Saw the trailers and sort of came to the conclusion that I’ll just save the money and time, I was going to put on this for Predators when it comes out.
The kid that played Aang seemed like a garbage actor, I’d rather they shave off the hair of one of these child actors from a soap opera or pull one of the younger kids from Slum Millionaire out of the ghetto and have them act. Seriously, only Keanu Reeves could get away with that sort of performance and technically, he hasn’t gotten away with it since the first Matrix.
Sheesh, does everyone have to provide a thesis statement to explain why they liked a movie especially if it contradicts your own personal opinion?
Let it go.
people race should be the last thing to argue about now…seriously they could have been purple skinned if that meant the acting was guaranteed to be compelling and convincing. I still have buyers remorse over this…last movie I can actually think of was Never Back Down where I had this feeling.
I made the same mistake at first. Friends got me into it a few years ago. In the last few years, I’ve seen the entire series with other friends and myself maybe a dozen times. Book 3 is actually running in my new roommates room right now, since I spared him from watching the movie to see the show. He started Book 1 on Friday and is ending the series tonight. He’s that hooked.
As an anime fan myself, let me tell you, do yourself a favor and enjoy some of the better writing, action and character development most anime would love to emulate (I said most~ not all. Trust me, I was pretty shocked. Especially by its second season). Considering its shorter season length as well, with a lack of filler and drawn-for-every episode lack of stock imagery~ you would be robbing yourself of a good thing. It’s definitely not a difficult viewing (like some anime, first few episodes can be misleading).
I really hope, that the worst thing the movie can do is rid audiences of their ticket money~ because if it prevents people from [media=youtube]5SGtsBIAwC0&playnext_from=TL&videos=i9ACvNwAjyA&fmt=18"[/media], I’ll never be able to forgive it for that.
Gorath, while I may believe you that I misunderstood Ghosts of Mars, I seriously don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about here.
There was nothing horrifying about 28 Weeks Later beyond maybe the opening and when heterochromia mom gets murdered while strapped the table (which was horrifying half because of the [forced] helplessness and fact that they didn’t cut away from the gorn), which is basically the same time where everything went to Hell like the others were saying.
Unless, of course, you find incompetence terrifying, in which case you were probably pissing and shitting yourself due to the sheer gross incompetence showed to move along the “plot” and add in gorn throughout the movie. Seriously, I think it would be easier to say what was done correctly, i.e. next to nothing, rather than pointing everything wrong with that films and actions of the characters in it. Everyone basically had to hold the Idiot Ball and it’s REALLY tiresome seeing the military look like complete idiots, whereas that was part of what made 28 Days Later so refreshing, good and scary: the military in Days was human and had human reasons for the horrible things they did, whether then being incompetent robots who can’t aim or improvise or even properly protect people like in Weeks.
I’m guessing by “no apologies” you just mean it was gory and didn’t cut away from that gore/gorn. Sure, that’s something that’s semi-respectable, but gore doesn’t make necessarily make a movie scary; it makes it disgusting or cheaply entertaining or even laughable (as in the case of Weeks at many points).
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t mind that you actually enjoyed the movie, but to say that it’s better than Days and that Days is “namby pamby” when it’s one of the few “zombie” movies that manages to capture the isolation and survival aspects correctly? The fuck?
Ye gods, why do we agree on something?
That’s what everyone is saying, though. And that just makes it all the more apparent that it’s Shamalan’s fault for cutting things out that would have been necessary to keep in rather than have characters awkwardly narrate everything.
I mean, when his defense is basically “episodic things are episodic so I’m too lazy to try to adapt them and will instead break up things non-sensically”, why the hell are you defending his inane decisions?
Except that the “hidden gem” was already pretty popular, everyone in this thread and probably even the people of “Aang ain’t white” could have enjoyed the movie even with the wrong skin colors if it was actually decent or, you know, even remotely true to its source AND Hollywood remakes tend to suck more often than not anyway, being cheap attempts at trying to grasp at sure cash.
Hell, this was an attempt at “sure cash” that obviously backfired greatly since a life-action adaptation was nonsense and unnecessary, at least in my eyes.
Besides, as this thread shows, people can obviously enjoy shitty movies, so why stop making them?
I’m going to have to agree with voodazz on this one, specs, even though opinions CAN be wrong. Just let it go.
You’re just not going to convince the few people in this thread that enjoyed it that they shouldn’t have enjoyed it or, at least, that it isn’t anywhere near a good movie.
or maybe he cut a whole bunch of “acting” because the actors were god awful.
look at which extended scenes made the final cut: Dev Patel’s, Asif Mandvi’s, Shaun Toub’s… people who could really act. There’s a reason why Zuko feels like the main character… He has more screen time, more story, less scenes cut, better acting by Patel and his supporting cast…
so the flip side of that is you don’t have scenes with the actual main characters with extended dialog or development, and whenever they did, it was laughably awful. you can probably count the amount of aang speaking lines on your fingers and toes, and you might not even need that much for katara or sokka. They probably did their best, but considering Noah Stringer was cast of an internet video, he needs an all-star actor playing his opposite in every scene to cover up his lack of experience… Nikola Peltz and Jason Rathbone are not those all-star actors.
