How to waste a flying bison
Bottom line: It was bad, but it wasn't that bad. There were some serious flaws, and being forewarned, I think I manged to figure out a bunch of them, but "worst movie of the year"? I kind of doubt that, not when there's an Adam Sander & co. gross-out flick still to come. It was disappointing, but it was far from the worst movie I've seen. I have seen Dungeons and Dragons. I have seen League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. People, I have seen Wild Wild West. This wasn't nearly that bad.
The big problem, as I saw it, was that Night clearly figured out that the "Siege of the North" story needed to be Act 3, and that's entirely right. The problem was that he crammed the other 17 episodes from Season 1 into the first 45 minutes, and wow, does that show. The pacing in the first 20 minutes is particularly awful. They find Aang in the ice. Bang! He's back at the village before he gets to even say anything. Bang! The Fire Nation captures him. Bang! Sokka and Katara go to rescue the guy they met 60 seconds ago, because he's so terribly important. Bang! Aang gets away. Bang! Big revelation about the genocide. Bang! Free the Earth Kingdom village. Bang! Start a revolution. And by the time they get to the Northern Water Tribe, they're so badly pressed for time that they have a voice-over to explain what we missed. It slows down and gets a lot better after that, but the audience already has whiplash, and anybody who hasn't seen the show is completely lost. Throw in some bad 3D (I saw it in 2D, thanks very much), and I can definitely see why people would have given up and left in disgust.
The only way to fix it, I suspect, is to have rewritten the entire first two acts. Instead of trying to cram a bunch of recognizable bits in there where they don't fit (the imprisoned earthbenders, the Blue Spirit), just start over. You're talking about a story that's a meandering journey across the entire world. Faced with accomplishing that in 45 minutes so you can set up for the big fight, I think most script-writers throw it all out and start from scratch. Which, of course, ticks off all the fans, but hey, they're ticked off anyway. It's pretty much a no-win situation.
I think a lot of people are going to take aim at the actors, especially the kids, and the lead who'd never acted before. I think that's unfair -- Noah Ringer (Aang) and Nicola Peltz (Katara) just weren't given enough to do...very odd, since they're nominally the leads. The show has plenty of moments, especially in season 1, where Aang just acts like an irresponsible kid, and Katara is caught between her need to play "mother" to the group, and the joy she takes in learning waterbending. With the time crunch in the movie, though, we get none of that -- everything Aang says needs to be serious and portentious, and Katara's stuck with just the teary-eyed "I've always believed in you" lines. There are a couple of flashbacks to before Aang was trying to save the world, and Ringer nails it there, but that's a total of about two minutes of screen-time. Jackson Rathbone really "gets" Sokka, and his line delivery is great, but he's honestly a secondary character.
Shaun Toub is fantastic as Uncle Iroh, and that's no mean feat, because Iroh is easily the most awesome character in the series. He's obviously going for "looks harmless, but don't push him" instead of the cartoon's "crazy old man you shouldn't mess with," but it works. Dev Patel also does a good job as Zuko, but Zuko's a bit easier to play in season 1; his emotional dial is permanently set to "angry." The real failure is the bad guys -- Cliff Curtis is playing Fire Lord Ozai, the Big Bad of the entire series, and he seems like...just some guy. Mind you, in the cartoon he was Mark Hamill in full-blown dangerous mode (if you're not familiar with Hamill's voice work, just trust me on this), but I don't think "innocuous" is the way you want to go with the lead bad guy in any story. The only actor with a more thankless job is Aasif Mandvi, who's playing a role that was voiced by Jason Isaacs, fer cryin' out loud. General Zhao should be dripping quiet menace and overconfidence, but instead he's just a bug-eyed idiot who got lucky a couple of times.
Sadly, the movie was desperately missing the humorous elements that put life into the characters. Momo and Appa are comic relief characters...what's the point of having them in the movie if they're just going to be background? Sokka got a few good lines, but mostly it was dull and deadly serious the whole time. Which, again, is a result of the pacing, but we never get a reason why anybody should care about Aang, because we never get to see him acting human.
After going to such great lengths to preserve as much of the series as he could, I'm really surprised that Night got some pretty basic things wrong. Specifically, the Avatar is presented as a peaceful force. In the show, the big deal is that he can control all four elements. Here, the big thing is that he can communicate with spirits; the elements thing is just an afterthought. But the show made it quite clear that the Avatar has crazy levels of power, and previous Avatars have had no problem at all with killing a king or a general if that will stop a war, or simply using overwhelming force to solve a problem. Aang is the pacifist, because that's the way he was raised; not the Avatar. (Which is the big plot point at the end of season 3 -- does his responsibility as Avatar supersede his personal beliefs?) In the show, Aang loses himself when he lets the Avatar power loose, and destroys the entire Fire Nation fleet. You don't see it directly, because it's a kid's show, but it's strongly implied that he drowned hundreds of soldiers -- which sets up Season 2 as he has to take responsibility for that, and what his power can do. In the film, that doesn't happen; Aang just bends a big wave and the Fire Nation all runs away. Really? Kind of misses the point.
There was nothing wrong with the fight scenes or the special effects; both were pretty impressive. The airbending fighting style is very kinetic with lots of leaps and swoops -- for once, the fact that the martial artists can nearly fly is justified within the show, so I'm a bit surprised that the fight choreographer didn't take better advantage of that. The camera seemed entirely too tight on the fight scenes, but I always think that in martial-arts movies, so maybe it's just me. The obligatory slo-mo didn't seem too terribly out of place, but the sudden zooming in, combined with the slo-mo seemed...old-fashioned, like something out of a Bruce Lee movie. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not.
