Preface: I had a few things I didn't like about M. Night's Last Airbender, much like everyone who saw it. However, there were also a few things I didn't like about about the reasons people were giving that it was bad and I felt was off-base. Since that had yet to be ranted about in the internet ad-nauseam, I'd figure it was worth bringing to the forefront.Original Post: March '12
I was just on a forum where
someone was talking about how M. Night claiming the ridiculous manner
in which the movie implemented its bending - supposedly the movements
were the character building up enough chi to release the elemental
attacks which is why nothing ever happens until they’re last pose - was
him trying to cover up for his laziness.
I disagree.
First off, there’s seems to be this overall sense from the community that M. Night didn’t care about the show and that this was, at best, an attempt to restore faith with the studio or worst a ‘paycheck’ gig. Neither makes much sense when put under any real scrutiny. For one, M. Night came to Paramount to do the film and even that aside, the production on this was $150 million. For comparison, Inception was $160 million. That’s a difference of about 6%. Inception looks a lot better The Last Airbender and by a lot more than 6% and it isn’t because M. Night was lazy.
It was because he was incompetent.
When I see people judge a film, by and large such critiques are based around the quality of the script/screenplay and the performances of the actors. They either completely ignore or flat out deride the technical aspects of film making - referring to it as ‘spectacle’ or worse, assuming good production is solely the result of the budget. Most people don’t stop to consider how difficult it is to physically make a film. Being a part of multiple student film productions with zero budgets, I can personally attest that the time and effort it takes to make a film is astounding. It can take as long as half a day to film two people having a five minute conversation in an empty room, with over a dozen film crew for the scene. It’s the director’s responsibility to…well, direct all of this chaos and while it’s hard enough to do so under the relatively easy conditions of a character drama, it requires exponentially more effort when you take into account a film that requires a completely new world to fabricate, dynamic action to engage the audience and convincing special effects.
All of M. Night’s previous films were small in scope and revolved around the same basic premise, with each film offering diminishing returns. There was nothing about that work that indicated he was capable of handling a film of this scope and technical complexity and it shows in every aspect of TLA, from the rushed and completely unrefined script he wrote (“we were forced under the water of the ocean” srsly?), the obvious lack of preparation with the actor’s performances (Rathbone in particular is seen literally stumbling over his lines multiple times in the film), the piss-poor action sequences (try the ‘see a random Fire Nation soldier awkwardly sitting still to wait for his cue while a fight’s going on in front of him, take a shot’ drinking game and you’ll pass out before the earth prison scene ends) and the completely inept handling of the special effects (ignoring the ‘chi building’ that started this whole thing, there’s multiple scenes where the characters are supposedly bending and yet nothing is shown being affected…at all). Literally every aspect of this film not directly related to the director’s responsibilities (production design, the special effects that did show up) show that The Last Airbender was M. Night simply not knowing what the hell he was doing.
So why do most people seem to want to put it as being lazy despite how little sense that makes? Because it’s a pretty common self defense mechanism. In the real world, when bad things happen - and TLA is a bad bad thing - they can just as easily be completely senseless and random as otherwise, with no opportunity to bring closure or order from chaos…so we make something up. It’s the reason conspiracy theories exist.* It offers control…and that’s comforting, which is the key aspect here. It’s easier to say that M. Night was being lazy because laziness is something we control. We can chose to not be lazy, but incompetence…well, you can try to be better at something, but that’s no guarantee you will be and by all accounts M. Night never even bothered to begin with…so I guess you could say he was lazy after all.
*Moviebob was pretty on the ball about this in one of his Big Picture episodes, which is somewhat ironic considering how completely off the mark he was recommending people go see TLA in his movie review.
Thing is that back when this was relevant, one of the most common comments being made was that the movie failed because it tried to condense too many plot points from the show. This always kinda irked me because it essentially put the blame on the show rather than the real problem.
So let me hit you with something to chew on:
I decided to do a test not too long ago comparing the length of the two part finale of the first season with the movie. That may seem unfair at first because, as I said, the assumption is that the movie had much less time than the series to get all the plot points the show had, but this turns out to be incorrect.
