The Last Airbender

Oh God. It's bad. It's very very bad. For the longest time I refused to see this on principal but - sweet baby cucumbers - I had no way of knowing just how bad it would be. Just - Just give me a minute, okay?

I might have given off the impression that I don't like movies with adapted source material. That's not it at all. I think the idea of movie adaptations, at their core, are flattering. As a writer, you know you've crafted a great story when people are so drawn in by the universe you've created that they want to start playing with it too.

We all know this is Twilight fanfiction, right?

And adaptations have a tall order. They are supposed to honor the existing universe with new adventures and/or characters while presenting the whole thing to the general public in a way that makes sense. Films based off of TV shows are by and large mostly harder to pull off than book adaptations because of they have more characters and a lot more plot threads.

I said MOST of the time, Jon. Get back here.
I only have five episodes left before I start with you. 

Now. About this thing.

WHY?

Yes, that's a good start. Why was this made?
Apparently M. Night Shyamalan started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender because his daughter wanted to go as Katara for Halloween.

Pilfering ideas from the children? For shame Shyama-llama. 

I can only assume that Shyama-llama gleaned all of his knowledge about the show by scrolling through a few tumblrs and maybe reading some shady wiki entries, because he decided the best way to handle Avatar: The Last Airbender was to treat it like a comic book. I'm serious. See, there are two styles when it comes to adapting television into movies.

Style One is when you take the premise and the character names and maybe even some trace of the actual plot lines and update to modern day. It's used mostly with older shows.

And apparently also with spy shows, which I did not notice until I made this. 

Style Two is when the movie is a continuation of the show. Same actors, same established plot lines, and if the show continues on after that, then the movie becomes part of the canon. It's mostly used with Disney children's shows and/or shows that recently ended.

I have mixed feelings about what I have created here today.

Comic book movies, on the other hand, draw from a large and varied canon and the specifics are usual unknown/accessible for the majority of the audience. It's similar to Style One from above, made from broad strokes that seek to reference the source material without becoming bogged down by depicting the time Aang lied to get two tribes of stereotypes to stop fighting.

That could work. Technically. Technically I'll eat a potato if enough butter, cheese, sour cream, and chives have been slathered on it.

Still not enough cheese to make me even consider putting this near my mouth. 

So he tried it. Shyama-llama wrote a script including all 20 episodes of Season One than ran over seven hours long and then compressed it into a 1hour 43 minute movie. Was this intended to be a launching point for a new franchise? Did they Do they plan on making Seasons Two and Three into movies? Who was the intended audience for this? Why does everyone have the wrong hair in this?

I'm sorry, but if I keep trying to divine Shyamalan's motivation for this I am going to do something crazy, like eat a potato.

Sokka the Power Ranger. I'm sorry but
this was killing me throughout the entire movie. 

Stupid uproar over casting choices is nothing new, especially when the movie is an adaptation. With The Last Airbender, the producers were fighting off the hot,spicy charge of racism from all directions.

What if I told you it was supposed to look like this?

I am forced to imagine that there would have been a musical number.

Look, I don't think the casting director was just deliberately racist. This is just another unfortunate case of Hollywood white washing.

Guess who gets a speaking part in this scene?

It was stupid. There are a lot of stupid decisions that make up this movie. For starters, they squander time like a five year old on the smallest details. 

The symbol change should have been our first warning. 

The opening sequence is faithfully recreated and the bending throughout looks great. Apparently it cost a metric ton of gold, five arms, and six virgins. But the most important part of this was Katara's narration:

"Water. Earth. Fire. Air. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the old days, a time of peace when the Avatar kept balance between the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads. But that all changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar mastered all four elements. Only he could stop the ruthless firebenders. But when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years have passed and the Fire Nation is nearing victory in the War. Two years ago, my father and the men of my tribe journeyed to the Earth Kingdom to help fight against the Fire Nation, leaving me and my brother to look after our tribe. Some people believe that the Avatar was never reborn into the Air Nomads, and that the cycle is broken. But I haven't lost hope. I still believe that somehow, the Avatar will return to save the world."