I'm torn about what should happen next. On the one hand, if the movie makes enough for a sequel, maybe Night will improve after hearing the criticism. The next two seasons don't have nearly so much travelogue as Season 1, so perhaps they'll work better. Or maybe he'll just step aside and let someone else do it. But if it bombs big-time, maybe somebody else can try to do better in a few years' time.
The big problem, as I saw it, was that Night clearly figured out that the "Siege of the North" story needed to be Act 3, and that's entirely right. The problem was that he crammed the other 17 episodes from Season 1 into the first 45 minutes, and wow, does that show. The pacing in the first 20 minutes is particularly awful. They find Aang in the ice. Bang! He's back at the village before he gets to even say anything. Bang! The Fire Nation captures him. Bang! Sokka and Katara go to rescue the guy they met 60 seconds ago, because he's so terribly important. Bang! Aang gets away. Bang! Big revelation about the genocide. Bang! Free the Earth Kingdom village. Bang! Start a revolution. And by the time they get to the Northern Water Tribe, they're so badly pressed for time that they have a voice-over to explain what we missed. It slows down and gets a lot better after that, but the audience already has whiplash, and anybody who hasn't seen the show is completely lost. Throw in some bad 3D (I saw it in 2D, thanks very much), and I can definitely see why people would have given up and left in disgust.
The only way to fix it, I suspect, is to have rewritten the entire first two acts. Instead of trying to cram a bunch of recognizable bits in there where they don't fit (the imprisoned earthbenders, the Blue Spirit), just start over. You're talking about a story that's a meandering journey across the entire world. Faced with accomplishing that in 45 minutes so you can set up for the big fight, I think most script-writers throw it all out and start from scratch. Which, of course, ticks off all the fans, but hey, they're ticked off anyway. It's pretty much a no-win situation.
I think a lot of people are going to take aim at the actors, especially the kids, and the lead who'd never acted before. I think that's unfair -- Noah Ringer (Aang) and Nicola Peltz (Katara) just weren't given enough to do...very odd, since they're nominally the leads. The show has plenty of moments, especially in season 1, where Aang just acts like an irresponsible kid, and Katara is caught between her need to play "mother" to the group, and the joy she takes in learning waterbending. With the time crunch in the movie, though, we get none of that -- everything Aang says needs to be serious and portentious, and Katara's stuck with just the teary-eyed "I've always believed in you" lines. There are a couple of flashbacks to before Aang was trying to save the world, and Ringer nails it there, but that's a total of about two minutes of screen-time. Jackson Rathbone really "gets" Sokka, and his line delivery is great, but he's honestly a secondary character.
Shaun Toub is fantastic as Uncle Iroh, and that's no mean feat, because Iroh is easily the most awesome character in the series. He's obviously going for "looks harmless, but don't push him" instead of the cartoon's "crazy old man you shouldn't mess with," but it works. Dev Patel also does a good job as Zuko, but Zuko's a bit easier to play in season 1; his emotional dial is permanently set to "angry." The real failure is the bad guys -- Cliff Curtis is playing Fire Lord Ozai, the Big Bad of the entire series, and he seems like...just some guy. Mind you, in the cartoon he was Mark Hamill in full-blown dangerous mode (if you're not familiar with Hamill's voice work, just trust me on this), but I don't think "innocuous" is the way you want to go with the lead bad guy in any story. The only actor with a more thankless job is Aasif Mandvi, who's playing a role that was voiced by Jason Isaacs, fer cryin' out loud. General Zhao should be dripping quiet menace and overconfidence, but instead he's just a bug-eyed idiot who got lucky a couple of times.
Sadly, the movie was desperately missing the humorous elements that put life into the characters. Momo and Appa are comic relief characters...what's the point of having them in the movie if they're just going to be background? Sokka got a few good lines, but mostly it was dull and deadly serious the whole time. Which, again, is a result of the pacing, but we never get a reason why anybody should care about Aang, because we never get to see him acting human.
After going to such great lengths to preserve as much of the series as he could, I'm really surprised that Night got some pretty basic things wrong. Specifically, the Avatar is presented as a peaceful force. In the show, the big deal is that he can control all four elements. Here, the big thing is that he can communicate with spirits; the elements thing is just an afterthought. But the show made it quite clear that the Avatar has crazy levels of power, and previous Avatars have had no problem at all with killing a king or a general if that will stop a war, or simply using overwhelming force to solve a problem. Aang is the pacifist, because that's the way he was raised; not the Avatar. (Which is the big plot point at the end of season 3 -- does his responsibility as Avatar supersede his personal beliefs?) In the show, Aang loses himself when he lets the Avatar power loose, and destroys the entire Fire Nation fleet. You don't see it directly, because it's a kid's show, but it's strongly implied that he drowned hundreds of soldiers -- which sets up Season 2 as he has to take responsibility for that, and what his power can do. In the film, that doesn't happen; Aang just bends a big wave and the Fire Nation all runs away. Really? Kind of misses the point.
There was nothing wrong with the fight scenes or the special effects; both were pretty impressive. The airbending fighting style is very kinetic with lots of leaps and swoops -- for once, the fact that the martial artists can nearly fly is justified within the show, so I'm a bit surprised that the fight choreographer didn't take better advantage of that. The camera seemed entirely too tight on the fight scenes, but I always think that in martial-arts movies, so maybe it's just me. The obligatory slo-mo didn't seem too terribly out of place, but the sudden zooming in, combined with the slo-mo seemed...old-fashioned, like something out of a Bruce Lee movie. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not.
I'm torn about what should happen next. On the one hand, if the movie makes enough for a sequel, maybe Night will improve after hearing the criticism. The next two seasons don't have nearly so much travelogue as Season 1, so perhaps they'll work better. Or maybe he'll just step aside and let someone else do it. But if it bombs big-time, maybe somebody else can try to do better in a few years' time.