First off a half hour tv show is not 30 minutes long. On average, it’s 22 minutes as the rest of the time is for airing commercials. This makes the actual finale of the show approximately 44 minutes long (point of fact I checked and it’s exactly 44 minutes). The show’s seasons 1 finale included the following in their entirety:
- Aang’s journey into the spirit world.
- Aang’s battle w/ Koh.
- The identities of the ocean/moon spirits.
- Zhao’s plan and history regarding the o/m spirits.
- Iroh’s failure in Ba Sing Se.
- Iroh’s journey in the spirit realm.
- Zuko’s infiltration, capture of the avatar and subsequent escape.
- Zhao killing the moon spirit.
- Yue’s history regarding the o/m spirits.
- Yue’s death.
- Koizilla
- Zhao’s death via Koizilla.
Bear in mind that all these threads are completely self contained in the finale. They were never mentioned in any fashion in any prior episodes. They even have space to fit in a spoiled prince subplot where the guy mis-pronounces Sokka’s name as Soh-ka. Watch it again, you’ll love that part!
Conversely the movie had 40 minutes spent in the Northern Water Tribe (NWT). Being four minutes shy of what the show had, it contained the following:
- Zhao’s attack.
- Zuko’s infiltration and capture of the avatar.
- Zhao killing the moon spirit.
- Yue’s death.
- Zhao’s death.
Now the elephant in the room is the fact that the show had one episode prior to the finale that was spent in the NWT. I don’t think this matters as much as one would might presume. Again, all the plot threads I noted above for the finale were contained entirely in the finale. The episode in question - The Water Teacher - revolved only around two plots, one of which was entirely self-contained:
- Katara battling the sexist teacher, an issue which never came up again and could be excised completely without really harming the overall story.
- Sokka courting Yue, the entirety of which could have been fit in the finale if it had replaced the spoiled prince subplot and Zuko carrying the avatar out into the middle of nowhere, the replacing of which would not have adversely affected the overall story at all.
Fact is the only thing this additional episode had to contribute was the scene where they first enter the city and meeting the new cast members that would be included in the finale. All this to prove that once again, this movie did not fail because it bit off more than it could chew. It failed because M. Night is a terrible writer and director.
I disagree.
First off, there’s seems to be this overall sense from the community that M. Night didn’t care about the show and that this was, at best, an attempt to restore faith with the studio or worst a ‘paycheck’ gig. Neither makes much sense when put under any real scrutiny. For one, M. Night came to Paramount to do the film and even that aside, the production on this was $150 million. For comparison, Inception was $160 million. That’s a difference of about 6%. Inception looks a lot better The Last Airbender and by a lot more than 6% and it isn’t because M. Night was lazy.
It was because he was incompetent.
When I see people judge a film, by and large such critiques are based around the quality of the script/screenplay and the performances of the actors. They either completely ignore or flat out deride the technical aspects of film making - referring to it as ‘spectacle’ or worse, assuming good production is solely the result of the budget. Most people don’t stop to consider how difficult it is to physically make a film. Being a part of multiple student film productions with zero budgets, I can personally attest that the time and effort it takes to make a film is astounding. It can take as long as half a day to film two people having a five minute conversation in an empty room, with over a dozen film crew for the scene. It’s the director’s responsibility to…well, direct all of this chaos and while it’s hard enough to do so under the relatively easy conditions of a character drama, it requires exponentially more effort when you take into account a film that requires a completely new world to fabricate, dynamic action to engage the audience and convincing special effects.
All of M. Night’s previous films were small in scope and revolved around the same basic premise, with each film offering diminishing returns. There was nothing about that work that indicated he was capable of handling a film of this scope and technical complexity and it shows in every aspect of TLA, from the rushed and completely unrefined script he wrote (“we were forced under the water of the ocean” srsly?), the obvious lack of preparation with the actor’s performances (Rathbone in particular is seen literally stumbling over his lines multiple times in the film), the piss-poor action sequences (try the ‘see a random Fire Nation soldier awkwardly sitting still to wait for his cue while a fight’s going on in front of him, take a shot’ drinking game and you’ll pass out before the earth prison scene ends) and the completely inept handling of the special effects (ignoring the ‘chi building’ that started this whole thing, there’s multiple scenes where the characters are supposedly bending and yet nothing is shown being affected…at all). Literally every aspect of this film not directly related to the director’s responsibilities (production design, the special effects that did show up) show that The Last Airbender was M. Night simply not knowing what the hell he was doing.