It's absent from the opening bending scene. Shyamalan doesn't trust the audience to watch action and listen to voice-overs. So we get scrolling text. 

I don't know why they felt the need to re-write her opener. The phrasing is stilted and to add insult to injury, doesn't explain things that well. And they knew it didn't make sense because they spend the first ten minutes or so of the movie establishing things that should have already been covered.

EXPOSITION!
Such awkward exposition.

This movie has a weird relationship with the Spirit World, constantly talking about how the spirits are watching over mankind with sadness and how the Fire Nation doesn't want to live by the spirits. They're trying to make it synonymous with Christian Heaven and it just doesn't work very well.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh. The opening of this movie is decent; they quickly hit all of the biggest plot points to get the ball rolling and the setting looks like it should.

Well, hello there green screen.

But the dialogue. Oh god the dialogue.

I wouldn't mind the new lines if only the ones they made weren't so forced and dripping in awkwardness. None of the actors are particularly good at emoting and none of their character's interactions are believable.

Except for Zuko. Dev Patel, you are too good for this movie.

As Prince Zuko leaves the Southern Water Tribe, one of his firebenders happily demonstrates another unnecessary change - Firebenders can only bend fire from sources rather than generating this own.

Shyamalan said things like this and changing the pronunciation of names like Aang, avatar, Iroh were because he wanted to "honor" the source material. Later on in the movie, certain charters say it properly, like the actors gave up on their crazy director and decided to do whatever they felt like.

This is not the sort of universe requiring an overabundance of logic (my rather nitpicky post on the subject aside). If you're so in love with logic, then explain how waterbenders can just make their water freeze at will.

Or explain how exactly the avatar test Iroh does on Aang makes any sense. If flames grow, rocks float, and water um, forms perfect circles in the presence of the Avatar, how does Aang go anywhere without creating a causing rock-slides or something?

Zuko finds honor in this puddle.

Aang's escape from the warship sadly ends any sort of clear direction this plot had. He takes Katara and Sokka on Appa (carefully zoomed in on the saddle so that we never really have to see the expensive CGI mess) to his home at the Southern Air Temple, unaware that 100 years have passed.

Keep in mind this is 19 minutes into the movie. They got on a strange animal with a strange boy
 and flew thousand of miles away from their home without even knowing his name. 

The revelation that everyone he knows and loves was mercilessly slaughtered decades ago is a little...abrupt.

Is it rude of me to talk about how fake those bones look?

But at least it triggers the Avatar state and sends Aang to the spirit world for the first time.

That's supposed to be a dragon, in case you can't tell. It's kind of a mix between representing the dragon Avatar Roku had in the show and a quasi-God Spirit that acts how people with very confused notions about Eastern religions think they should. A mess. I'm not sure why they didn't just cast an Avatar Roku to be ghostly and awesome.

We could take a break right now and talk about Zuko's scenes. All things considered, they're not bad, establishing his history, motivations, and relationships with other quite nicely. For the most part, the Fire Nation is the most accurately depicted of the Four Nations.

For the most part. There's an unjustifiable amount of Fire Lord Ozai in this and his effect is completely wasted.

See? He's this all-powerful figure that literally sits on a throne of flames. But the thing that makes him truly scary is the hidden face. Fear goes very well with the unknown, allowing our wonderfully creative minds to do all the work of conjuring up some hideous monster that gobbles up children for snacks. When you finally did get to see his full face, he instantly became less scary.

It's a technique that's been used with a ton of cartoon villains and for some reason it's always the first thing to go with movie adaptations.

Can you even tell which one is the Fire Lord in that scene?

Right, let's talk about some Earthbenders for a change. I'm sure you've seen this famous scene by now.

