight. See? Same effect, but it shows that the characters aren't stupid.
Cut to Aang in chains. Good job, Katara. Aang is marched through an Earth Kingdom village, where we see generic Hollywood peasantry, with what I can only assume are Fire Nation insignias everywhere. They are thrown into the prison with the other earthbenders.
Sokka says that the Fire Nation's plan is to suppress other bending. Um, OK. So why didn't they, I don't know, kill the earthbenders? It's not like they're the good guys or something. They didn't exactly spare the Air Nomads, so why start imprisoning people now?
Aang asked how the Fire Nation won, and apparently metal machines beat earthbenders. We get an awkward 360 camera pan around the group as this exposition is delivered. Then Aang marches into the center of the area, and starts to give a speech to the earthbenders. He gives them a pep talk, saying that there's earth beneath their feet that they could use.
Oh come on Aang, that's silly. Obviously, earthbenders can't bend ground earth. I mean, if they could, they could have walked free at any time. That would make the Fire Nation soldiers monumentally, ball crushingly stupid to have put them in what by all appearances is a rock quarry. And it would make the earthbenders even dumber for not having noticed until now that they could annihilate their captors at any time. I mean, even M. Night Shyamalan can't be that deranged to write that. So clearly, there must be something more to earthbending that keeps them here.
*snicker* What? Oh, it's just that either M. Night radically changed the nature of earthbending or... well, you'll see.
Aang then asks them what they would do if the Avatar returned. One of them says that the Avatar is dead, that if he were back, he would protect them. Jesus Christ, were the people in the series this needy? Not most of them. Aang then pulls down his hood, says his name (imagine if this were the first time we'd heard his name), and then announces that he's the Avatar.
This is supposed to be a big moment for Aang. He's supposed to be accepting his role in dealing with what has happened in his absence. He is supposed to be accepting his place as the Avatar, the role we will discover that he ran away from. And yet, nothing in this scene except for the words themselves helps to emphasize it. Not the music, not the cinematography, and certainly not Noah Ringer's acting. He doesn't even do stock movements, like looking back at his friends for support before the reveal. He just says it like any other lines he's read from the cue-cards just off-camera.
And then we begin what should have been the worst action scene in the film. Because really, it shouldn't be possible to get worse than this, but it does. Oh boy, it does.
It's terrible from minute one. After one of the guards asks sarcastically if he's an airbender, Katara jogs over from off camera and shoves him. And that movement alone is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with the scene. Any mildly competent action director would have cut from the guy talking to a closeup of Katara shoving him. But not M. Night; no, we have to see every one of Katara's steps as she walks to him. Do those footsteps mean anything for the pacing, action, or impact? Yes in fact; it destroys all of those. But not showing her walk would mean introducing a camera cut. And we can't have that in an action scene.
When the guy tries to attack Katara, Aang blows him away. Literally. As Aang whips up some wind that... doesn't seem to be doing anything, one of the guards asks how he did that. Dude, he just said he was the Avatar, and he just airbended right in front of you. Are all the Fire Nation soldiers stupid or something?
Sokka joins the trio as one of the guards says to kill them. Sokka asks for someone to help them out, and a rock hits one of the guards.
Did... are... oh God...
You know, I was being facetious when I asked if all Fire Nation soldiers are stupid. I didn't need the film to answer in a loud affirmative. So, yes, earthbenders can just use whatever stone happens to be nearby. Such as you might find in... a rock quarry.
One of the soldiers does a little dance, and flames rise up from a nearby pot of fire towards a prisoner. But then one of the others raises a wall of stone from the ground to stop it.
The camera needlessly pans around some more, sucking all pacing out of this supposed action scene. After another failed attempt by the firebenders to attack, we see six earthbenders doing some synchronized movements. One would expect something awesome to come from that. It doesn't. Indeed, nothing comes of this. Was there a special effect that was cut?
Instead, we see one guy in the foreground levitate a stone and hurl it into a soldier's gut. We then pan the camera back to our heroes, where Sokka gets his boomerang back and Aang starts laying waste to people. Really, given how much ass Aang kicks effortlessly with airbending, he probably could have broken everyone out by himself. Sokka gets a chance to use his boomerang in some of the worst effects in the film (and that's saying a lot).
The Fire Nation soldiers flee. Cut to shots of Aang taking out Fire Nation soldiers in town, also effortlessly.
