You know what it's something different today. A review/or justification to myself of a FILM! Hold onto your hats folks! I know it's crazy =p
So I'm not running into a new film, one that has only just come out at the cinema. I'm not going for an old classic either (a you-should-watch-this-because review). This film has had time to settle into the DVD market and has plenty of reviews. Plenty of baaaad ones, but I'm just talking myself out here, go with it.
The film?
THE LAST AIRBENDER
(aka, wor Avatar film or Aang-chan or just plain Avatar (ignore blue people please for now, haven't seen it, will at some point but to me that is not the true avatar =p). If you don't like spoilers TURN BACK NOW! Go get the cartoon, watch that, get the live action film, watch that, then come back. If you have already covered one of those bases you should be fine =D
So I'm not running into a new film, one that has only just come out at the cinema. I'm not going for an old classic either (a you-should-watch-this-because review). This film has had time to settle into the DVD market and has plenty of reviews. Plenty of baaaad ones, but I'm just talking myself out here, go with it.
The film?
THE LAST AIRBENDER
(aka, wor Avatar film or Aang-chan or just plain Avatar (ignore blue people please for now, haven't seen it, will at some point but to me that is not the true avatar =p). If you don't like spoilers TURN BACK NOW! Go get the cartoon, watch that, get the live action film, watch that, then come back. If you have already covered one of those bases you should be fine =D
For those who don't know L-R:
Katara (14), Aang (12) (main guy in all this), Sokka (15)(Katara's brother)
The little guy with the green eyes and is all ears is Momo a flying Lemur-bat
Still with us? Good. To start with I am a fan of the cartoon. It is good, bonkers plotwise and there is rarely a linear feel but that's fine. The most linearity in the first season is going from the Southern Watertribe to the Northern one. But you know what? it works.
Now here are the film characters - just while you still have the cartoon picture in your head =D
LR-TB:
Aang, Prince Zuko (we'll come to him in a bit), Katara and Sokka.
Now here are the film characters - just while you still have the cartoon picture in your head =D
LR-TB:
Aang, Prince Zuko (we'll come to him in a bit), Katara and Sokka.
Ok there is no bright blue cloth but that makes sense! They're pretty close don't you think? Right now here is the first issue. If you like Sokka from the cartoon you have a 99% chance of hating him in the film. I personally didn't like him in the first series but I know that he's wrong. He's a bit of an idiot in... one maybe two scenes instead of the entire film. That's a big change. He's rather serious in this film. Rathbone maybe wasn't their best choice, he seems very serious. He needed to be a joker character, a bit stupid and telling stupid jokes all the time. Sigh.
Prince Zuko... one minute let's go back to the cartoon for a minute:
Prince Zuko (16) has daddy issues.
Prince Zuko... one minute let's go back to the cartoon for a minute:
Prince Zuko (16) has daddy issues.
Now his character looked very wrong to me but we let it slide, in fact all of the main Fire Nation had the wrong hair (aside from the glimpse of Azula, his sister, that we had) which did bother me. Iroh sounded the same which made me happy (his uncle, but seriously watch the cartoon because it's too hard to explain here everything that happens!) but he was not right but meh, character designs change!
They pronounce Aang and Avatar wrong a lot. Little gripe but important! There is 3 serieses! You can listen to it! GO! It isn't Ar-ng but A-ng and not Ar-var-tar but a-vah-tar. I quickly forgot that they were doing it wrong but if you get annoyed by that don't watch. It'll kill you!
So I would change some of the characters, or at least make them look more accurate. That's generally a problem with an adaptation, you already have at least an idea of how you want them to look or even better, someone has already set the bar and shown you what they look like! For Instance Fire Lord Ozai. It's hard to find some photos but they basically cut off all his hair (inluding the awesome pointy beard) and didn't give him his crown-deely (pretty important).
Ok now the plot of the film! They cover the first book(season) Water. This was a good move. If they attempted to cover everything all in one film they would have done a much worse job of it. Seriously. They had a hard enough time to fit enough in as it was. Histories of characters were shortened to a brief conversation and a lot of the side plots (and I mean A LOT and since the cartoon is MADE of side plots and filler episodes that's a lot missing) but they kept the shape the same and generally only missed out things instead of changing them to make them wrong. I think that is a relatively good way of adaption and this really is an adaption here, oh aside from two sections that we noticed nothing was "wrong" per se, just had chunks missing.