It's not that it take give flailing earth benders to move a tiny stone.
It's just a horribly filmed scene. 

It is true, however, that the entire thing takes place in the middle of an Earth village, unlike the metal ship that was so effective in the series. I assume that there just wasn't room in the budget for yet another CGI Fire Nation ship, so they went with the village of people too downtrodden to fight back.

Also, poor Haru was turned into a seven year old.

And most people thought he was a girl.

Luckily for Haru's village, Aang makes a five-second motivational speech that manages to wake up their brains. Having come to the realization that they are Earthbenders and that Firebenders can only draw from tiny, crappy fires, they have that horrible fight choreography and retake the village. They also manage to cram in references to the Waterbending Scroll and Kyoshi Warrior episodes.

Apparently they filmed a more complete Kyoshi sequence but then cut it to save time with the 3D conversion (because that was completely necessary).

First you take our title and then you force 3D back into popularity?
Will the outrages ever cease? 

And I am probably most upset about the lack of the Kyoshi Warriors. It was a great episode, one of the best in the entire series, and it had important character moments for all of the characters as both individuals and as a group.

I could go on like this for the rest of the night. 

What follows is a truly useless montage. The Gaang are shown heading towards the Northern Water Tribe, sparking several rebellions in minor Earth Kingdom villages, but it doesn't show them bonding as friends or even growing in skill with their weapons or bending. By the time they get to their destination,   I'm about as emotionally invested as a spork.

So? What of it? Also, yes, shlong hair. Moving on.

The Northern Water Tribe stuff is boring preparations for war and Sokka falling in love with the princess and it takes up half of the movie. For all the time spent there, it doesn't even touch on the interesting issues, like Princess Yue's betrothal and Katara struggling against the sexism of the Waterbending Master. Instead they just wander around and train and never make an issue about the fact that their Avatar is a pacifist.

Smoke mixed with water to make black snow.
Also known as a ripoff of Doctor Who, your highness.

So the Fire Nation attacks again and there is a flood off suitable fight scenes. Not much talking, good graphics, close to the end = definitely the best parts of the movie. Then Zhao kills the Moon Spirit in front of Iroh.

Iroh used Righteous Fury. It was super effective.

If you have enough chi or strength or cookies or something as a Firebender then you can channel it to make fire from nothing. This becomes a point at the very end when Fire Lord Ozai details his plan to use Sozin's comet to make every Firebender capable of this and blahblahblah.

They're never getting the sequel so who cares?

Now, Iroh doesn't actually attack anyone with his fire. He just sort of startles them all away by showing off what he could theoretically do. It's like the wimpy teacher finally snapped and is screaming at everyone. This is a recurring theme. When Aang finally gets over his crushing survivor guilt (with help from the creepy dragon spirit and the ocean spirit), he enters the Avatar state and goes to show the Fire Nation Armada who's boss. By that I mean he raises a wall of water and lowers it.
It is supposed to look this.

What he actually does is this.

That's good enough for some people. The Fire Nation see the tallest of water walls and promptly sail as fast as possible in the other direction. The Northern Water Tribe is left alone and Aang acknowledges his responsibility as the Avatar.

His first act is to invite you to erase this whole thing from your mind. 

There is an episode called the Ember Island Players that had the Gaang watching a horrible play about themselves and their adventures. Aang was played by a girl, Katara tearbended, and Sokka made bad food jokes. It was more accurate than this movie.

In case you were unclear, I'm calling this movie a textbook case of Adaptation Decay.

Crikey that was long. If you read this far, I love you and admire your dedication. Let us all take comfort in the news that Nick just ordered an additional 26 episodes for Legend of Korra, not counting  the already ordered Season 2. So that probably means we're getting a Book 3 and a Book 4. My excitement cannot be contained. 

Barbie as Rapunzel Part 2: The Electric Brush Boogaloo

Part 1 can be found here. 