So why do most people seem to want to put it as being lazy despite how little sense that makes? Because it’s a pretty common self defense mechanism. In the real world, when bad things happen - and TLA is a bad bad thing - they can just as easily be completely senseless and random as otherwise, with no opportunity to bring closure or order from chaos…so we make something up. It’s the reason conspiracy theories exist.* It offers control…and that’s comforting, which is the key aspect here. It’s easier to say that M. Night was being lazy because laziness is something we control. We can chose to not be lazy, but incompetence…well, you can try to be better at something, but that’s no guarantee you will be and by all accounts M. Night never even bothered to begin with…so I guess you could say he was lazy after all.
*Moviebob was pretty on the ball about this in one of his Big Picture episodes, which is somewhat ironic considering how completely off the mark he was recommending people go see TLA in his movie review.
2nd Post
Let’s dip back into this well for no reason whatsoever. What can I tell you? It’s a slow week. Anyway…The Last Airbender sucks.
Thing is that back when this was relevant, one of the most common comments being made was that the movie failed because it tried to condense too many plot points from the show. This always kinda irked me because it essentially put the blame on the show rather than the real problem.
So let me hit you with something to chew on:
I decided to do a test not too long ago comparing the length of the two part finale of the first season with the movie. That may seem unfair at first because, as I said, the assumption is that the movie had much less time than the series to get all the plot points the show had, but this turns out to be incorrect.
First off a half hour tv show is not 30 minutes long. On average, it’s 22 minutes as the rest of the time is for airing commercials. This makes the actual finale of the show approximately 44 minutes long (point of fact I checked and it’s exactly 44 minutes). The show’s seasons 1 finale included the following in their entirety:
- Aang’s journey into the spirit world.
- Aang’s battle w/ Koh.
- The identities of the ocean/moon spirits.
- Zhao’s plan and history regarding the o/m spirits.
- Iroh’s failure in Ba Sing Se.
- Iroh’s journey in the spirit realm.
- Zuko’s infiltration, capture of the avatar and subsequent escape.
- Zhao killing the moon spirit.
- Yue’s history regarding the o/m spirits.
- Yue’s death.
- Koizilla
- Zhao’s death via Koizilla.
Bear in mind that all these threads are completely self contained in the finale. They were never mentioned in any fashion in any prior episodes. They even have space to fit in a spoiled prince subplot where the guy mis-pronounces Sokka’s name as Soh-ka. Watch it again, you’ll love that part!
Conversely the movie had 40 minutes spent in the Northern Water Tribe (NWT). Being four minutes shy of what the show had, it contained the following:
- Zhao’s attack.
- Zuko’s infiltration and capture of the avatar.
- Zhao killing the moon spirit.
- Yue’s death.
- Zhao’s death.
Now the elephant in the room is the fact that the show had one episode prior to the finale that was spent in the NWT. I don’t think this matters as much as one would might presume. Again, all the plot threads I noted above for the finale were contained entirely in the finale. The episode in question - The Water Teacher - revolved only around two plots, one of which was entirely self-contained:
- Katara battling the sexist teacher, an issue which never came up again and could be excised completely without really harming the overall story.
- Sokka courting Yue, the entirety of which could have been fit in the finale if it had replaced the spoiled prince subplot and Zuko carrying the avatar out into the middle of nowhere, the replacing of which would not have adversely affected the overall story at all.
Fact is the only thing this additional episode had to contribute was the scene where they first enter the city and meeting the new cast members that would be included in the finale. All this to prove that once again, this movie did not fail because it bit off more than it could chew. It failed because M. Night is a terrible writer and director.
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