There was no Bumi, no Suki, no Jeff (I mean Jet =p). Aang didn't learn ANY firebending (you'll know what I mean if you know the 'toon), no huge canyon, no fortune teller, no Teo. So unless they are presented in the later films (the characters not the canyon =p) the ending plot is going to be MESSED UP! There is a lot that is going to have to be explained.
The film is 103 minutes long. That's barely 2 hours! They could have extended out to 2.5hours and filled in one detail. One character. Introduced the Kyoshi warriors maybe, nothing major, just a hello and a bit of dissing from Sokka.
I know that films start to get a little bit bogged down when they have to introduce a lot of characters and that is generally the problem with adaptations. Lord of the Rings did pretty well (with nine pretty main characters in the first film alone!) but did skip out on some characters in places to make things easier, Final Fantasy: Advent Children hoped that you would know who everyone was from the game and even gave you a summary of the game on the DVD. Harry Potter has a lot of the characters in but I don't know that much on it so meh, I'm sure it was done very well.
Ok so we've worked through the characters (that actually by the end of the film I was ok with most of them), the plot (which I thought was relatively accurate although missed out pretty big chunks!) now onto the stuff I was less critical about.
The martial arts aspect of it was actually rather impressive. I thought it looked pretty and, as in the cartoon, they all had different styles. Even the little kid playing Aang was really good. He knew his stuff! It looked fancy and the digital effects didn't hurt. Actually the digital effects in general we pretty good. Apparently the 3D aspect was rubbish but we weren't dealing with that so I don't know on that matter but watching walls of water, people being frozen, fireballs, icespikes, rock walls, it was all pretty impressive.
The music was pretty good too, James Newton Howard was the composer. Other Works are I Am Legend, Hidalgo and the Sixth Sense to name a few. He has also worked on The Dark Knight/Batman Begins with Hans Zimmer.
I wonder if maybe I, along with Blue and her sister who watched it with us, set our bar too low. It was an ok film. Nothing really special but something I wouldn't mind watching again really. Maybe we were expecting it to be so painful we couldn't finish it and would pretend it didn't exist and watch the cartoon again in a marathon as penitence or something but no. It was ok, possibly even good. In fact I'm ok calling it good and like I said, I liked/loved (more accurate) the cartoon.
Maybe it's because most adaptions from cartoon/anime suck that our bar was so low, we didn't expect much. Death Note was ok (but not much happened in that), Blood The Last Vampire was bonkers (like the anime) but had a whole second half that wasn't in the first anime because it was a short and bonkers plot. Not much is thought of of The Dragonball-Z film (haven't seen can't comment), Bleach live action? Probably going to be terrible and I love Bleach. Even the Marvel/DC films aren't that great although they are starting to come out of their shell now. But those guys have had practise! I mean look at how many terrible Batman films there are. Or on second thought don't and just watch the better stuff from more recent years! Thing is adaptations don't have a good life expectancy anymore. But really let's change that.
FILMS don't have a very good life expectancy.
We still get the big blockbusters and the ones that blow us away but against how much dross and how many terrible films? But it's nearly always been like that, sadly.
The moral of the story? Set your hope low on the film and then you won't be disappointed.
Or pray they start making more really epic films!
Anyway I actually enjoyed the film, ignoring all it's faults and flaws, or I just don't mind if the film is B-rate... so nyeh to all the bad reviews =p
They pronounce Aang and Avatar wrong a lot. Little gripe but important! There is 3 serieses! You can listen to it! GO! It isn't Ar-ng but A-ng and not Ar-var-tar but a-vah-tar. I quickly forgot that they were doing it wrong but if you get annoyed by that don't watch. It'll kill you!
So I would change some of the characters, or at least make them look more accurate. That's generally a problem with an adaptation, you already have at least an idea of how you want them to look or even better, someone has already set the bar and shown you what they look like! For Instance Fire Lord Ozai. It's hard to find some photos but they basically cut off all his hair (inluding the awesome pointy beard) and didn't give him his crown-deely (pretty important).