This is a post about a brush.

I know, I know, you all came here expecting some ranting about how Barbie movies are too tame show about scratching about prince's eyeballs or abandoning pregnant foster daughters to the mercy of the wilderness. At least, I assume you did because the my mind-reading device is not quite complete.

Negotiations were going fairly well. We're stuck on the
details of his benefits package. 

Sorry to disappoint. Well, no, that's a filthy lie because I'm actually quite excited to talk about what may be the most powerful weapon ever introduced into Western animation.

Even combined they are no match
for the mighty bristles

It all starts when Rapunzel and gang discover a secret room beneath the kitchen. All because a spoon lands on a Gargoyle's nose.

Personally, I think all silverware should be stored like this. 

Thankfully, Gothel is prone to naps when the plot calls for it, so Rapunzel and gang have plenty of time to explore without any sort of tension. They discover a silver hairbrush, conveniently engraved with the message "To our daughter Rapunzel on her first birthday. Love Mother and Father."

Rapunzel: "Why would Gothel lie?"
Me: "Why would anyone give a one year old a hairbrush?"

Then Penelope, who can pack quite a powerful punch when the plot calls for it, is startled by Hobie and stamps a hole in the floor.

I worry about the structural integrity of this manor.

The revealed tunnel leads to the world outside the magic wall, which Rapunzel has never seen. However, certain...events conspire to ensure that she must go it alone.

"That castle is the same color as my dress. My destiny must be there." 

I know this Rapunzel wasn't confined to a tower, so being outside is nothing that new to her, but she's still taking being around other people very well. I guess no one wanted to have to explain what Stockholm Syndrome and Social Anxiety Disorder are to their seven year old.

Then again, maybe being able to make small talk with bakers
while wandering through town is an inborn princess trait.

Anyway, never one to run from danger, Rapunzel comes to the aid of a little girl who has fallen into a spike pit near the kingdom's borders.

"If only we had some kind of braided rope to lower down there." 

Alas, it was not to be. Rapunzel just pulls the kid up with her hand and is rewarded with meeting her "hot" older brother.

They talk. Apparently there is a feud going on with the neighboring kingdom. Something about a missing daughter, I don't know. I didn't pay much attention to this part. I was much more focused on how in the middle of the conversation, Rapunzel just runs back to her life of imprisonment, enslavement, and abuse without any reason at all. Well, I suppose she needed to go back and gossip with Penelope about "meeting the most handsome man in the world."

Hobie: "And you've met how many men exactly?"
Me: "Someone on this writing staff was secretly
taking the piss out of this movie." 

Note that everything up to this point was never in the original tale. Now, I understand that a tower and only five characters make for a rather boring story and honestly everything up until now wasn't so bad (Rapunzel's idiotic decision to return nonwithstanding). But it's like the producers suddenly realized they had a story they were supposed to be sticking to and decided to cram all those bits in one section.




Exile in the tower appears when Gothel - um -magically transforms her room into a tower until she gives up the name of the boy she met in town.

"That'll teach her not to refuse to tell me things she doesn't know!"

There's a pointless intervening scene where we go back to the castle, learn the boy is actually Prince Stefan (shocker), and listen to him begin to fall in love with Rapunzel because he is describing her to his dad. When we return to the castle, the camera takes its sweet time showing off this.

Jesus, how thick was that braid? Did she have some pinned under?

This is more like it. Though the thought just occurred - hair like this would require crazy amounts of time spent at maintaining it. Gothel wants Rapunzel to spend all of her time cleaning the manor and should then discourage long hair. So the movie makes even less sense than it did when I started writing this thing (not that  should surprise anyone). Anyway, a familiar face soon arrives to re-enact a familiar scene.

"Release thou lengthy golden extruded proteins." 

My notes on this scene went a little something like this: "Wait, what? Stefan, aren't you supposed to be out patrolling? Did you just stumble across this place? Did the magic invisible wall disappear and no one told me? What? Where was Hugo? Why is her hair suddenly long? WHAT'S GOING ON?"

