Ebert's review of The Last Airbender (they hastily dropped the "Avatar" from the title after you-know-what) strikes blows for good animated features and against the misuse of 3D.
Other people have documented in great detail how M. Night botched the casting to make the movie more Peoria-friendly, and how he squirmed on the hook when confronted with this, with various dodges about racial ambiguities in anime. But in the end the casting doesn't even seem to have been the movie's biggest problem, which is (based on this review and others I've seen which leaked beforehand) that the movie just plain sucks.
Several takeaways for me from all this:
- Adding 3D to a movie after the fact is an abomination that may well be even worse than colorizing, and will almost certainly be employed consistently to milk that many more bucks out of a movie that was no good to begin with.
- I owe it to myself to watch the TV series.
- An anime-style feature-film version of the story would be well worth doing as a way to make up for this.
- Based on his track record, M. Night is less a talented director who made some aesthetic mistakes and more an emperor who got lucky and is only just now being stripped naked.
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Even though I was accused by a friend of mine of exhibiting unbridled weeaboo-ism in regards to the TV show (in my defense, I wasn't making a snide comment about the show itself but the fandom writing porn about its clearly underage characters, which he somehow misinterpreted as me saying that I thought Japanese animation aimed at kids was superior to Western animation... yeah, I don't know either) I actually have liked what I've seen of the show. It's beautifully animated and has a good story. I hope that more Western animation follows its lead and more serialized stories, rather than episodic comedies, will come about.
In a way I'm kind of glad that the movie is being panned because I had my suspicions that it would be pretty terrible. The whole whitewashing of the cast was a big deal amongst my friends who are fans of the animated series. But I'm also sort of disappointed that a decent property was mishandled so terribly. I wish that people could just leave well-enough alone.
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I was, I admit, not as up in arms about the cast issue as other people, if only because I hadn't seen much of the show at that point. What became clear to me in time was how this was symptomatic of the cavalier handling of the material in general. They didn't care about these things; they just wanted to wring some money out of a popular franchise. They still don't understand that fans are more than willing to rally when they see something they love get manhandled that badly. I am willing to make exceptions up to a point for the things I like, but in the end the one thing I can't excuse is if the final product is junk by any measure.
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I also did not care about the cast issue as well (after all, there was no moaning and groaning about the fact that Caucasian actors were voicing these characters....).
I came late to the party in regards to the animated series, but it was thanks to co-workers (at the studio I was working at the time) that convinced me to give it a look. I was not disappointed.
As for the film...the reviews are brutal, a ball peen hammer to the face, and it will certainly have a lot of fans up in arms. I do agree with what you said about the cavalier mishandling of original material--it's definitely NOT a good thing (which is why STAR TREK 2009 succeeded--they gave a s@&# about the material and put their best efforts into it).
As for M. Night...I liked his first two films very much, but I'm wondering if too much hope was placed on him too soon. The same thing has been done to other directors like Neil Blompkamp (sic) and Christopher Nolan, but to be fair, Nolan has definitely hit his pitches out of the park, while Neil still has to put another film on his resume besides DISTRICT 9.
Interesting points made, as always....
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Actually, I disagree completely re: Trek -- I had fun in the theater, but when I was done it was like walking around behind the façade of a stage show: all fakery. I felt Trek should have just been put out to pasture for a good long time instead of resurrected this cynically and cheaply, but I'm discovering I'm in the minority of fans on this note.
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Hmmm...no, actually, I did hear the same thing about Trek--that it should have been left alone, put out to pasture for a longer period of time. While I did have some issues with the film, I did end up enjoying it a lot in the theater and out of the theater.
I guess one could look back at Toho's Godzilla films--there was a period of, what, nearly ten years after the last G film in the 70's to the return in the mid 1980's. But...there is always the danger that if it's kept out for too long, the return might not work out so well.
(And I do know a lot of the facade of a stage show--I've had to work on stage crew myself....8-))
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