Thanks to merely two degrees of separation, I was able to find the gracious host of this blogfest, Alex J. Cavanaugh. And you can find him HERE!
Here are the rules:
On Monday, September 19, post a list of up to ten of the worst movies you’ve ever had the misfortune to watch. Films that just oozed awfulness and featured plot holes so big you could drive a bus through them. Any genre or year, but only theater and straight to video/DVD titles. (Otherwise we’d all list every movie ever made by the SyFy Channel!)
Here is my worst.
M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender."
Alright, let's start with the plot, which most of you may already know.
Two siblings find a young boy in an iceberg, who turns out to be the Avatar, the savior of the four nations of the world.
He must master Water Bending before he can save the world.
So he masters Water Bending. THE END.
Not only does this plot make no sense (especially when compared to the show), it also leaves you hanging. What happened in between? Well, that's just it. Really, nothing monumental EVER happens in the movie. The reason for this may very well be that the producer wanted to create an action-packed adventure with three kids being hunted by an angry fire-bending prince, with non-stop fight scenes (if that is the case, they also did a really bad job at it). But the more likely reason is that the actual show contained twenty episodes in the first season, each clocking in at roughly twenty minutes. That's a total of four hundred minutes, or six hours and forty minutes. The movie was one hour and forty-three minutes long, including credits. They tried to squeeze in anything semi-important, and therefore made it really confusing. The characters wound up practically teleporting to different parts of the world. I could go on about the plot for days, but I know you'd rather I didn't, and I would rather I didn't.
The acting.
It was terrible. Everything about it was bad.
The main character, Aang, is supposed to be a fun-loving little dude who always has a smile on his face. Instead, he's the most serious character in the movie. In a scene where he says "I love games, too," it looks though as if he's just seen the end of all times, and looked into the bowels of death.
Sokka, the 16-year-old brother who found Aang, is supposed to be cynical, sarcastic, and an all-around funny, sort of ladies' man. They got the cocky, 27-year-old Jackson Rathbone, the guy who played Jasper in Twilight (quote: "the one who looks like he's always in pain") to play him. Did he do a terrible job, even though he's a name actor? I mentioned he was in Twilight, yes? Plus, he and his sister were the only white people in the entire water tribe.
All the firebenders (the badguys) were played by Middle-Easterns. I don't have a problem with them, but you would think someone would find it offensive. To me, it seems a little racist to make all of them the enemies. And the actor who played the intimidating "General Xiao" was played by the same man in Spiderman 2, the owner of the pizza shop that Peter Parker works at.
The bending is a unique process where the elements of nature move according to the movements of the body, the speed of it being no exception. Did they get this correct? Nay, good sir! In this, the benders do a ridiculously long Kung Fu windup (which would wear you out, I'm sure) in order to use a tiiiiiiiiiny bit of bending, like blowing out a candle, or splashing a drop of water on a friend's head. (This explains Chinese water torture; it's not that they were trying to make the people go crazy, it's just literally as fast as they could go whilst bending.)
They also pronounced almost every name in the movie wrong.
The only redeemable quality that I found in the movie was the costumes. They did a good job on the costumes. Bravo.
That was probably the worst "big" movie I've ever seen. Some people, who haven't seen the show, may have enjoyed it. But the IMDb rating was 4.5 out of 10 stars, and the Metascore was a mere 20 out of 100.
| (This cool-looking scene never actually happens, in case you didn't guess that already.) |