i’m sure its partly to blame on the 104 minute run-time, but if he could’ve squeezed out any acting from them, it would’ve been apparent in the 30 minutes of screen time they did have. I mean, if they needed to cut stuff, that 10 minute water wall bullshit at the end of the movie could’ve been shortened down, and the random 40-60 second sections of pointless dancing they do through out the movie could’ve gone too.
so yeah. it could be just bad cutting, but i’m willing to gamble and say that he cut scenes because he had to make a choice… call in one girl to do voice overs, or force the audience to watch 15-20 minutes more of the worst acting you’ve ever seen in a multi-million dollar movie? you either patronize your audience and at least give them exposition to move the narration along, or let horrible horrible acting tell the story? even if there’s a fair amount of stuff that needs to be cut because of time constraints, i’m pretty sure going in that the scripted dialog wasn’t meant to be a bunch of individual lines spoken at co-stars, especially when Dev Patel and Asif Mandvi get plenty of time to perform and exposit.
I’m…honestly not sure what to say that to that, since I don’t understand whether you’re (and much less why you would be) defending Night or agreeing with me.
I mean, Night was the one that restricted the casting call, according to Tomahawk. I’m sure that didn’t help the actor pool in any way. Hell, even if the most talented person (which these three obviously aren’t, but again, I’m not going to fault the little kid) ended being white anyway in an open-casting call, at least then it would have been for their merit as an actor rather than for their, you know, whiteness.
Additionally, that line of thought (provided I’m getting where you’re going) doesn’t explain why he just cut out the Kyoshi warriors entirely since those people weren’t the main three horrible actors. Or why he didn’t not even cast Bumi or June or Jeong-Jeong, who sounds like he’s going to end up being Aang’s teacher of fire in the third (I would hope no longer in the works) film. I get not casting Jet, at least, since Jet is ultimately unimportant to the scheme of things even if he’s a likable minor character.
But those other three? And the Kyoshi warriors not being in the final release even though they were advertised as such? It wouldn’t be the first time that false advertisement happened, but seriously, as director, he has duties that he obviously failed at. Isn’t he largely in charge of time and re-casting too and, well, directing his actors how he wants them to act? I could get if he was maybe approaching three hours or even over that already or this movie had hit some delay, but this movie is less than two hours and as far as I know wasn’t delayed by anything despite how much it was rushed (and despite how rushed the 3D–yet another cheap cash attempt, Kelter Skelter, though Night is hardly alone in this unfortunately–ended up being apparently).
I’m not defending him at all. he made his bed and he’s going to have to sleep in it. everything from casting to writing to directing to producing was his job. and it is 100% his fault as to why the movie sucks.
but i’m talking about the last step, not so much everything else. yeah, he should’ve gotten more out of casting. yeah, he should’ve gotten more out of his actors. should’ve directed better. but if you’re talking about cutting things, judging on m.night shyamalan’s tendancies in writing from previous movies and even in “the last airbender” that there should’ve been more there in terms of dialog and acting sequences cut… and if it wasn’t time constraints, it had to be something else.
maybe kyoshi warriors was something that needed to be cut according to time. maybe it was cut because that meant more Noah Stringer in something that didn’t do much for the overall narrative. i’m just saying that there is probably something more to stuff getting cut, especially when you consider the things that remained in the movie.
To those who say they did like the movie, are you sure? I remember that I thought I liked The Punisher when I saw it on TV one time, mostly because of the opening scenes and Frank against that dude in the striped shirt, but after I had watched it for a second time (I think the gap was like three months), I couldn’t stand to watch the whole thing through again. What I had thought was pretty cool initially was just meh and the Italian opera singing was stupid.
I suggest you go see Last Airbender again and if you still like it, I’ll leave you all alone.
Generally speaking the studio is who dictates how long the director can make a movie. Which until I hear that it was his decision to make it 1 hr 45 mins instead of 2 hr or 2 1/2 hr I’m not placing the blame on him.
Re: “Anime”: Avatar is to anime what JLU is to anime. Anime = cartoons; 98% of anime is trash; Avatar, while flawed, is better than 99% of anime.
Re: M. Night’s shitty adaptation: one thing I forgot to mention, and is most important even if the rest of the movie wasn’t garbage, is that, unlike the show, there’s NO DEPTH OF CHARACTER.
Dr. B doesn’t take trains. I do in other cities, so I have to go.
AGREED. This is the very reason I boycotted M.Night years ago. The man is a hack and HOPEFULLY people will finally realize this after they see this apparently bad movie.
I’m sick of this guy being hyped as the new Hitchcock
Man, it’s kind of surreal reading through this thread from the beginning again. I can’t believe the cartoon has apparently been off for two years already.
Whoa, whoa what? Who the fuck said that?
Hitchcock be spinning, yo. So fast he’s probably flown apart.
How do you still get paid to make bad movies? M.Night doesnt need to make another movie ever! I saw it yesterday and it was horrible. Everything was just wrong. I wont go into much details since it’s been stated plenty. One thing I would say is that even my 6 year old nephew pointed out the flaws. During the movie he is asking “why are they saying the name wrong?”, and at the end “why he didnt turn into the fish like the cartoon?” For the most part the kids enjoyed it, I didn’t!
My friends have told me how awesome the show is and I am finally getting around to watching it. Despite Night’s best efforts to tarnish the reputation of the show, I am going to watch the series anyways just to spite him.