Ok now the plot of the film! They cover the first book(season) Water. This was a good move. If they attempted to cover everything all in one film they would have done a much worse job of it. Seriously. They had a hard enough time to fit enough in as it was. Histories of characters were shortened to a brief conversation and a lot of the side plots (and I mean A LOT and since the cartoon is MADE of side plots and filler episodes that's a lot missing) but they kept the shape the same and generally only missed out things instead of changing them to make them wrong. I think that is a relatively good way of adaption and this really is an adaption here, oh aside from two sections that we noticed nothing was "wrong" per se, just had chunks missing.
There was no Bumi, no Suki, no Jeff (I mean Jet =p). Aang didn't learn ANY firebending (you'll know what I mean if you know the 'toon), no huge canyon, no fortune teller, no Teo. So unless they are presented in the later films (the characters not the canyon =p) the ending plot is going to be MESSED UP! There is a lot that is going to have to be explained.
The film is 103 minutes long. That's barely 2 hours! They could have extended out to 2.5hours and filled in one detail. One character. Introduced the Kyoshi warriors maybe, nothing major, just a hello and a bit of dissing from Sokka.
I know that films start to get a little bit bogged down when they have to introduce a lot of characters and that is generally the problem with adaptations. Lord of the Rings did pretty well (with nine pretty main characters in the first film alone!) but did skip out on some characters in places to make things easier, Final Fantasy: Advent Children hoped that you would know who everyone was from the game and even gave you a summary of the game on the DVD. Harry Potter has a lot of the characters in but I don't know that much on it so meh, I'm sure it was done very well.
Ok so we've worked through the characters (that actually by the end of the film I was ok with most of them), the plot (which I thought was relatively accurate although missed out pretty big chunks!) now onto the stuff I was less critical about.
The martial arts aspect of it was actually rather impressive. I thought it looked pretty and, as in the cartoon, they all had different styles. Even the little kid playing Aang was really good. He knew his stuff! It looked fancy and the digital effects didn't hurt. Actually the digital effects in general we pretty good. Apparently the 3D aspect was rubbish but we weren't dealing with that so I don't know on that matter but watching walls of water, people being frozen, fireballs, icespikes, rock walls, it was all pretty impressive.
The music was pretty good too, James Newton Howard was the composer. Other Works are I Am Legend, Hidalgo and the Sixth Sense to name a few. He has also worked on The Dark Knight/Batman Begins with Hans Zimmer.
I wonder if maybe I, along with Blue and her sister who watched it with us, set our bar too low. It was an ok film. Nothing really special but something I wouldn't mind watching again really. Maybe we were expecting it to be so painful we couldn't finish it and would pretend it didn't exist and watch the cartoon again in a marathon as penitence or something but no. It was ok, possibly even good. In fact I'm ok calling it good and like I said, I liked/loved (more accurate) the cartoon.
Maybe it's because most adaptions from cartoon/anime suck that our bar was so low, we didn't expect much. Death Note was ok (but not much happened in that), Blood The Last Vampire was bonkers (like the anime) but had a whole second half that wasn't in the first anime because it was a short and bonkers plot. Not much is thought of of The Dragonball-Z film (haven't seen can't comment), Bleach live action? Probably going to be terrible and I love Bleach. Even the Marvel/DC films aren't that great although they are starting to come out of their shell now. But those guys have had practise! I mean look at how many terrible Batman films there are. Or on second thought don't and just watch the better stuff from more recent years! Thing is adaptations don't have a good life expectancy anymore. But really let's change that.
FILMS don't have a very good life expectancy.
We still get the big blockbusters and the ones that blow us away but against how much dross and how many terrible films? But it's nearly always been like that, sadly.
The moral of the story? Set your hope low on the film and then you won't be disappointed.
Or pray they start making more really epic films!
Anyway I actually enjoyed the film, ignoring all it's faults and flaws, or I just don't mind if the film is B-rate... so nyeh to all the bad reviews =p
Love Buttercup xxx
I <3 Zuko. :|
ReplyDeleteGood review - I appreciate that this was written in plural peoples :D
Zuko is the cute!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Kai has daddy issues too... =p