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Since: Dec, 1969
07/09/2010 00:00:00
They didn't even hit all the major plot points, just a couple of them and a few minor ones. Sozen's comet isn't mentioned until the very end, they dropped the avatar state, Ung could go to and from the spirit world at a whim, the characters are nothing like their animated counterparts, and either Appa was incredibly ugly, or he didn't get enough screen time for me to have a good look at him (now that I think about it, it was both). Also, there was a disturbing lack of Koizilla, Yroh had far too few lines about tea, the intro was... it was... indescribably bad. And thats only part of it.
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even worse than you've heard.
There's exactly one good thing about this film, which is that it's so awful people who boycott it because of the casting won't be missing anything. The SFX are passable, but nowhere near as good as they should have been with the film's budget, and the fight choreography is OK compared to most movies but awful compared to the show.
Shyamalan is faithful to the show's plot, but he compresses 10 hours of story into an hour and 45 minutes by hitting each major plot point but jettisoning everything that made the story worthwhile - humor, characterization, worldbuilding, logic. Here's a sample of the writing quality - on the show, Earthbenders are imprisoned on an ironclad ship, and the Gaang steals coal from the engine room so they can Earthbend it and fight back. In the movie, they're just locked in a dirt-floored prison camp, where they stand around helplessly until Aang reminds them that THE GROUND IS MADE OF DIRT. A decent adaptation would have been willing to change the details of the story to save time while preserving its spirit, instead of giving us a plot that's technically faithful but completely soulless. (I mean, why even bother including Momo when you don't have time to do anything worthwhile with him OR time to develop characters who are central to the plot?)
I would have been willing to grudgingly overlook the whitewashing of the main protagonists if the white actors had really nailed their characters. They don't. They're all awful even for child actors, although it's hard to blame them considering the dialogue they get (even Dev Patel can't manage much). There is just no chance Shyamalan couldn't have found Asian and Inuit actors who could do AT LEAST this well. And he compounds the racism by adding in sexism - all of Katara's character development and badass moments are systematically either removed entirely, drastically downplayed, or given to a male character.
I could go on about more problems - awful dialogue, no characterization, dark cinematography. The decision to change the pronunciation of character names is even more annoying than you imagine. But really, there is just nothing good here. Even wanting to laugh at it doesn't justify the ticket price. This movie goes straight past So Bad Its Good and loops around to So Bad Its Horrible.