The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender.

First, before I go into this, I should note that I am actually significantly more sympathetic to M. Night Shyamalan's oeuvre than a lot of filmmakers. Admittedly, in my case, that mostly means that I'm hesitant to call him a bad director (largely on the basis of his early work), and am a lot kinder to The Village than many moviegoers, if only because this scene pretty much confirmed to me that I have a foot fetish:



This may be because watching The Sixth Sense as a child really opened up my eyes to the dramatic potential of the thriller to a child whose tastes tended strongly towards comedy up until that point. That said, his movies from Lady in the Water to After Earth, I all freely admit to be total shit (His later movies are much better, though, while I haven't seen Glass yet, but I'm not holding out much hope for it). Although, despite this being the only one of his films to be recieved so badly that it made the Project, it might not have been his fault that it turned out this bad. Here's a forum post made by someone who was allegedly involved in the movie (put in hide because it's pretty long):

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Production wrapped 5 years ago so I don't think Paramount is going to care. They know it bombed.

What it came down to was M Night really was the only one who knew the show and what he was doing (the first draft of the screenplay? gorgeous. hence Bryke giving him the okay). The producers, who are actually in charge of at least 80% of production including casting.... not so much. They clearly never bothered to watch the show, nor had the ghostwriter who did the final screenplay.

Nicola was hired because she's the daughter of someone one of the producers owed a favor to as Hollywood loves its nepotism. (Her audition tape was subpar at best). In having to cast her they had to cast a guy who could pass as her brother - hence Jackson. His audition was actually pretty good. He's a funny guy and had clearly seen the show. Too bad the producers felt the movie didn't have time for intentional humor and cut all that out of the script. Noah was the only one who honestly openly auditioned and was chosen based on talent. He just needed extra help acting because with a lot of it being green screened he was talking to air a lot of the time. Experienced adults have a hard time doing that let alone a kid.

If you recall they initially signed on Jesse McCartney as Zuko. Why? Because otherwise the lead actor roster would be "starring: two unknown kids you never heard of and that guy who played a minor character in Twilight!".  And then someone with a brain realized "wait a minute this show is kind of anime-esque and we're hiring a bunch of white kids. Um.". So what did they do? Because they couldn't can Nicola without someone being really ticked, Jesse willingly bowed out and went with another project offered at the time. Even still, they still needed a big name to draw people in but it couldn't be another white kid. Dev Patel just gave an Oscar-winning performance and was willing to sign on. And in getting him they had to make the rest of the Fire Nation match.  Which is why it turned into heroic white kids VS evil brown people (which was intentionally unintentional).

And then it was horribly budgeted. The opening at the SWT all nice and pretty in Greenland? Cost big bucks. And then they realized with a story about people manipulating elements that couldn't be believably done with in camera practical effects. So they had to rebudget and gave most of the money to ILM for post production. You go from the beautiful SWT to everything looking dingy because everything else was shot in Pennsylvania. The Fire Nation Royal Palace? An old high school in Philadelphia. Parts of the Earth Kingdom (including Kyoshi Island which got cut)? Reading, PA.  And everything that was the NWT.... some sets built in front of giant green screens in an old emptied aircraft  hangar  in the outskirts of Philadelphia. Yeah.

And ILM was rushed despite most of the movie's look being left up to them. And you had novice directors hired by producers to oversee that process. That's how come the pebble dance happened. Sadly at that point M Night was just tired of arguing with the overheads, gave up, and collected his paycheck. If you look at the movie's premiere and red carpet footage you can tell his excitement and happiness is fake. Bryke had little say in the film despite being listed as executive producers. That title was a fancy way of saying that they created the show it was based on and they're still alive so they need some kind of nice credit. The actual producers didn't know what they were dealing with and were only interested in a quick buck.  Bryke and M Night gave up on the film around the same time for same reasons. The other people working on the film were a pain to deal with and Nickelodeon themselves only wanted the final product as quickly as possible and the money it would presumably make them.

At least they hired good caterers. The food was great on that set.

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I also watched the entire series (not when it first aired; that happened after I initially grew out of watching Nickelodeon,) and it was pretty damn good. And one of the show's strengths was that it had almost nothing superfluous (except for "The Great Divide") in terms of episodes, and even the episodes that don't advance the story still have some damn good character development (like "The Tales of Ba Sing Se"). According to that forum post, the original script was 7 hours long. How does one condense such a script to a 103-minute, 8-second movie? Poorly. 

