I'd heard a lot about this movie, and came into it with low expectations, expecting irredeemable trash. But this movie exceeded those expectations, at least at the beginning.
I noticed the Race Lift on all the characters, who have become mysteriously white, and the odd mispronunciations of names. But I just rolled with it, since at first, I was enjoying what I was seeing. The settings were fantastic, and I was liking what I saw of the story so far.
The bending attacks ranged from looking pathetically lame and not lining up at all with the characters' arm and body movements, to looking pretty damn good. However, things that work in a cartoon can look rather odd in a movie. Zuko's fire attacks hit Katara's water attacks and they both extinguish each other. Characters get rocks hurled at them which should really hurt more or even kill. Fire launches people across the room without burning them. These aren't any kind of real life physics; these are video game physics! I also note that when bending isn't used, the characters use lots of martial arts instead.
The story has some major problems, mainly that it rushes through plot elements quickly and doesn't give us much time to get to care about the characters. These start to become problems early on, but by halfway through the movie, it really gets a lot worse.
How bad is it? To use one example, we see Sokka randomly fall in love with the princess of a kingdom, which is explained only in voice-over narration. He is later seen holding hands with the princess, then later delivering a heartfelt sad speech before kissing her, and... that's it for the romance. No buildup, no reason for the audience to care.
A worse example is the killing of the moon god, who is in the form of a fish. We're told that the thing even exists like 6 minutes before it's killed, and its death is undone by the princess doing something seemingly random only about 2 minutes later. No buildup, no way for the audience to know what the hell is even going on if they haven't watched the cartoon!! Or even care.
The cause of these problems is simple and stupid: the movie tried to cram 20 episodes of a cartoon into 90 minutes of movie! I think the movie at least had the potential to be a decent interpretation of the source material if it didn't bite off more than it could chew.
Starts out better than I expected, but degenerates into an incoherent mess
I'd heard a lot about this movie, and came into it with low expectations, expecting irredeemable trash. But this movie exceeded those expectations, at least at the beginning.
I noticed the Race Lift on all the characters, who have become mysteriously white, and the odd mispronunciations of names. But I just rolled with it, since at first, I was enjoying what I was seeing. The settings were fantastic, and I was liking what I saw of the story so far.
The bending attacks ranged from looking pathetically lame and not lining up at all with the characters' arm and body movements, to looking pretty damn good. However, things that work in a cartoon can look rather odd in a movie. Zuko's fire attacks hit Katara's water attacks and they both extinguish each other. Characters get rocks hurled at them which should really hurt more or even kill. Fire launches people across the room without burning them. These aren't any kind of real life physics; these are video game physics! I also note that when bending isn't used, the characters use lots of martial arts instead.
The story has some major problems, mainly that it rushes through plot elements quickly and doesn't give us much time to get to care about the characters. These start to become problems early on, but by halfway through the movie, it really gets a lot worse.
How bad is it? To use one example, we see Sokka randomly fall in love with the princess of a kingdom, which is explained only in voice-over narration. He is later seen holding hands with the princess, then later delivering a heartfelt sad speech before kissing her, and... that's it for the romance. No buildup, no reason for the audience to care.
A worse example is the killing of the moon god, who is in the form of a fish. We're told that the thing even exists like 6 minutes before it's killed, and its death is undone by the princess doing something seemingly random only about 2 minutes later. No buildup, no way for the audience to know what the hell is even going on if they haven't watched the cartoon!! Or even care.
The cause of these problems is simple and stupid: the movie tried to cram 20 episodes of a cartoon into 90 minutes of movie! I think the movie at least had the potential to be a decent interpretation of the source material if it didn't bite off more than it could chew.