OK, movie, you just had your first action scene. What did that accomplish? You made the entire Fire Nation look like incompetents. You made the Earth Kingdom's earthbenders look like even bigger fools for not bothering to even try to fight back once the "machines" were taken away. You showed that bending moves take a good second if not more to launch, as well as making everyone look stupid while doing them.
Your hero took down groups of badguys with little effort, thus removing narrative tension. And the whole thing was shot so badly that any excitement the fight could have created was sucked away.
And it all only lasted 1 and a half minutes. Thirty minutes of film thus far. Roughly 2 minutes of action.
Adaptation?
This is not an adaptation. An adaptation implies, by its very nature, that some degree of thought went into moving from one medium to another. And this five minute scene proves that precious little thought was put into this movie.
See, this entire scenario, a group of earthbenders being imprisoned and the heroes getting them to fight back, was the plot of the episode Imprisoned. Not one of the better episodes of the series, or even just season 1 of the series. So the big question is this: why is it in this movie?
A movie is not a TV show. At no time should a movie be condensed versions of TV episodes. But that's what this film is. And that's why I have titled the parts of the review as I have: named after the episode of the show that the time period in question represents. This isn't a film; this is the themepark version of the show.
Oh, the scene tries to justify its existence. And indeed, I have to give M. Night some credit here. In the show, the episode is a Katara episode, primarily focused on how she is always right and always gets her way. OK, it's focused on her empowering the other earthbenders and giving them hope. Whatever. Here, it serves as a moment for Aang to take up the mantle of the Avatar. It's the moment where he accepts his role and starts doing his job. Kinda. As previously stated, it is terribly weak and fails to get the point across, but you can see what they were going for.
You cannot tell me that there wasn't a better way to do it than this. In the episode, the prison was on an off-shore platform made of metal. The focus was more on making the earthbenders try to find a way to escape than to get them to do what they obviously could have done at any time. Though in M. Night's defense, when the earthbenders do get some earth (coal that the Fire Nation had foolishly been using to run machines on the platform), they still need prodding to start fighting back. But even that's not as stupid as this.
The problem with adapting this episode in particular is the required setup work. You have to get the group to an off-shore platform. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of time and on-screen effort you have to spend, all for a scene who's purpose in the film is to establish that Aang is taking up his role as the Avatar. The platform would be a complicated set to build, and an expensive one. And so forth.
Or you could just do what this film does and make a big, huge, obvious plot hole. Any competent filmmaker would have seen from moment one that Imprisoned simply wouldn't work in a movie and just did something else. Indeed, this whole sequence of Aang fighting and freeing other towns? Utterly meaningless in terms of the overall plotline of the film.
Because this movie is basically fragments of episodes loosely glued together, the whole film really crumbles under its own weight. Nothing that happened her will be relevant in the future. And you can't spend 5 full minutes of screen time on a sequence that has no relevance for the future.
Films are not television shows. You cannot do episodic storytelling in a movie. In a TV show, you could spend an entire episode on a side character or an event that is overall meaningless to the main plot. The show actually spent an episode chronicling the escapades of the villains while they were on vacation.
You cannot do that in a movie. Films need economic storytelling. In the best films, everything does more than one thing. You tell complex stories on many layers, by having scenes say and do multiple things at the same time. You can't waste 5 minutes of screen-time just to have "the scene wherein Aang accepts the mantle of Avatar." More stuff needs to happen than just that in order to justify its presence. At the very least, the plot should move forward. Maybe somebody in the camp had a plot coupon they needed to cash in or something.
This movie is not an adaptation because very little was actually adapted. M. Night just tried to throw bits and pieces of first season onto the screen. And that never works. I've even heard that there's a deleted scene involving the group on Kyoshi Island, which would be a terrible idea. Oh sure, the Kyoshi Warriors matter somewhat in season 2, but a good adaptation would find a way to tell the same story a different way. Indeed, that's the whole point of an adaptation: to make the story work in a new medium. And that requires understanding the needs of that new medium and yoking it to their benefit.
Even if you don't know anything about the original work, you can usually tell a film adaptation when you see it. The pacing of an adapted work will often be... unnatural compared to other works that were intended for that medium. But nowhere is this more evident than in a literal adaptation.
You can practically see the episodes of the show even without having watched it. They don't feel like connected events, like things that would happen in a film. They're just a random sequence of events, which is what this film presents.
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