• The most fundamental problem with the film is that, due to the whole "compressing an eight-hour story into about a fifth the length," the dialogue is going to be heavy on exposition. Most of the movie is built of exposition and glancing over a shitton of elements that were given proper justice in the show. This makes a very frustrating film even without the other flaws.
  
• And one of the biggest problems with the movie comes to light pretty early on: They pronounce it AH-vuh-tar with an open central unrounded vowel, as opposed to the Near-open front unrounded vowel used in the show (and real life.) This is the first time they mispronounce terms used in the show, since, in particular, Aang's name has the same mispronunciation, and Sokka is pronounced SOH-kka, despite actually using the same a sound they used for Avatar.
  
• The one problem that I still think Shyamalan does deserve the blame for: the very lackluster performances. Earlier on in his career, it created a sort of stylisation that helped to ground these films a bit, make them seem a bit closer to reality (and I think this may have been a factor in why this autistic child came to latch onto The Sixth Sense in ways that no other serious drama had done before; a horror film where nobody screamed), but eventually, it just started to look like nobody could be arsed to give a good performance, and Shyamalan couldn't be arsed to actually direct them. And now, with characters that most of the people who're going to see the movie already know and love, he's just stripped all that characterisation to the bone, leaving almost nothing. Sokka in particular loses anything that made him distinctive: formerly a meat-loving smartass with a shocking amount of intellect and a very low tolerance for frustration, he's just a sad sack who probably hit his sister Katara here. It's really telling that the TVTropes character page for this film (as opposed to the one for the series) is just a big nothingburger because nobody passed the Plinkett Test. Everyone is just reading lines, and nobody is acting. And this time around, I can only assume he just gave up because the script was so butchered that there was no point.
  
• BRING ME ALL YOUR ELDERLY!!!! This was explained so much better in the show.
  
• And why the fuck does Iroh sound like Guido Sarducci? And why does he have dreadlocks? In the show, he was a short, stout old man with a face like a badger, and a love for tea. Now, he looks (and acts) like Don Novello got abducted by Psychlos at an early age.
  
• And now for one of the most infamous gaffes: Aang gets imprisoned in a prison for Earthbenders and eventually leads a rebellion. Earthbending, for those od us not familiar with the series, is the ability to manipulate rock and earth. You basically have the ability to make the Earth itself play dead and roll over. This happened in the show, but they changed something crucial for the film: in the series, that prison was in a metal ship on the open seas, SPECIFICALLY TO THWART ANY ATTEMPTS AT EARTHBENDING. In the film, that prison is in a fucking quarry.
  
  
  Seriously, ANYONE Who watched the show should know immediately that this is like locking up a prisoner and keeping the key in the cell. And the fight choreography is really bland, consisting of mostly occasional columns of CGI rocks popping up, and one rock getting tossed at a guard's head.
• And the CGI looks like dogshit. May not be quite at After Earth levels, where the actors and the CGI were rendered at different resolutions, but there's so much blatant shit it's not even funny. And to make matters worse, the 3D rendering was one of the worst ever made. Thankfully, I don't have a 3D TV, so I don't have to deal with that.
  
• WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD HAIR DESIGN? Seriously, this was the first image we see of Princess Yue, and it couldn't look more like a dick if they added throbbing purple highlights to her hair and added a blowhole that spurted out milk!
  
• Also, for those of us who didn't read the post, there's a really unfortunate paradigm in the casting: our heroes are all white, and the villains aren't. It should also be noted that, in the show, the exact opposite was true: Katara and Sokka were darker-skinned than Azula and Zuko in the series. To be fair, this did happen with the series, but given that those were different times, and that putting Mae Whitman's voice to a character who happens to be Asian and putting white actors in roles that are clearly meant to be Asian are two different beasts, and that the series put a Hell of a lot more love into portraying the Pan-Asian culture that became the world of Avatar than the film, it just makes everything a lot more needlessly fucked up. And there's a few reasons where casting white actors might make be theoretically defensible (particularly for much older films), but cultural prejudice isn't much of a problem here, since this was based on a hit series that was popular enough to merit a $150 million adaptation. And it's not like the white actors really added to the commercial viability of the film (American audeinces are going to be a lot more likely to go to a movie starring Scarlett Johansson than one starring Rinko Kikuchi, solely because Johansson has the marketing hype behind her and Kikuchi doesn't. And this vicious cycle will go on forever until someone decides to change it. And it'll only happen piecemeal. Why, yes, this does fucking suck.) Of the three members of Team Avatar in the film, only Jackson Rathbone had any previous acting experience, and that was as Jasper in Twilight. Dev Patel is easily the most famous actor in the film, and that's because he was in Slumdog Millionaire.
  

So, in conclusion: