Fuck you M. Night Shamwow, the Last Airbender totally sucked!

[Azisien]

SPOILERS: If you haven't seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, I can't imagine myself not dropping a spoiler or two. If you plan on seeing either the TV show or the movie at some point uh...Sorry, I'll do my best.


Hay guys so I'm actually surprised given the solid Avatar: The Last Airbender following that there wasn't a peep of this up until I decided to put finger to keypad. Let's see what are the major points to hit here, a few days off from the movie release.....

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender is Fucking Awesome




I'm probably a Class-5 Avatard, which means I'm willing to have real life arguments with people to defend its honour. I don't know if its my favourite show EVER, but it's easily top 3. It's certainly the most well rounded and light hearted. The TV show was short, relatively low on filler, and an ideal balance of action, comedy, drama, and the journey of teenagers that can shoot elements out of their hands.

When I heard a live-action movie was in the works, my Class-5 Avatard self kicked into immediately caution and pessimism. Wait, WHA-

2. The Guy That Made Signs and Shit Is Making This?



What a twurst!! The only redeeming factor about this guy is that he has two daughters that loved the TV show. We have people on the inside in case the movie is atrocious and we need to partake in a little bit of assassination.

There are some worrying things about a live-action movie. One thing I'm not worried about is technology. I thought, and the trailers don't lie, that we were at a point where we could make bending elements look sexy, and it's true. The worrying part about a live-action movie is the inevitable changes that will be made. Part of the changes need to be in the interest of time, and that I can understand. The other will probably be changes to please wider audiences. As if Avatar needs changing, seriously. There are flaws of course, and some crappy episodes, and characters that leave things to be desired, but the core of the show is essentially flawless, and simply a good watch. How could someone take the entire first season of the show, condense it into a little over one and a half hours, still cover everything, and still make it the Avatar: The Last Airbender we all know and hate/enh/like/love/avatard?

The sad truth is, it is more or less impossible, at least for someone under the whip of Hollywood. Someone willing to bend (snicker) to the overminds that control the big giant water-down generic-ifying machine that gets poured onto any big screen release.

3. Screw following the show as a guideline for cast ethnicities, this is AMERICA, so it shall be...THE SHINY GOOD WHITE GUYS VS. THE BIG BAD MEAN BROWN GUYS!

This is a big talking point, because, well, racism and Yellowface and such. Even though Avatar's status as an actual anime is probably false, it's basically an anime, and the entire mythology of the whole show is taken straight out of Asian themes. The god damn characters are Asian, or Inuit, or at best Caucasian in the Earth Kingdom.

The casting for the show is just all over the place, really.

Perhaps we should snowball this into a 100 page yelling match on racism in Hollywood! I'll put 10 down on Prems, he's got 2:1 odds against Nique and Funka.

4. I found something! Some evidence! The movie trailers!

There's plenty of trailers running around here. My speculation:

1. Movie is going to be too super serious, losing a lot of the light heartedness and comedy of the TV show.

2. Iroh's actor FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

3. Fights will probably be awesome

4. I'm taking fireworks into the theater to celebrate it if its good, heckle it if its bad, and blow up fireworks either way because I have my tickets preordered for July 1st already.


Movie Trailer 1
Movie Trailer 3
Japanese Intl Trailer


There's another trailer floating out there with some shots of Appa and Momo, but I haven't found them.

[Kim]

I'm just not going to watch it. After a certain point, I got very good at ignoring video game and anime movies as a rule.

[Lumenskir]

1) Where the fuck is the required Avatar-related title pun? There's a responsibility that comes with making an Avatar centric thread.

2) Honestly, the movie won't diminish the show. The first two seasons will still remain examples of near-perfect storytelling, having live action movie versions of that stupid recap episode from the third season doesn't diminish the enjoyment inherent in the actual show.

3) I hope to god that when I finally get around to seeing this on HBO, the trailer will have lied and the bending takes place in some temporal space outside of slow motion. All of the best fights on the show were break neck affairs, not elemental ping pong matches.

[Aerozord]

is it just me or was Katara kind of shoved into the background?

And my biggest peeve I bet they will totally ignore the fact Sokka is sexist. Him losing that was one of the bigger factors in his character development as it also forced him to realize not only is this outlook wrong but he himself is a pretty poor warrior in the grand scheme

[Amake]

The journey of teenagers that can shoot elements out of their hands.

Very well written. xD

I'm torn about this movie. On one hand, I kinda liked the show except for the prevalent "Let's Be Total Idiots To Create Drama" moments, and that it made me want to sleep about half the time. A movie is likely to fix both those things. On the other hand, making the heroes white is fucking insulting to every single person of color in the world and insulting to the intelligence of moviegoers everywhere. It's about the most blatant racism Hollywood has let slip that I can remember and I figure it's about time to call them on it.

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by Lumenskir

1) Where the fuck is the required Avatar-related title pun? There's a responsibility that comes with making an Avatar centric thread.

Hey, I thought the thread title was fine thanks!

Originally Posted by Lumenskir

2) Honestly, the movie won't diminish the show. The first two seasons will still remain examples of near-perfect storytelling, having live action movie versions of that stupid recap episode from the third season doesn't diminish the enjoyment inherent in the actual show.

It won't diminish the show directly, but it makes my life as an Avatard harder. For instance, after the movie, most likely, people will be like "Oh, that Last Airbender movie? What a stupid movie!" And I'll be like "*facepalm* No! Well, yes, it was, but god damn, the source material is good!"

It's made all the worse by the fact that I work in a video store currently. Movie discussions come up.

Originally Posted by Aerozord

And my biggest peeve I bet they will totally ignore the fact Sokka is sexist.

My biggest pet peeve is M. Night came right out and said, worse than this, that Sokka won't really be comedic relief anymore.

HE BETTER BE TWISTING ME.

[bluestarultor]

Uh, first off, I'm pretty sure we DID have at least one thread a while back.

On race, okay, yeah, the kid who plays Aang is white. He's also the same age as the character and is also already a black belt in the exact martial art Aang practices from what I hear. As in I don't care if the kid is green, he gets the part. People are going WAY too apeshit over the casting when the fact is that this has to be about the least whitewashed cast ever. Never mind they're all great actors or have a special something that makes them perfect for the part, you have three white kids GASP! And race is internally consistent throughout the whole production, including Uncle Iroh, who is neither a villain nor European. So you can't even make your argument of the white master race versus people of color. In short, I find this argument hasty.




See, I really don't see why people are so quick to shoot this down. M. Night watched the series since like the third episode and loved the whole thing. They didn't randomly ask "the twist guy" to direct this thing. He battered their door down with a tree he ran into and broke off on his way there and said "PICK ME PICK ME OH GOD PICK MEEEEEEE!" I understand people hold the show up like something sacred, but this production has an amazing team who are enthusiastic about making it happen and making it work.

[Kim]

And I'm sure you have an explanation for why the water tribe be white as hell, too?

If he really loved the show he wouldn't be cutting the humor out of it.

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

People are going WAY too apeshit over the casting when the fact is that this has to be about the least whitewashed cast ever. Never mind they're all great actors or have a special something that makes them perfect for the part, you have three white kids GASP! And race is internally consistent throughout the whole production, including Uncle Iroh, who is neither a villain nor European. So you can't even make your argument of the white master race versus people of color. In short, I find this argument hasty.

See, I really don't see why people are so quick to shoot this down. M. Night watched the series since like the third episode and loved the whole thing. They didn't randomly ask "the twist guy" to direct this thing. He battered their door down with a tree he ran into and broke off on his way there and said "PICK ME PICK ME OH GOD PICK MEEEEEEE!" I understand people hold the show up like something sacred, but this production has an amazing team who are enthusiastic about making it happen and making it work.

I'm not quick to shoot it down, I'm apprehensive because it's a movie about one of my favourite shows. I reserve the right to. And there are definitely a lot of people that love the show making it, because I have seen some fantastic stuff. The sets are insanely great looking, for instance. The effects are pretty much perfect.

But the casting is pretty average, or bad, from everything I've seen so far. Pretty sure Noah Ringer, the kid playing Aang, is just a Tae-Kwon-Do black belt. Obviously he's a good pick on the martial arts side, though I don't think that's what Aang practices. Anyway...

The multiculturalism of the movie in general is uh...arguably okay, but I'm not seeing the internal consistency you are Blues. There's white, brown, and yellow mixed up everywhere and it doesn't make sense compared to the show, or to actual breeding.

Edit: Well more than that. A surprising amount of season 1 is covered in the trailers combined. However, I saw that it was an hour and forty minutes and I was like "HOW can you cover all that appreciably?" I'm sad they seem to have cut out Boomy and Omashu for anything more than a cameo (and Boomy isn't on IMDB).

[Amake]

Err, out of all the non-white characters in the cast, the only ones for whom no appropriate color actors could be found are the three main protagonists. But noo, I'm sure that's only because they were the best actors and not at all because 90% of Hollywood movies have to be about straight white men.

So Katara has a reduced role in the movie huh?