Then:

Please insert your own Inception joke here. 

I'm not sure what to make of having a nightmare about being in the fairy tale that you are technically in, but let's not linger on that little detail too long. After Rapunzel goes back to sleep, her hairbrush from earlier transforms into a paintbrush.

Spontaneous transformation is just
one of silver's lesser known qualities. 

No fairy godmother, no angel from above, she just vows to be free and the thing turns itself into a paintbrush.Can it transform into any kind of brush? A toenail brush, a wire brush, a saddle brush, or even a cleaning brush, which as a servant I'm sure she could use a few of. Granted, maybe this sort of thing is common in this quasi-magical setting because the next morning Rapunzel's only reaction is, "I don't understand." Her reaction is a little more realistic when she tries painting on the wall with some berry juice.

"Holy shit balls! Which one of you put LSD in my paint?" 

Meet the magic paintbrush. I don't know what the hell it could have done as a hairbrush. I'm kind of afraid to ask. But now apparently all you have to do is think of something and it will appear. You don't even need to have paint. You don't even need to be a good painter. With one light touch she recreates a lovely portrait of the town from yesterday. But it gets better. 

I'm trusting you to provide your own Portal jokes.
Don't let me down. 

Just imagine where in the painting you want to go when you step through and you'll arrive there in the real world. 

Seriously, what was in that paint?

This handy little plot device allows Rapunzel to return to the prince and secure an invitation his birthday ball that night, and then just paint another portal home when she needs to go. She actually gets a reason to go back this time - Penelope comes to find her because she's afraid of what Gothel will do to her father if Rapunzel goes missing. 

What happens if you visualize the outside of the tower?

Can we just take a moment to imagine the implications of this brush? You can paint as many lasting, one way portals to anywhere in the world that you can visualize. Move massive armies in a single minute. Enter secure bank vaults. Re-direct an avalanche or a flood. Shipping costs would vanish overnight. Hell, planes, trains, and automobiles would vanish overnight. It doesn't need any sort of power supply and it can fit in a slender pocket. That's loads better than any other portal device currently on the intellectual property market.  

And it's not burdened by cumbersome cubes or theoretical cake. 

It gets better. Because Rapunzel cannot reveal the name of the boy she met, Gothel is content to leave her alone in the tower for hours on end. She could just walk through the painting-portal that they successfully hid from Gothel. But first she needs a dress for the dance. 

So she paints one. 

And walks into some magic wall-dimension to put it on. 

And discovers the secret to creating matter.

It's not just a matter of portals and pretty paintings anymore. This paintbrush can make anything. Cheesy as it, the only limit is her imagination. Which may explain why she uses it to have a fashion show.

However, there is a waste product in this creation of new matter - sparkly lights. 

This inevitably attracts the attention of Otto and Gothel, who has decided that if she may as well stick to the original story even if no one else is. She destroys the painting-portal and the magic paintbrush and then cuts off Rapunzel's hair so that she may impersonate her at the ball. 

This movie also is fixated with telling the truth for its moral lesson. It's like they thought having that point would make it sell better with parents or something. Gothel constantly calls Rapunzel a liar like she's accusing her of being a baby-killer and eventually casts a spell on the tower to imprison liars there forever.

Luckily, because Rapunzel's not a liar she can jump safely through the spell onto Penelope's back and fly off to rescue the prince from chasing Gothel through the palace maze garden.

Prince cannot tell 60 year old woman from 18 year old girl.
I'd get that eyesight checked, your highness. 

Again, this is actually a case of Gothel trying to stick to the original tale. I don't know why she started so late in the movie, but props for trying. I mean, technically she should have tossed Rapunzel out of the tower to wander the world alone and then lured the prince up into the tower with the cut hair and scratched his eyeballs out. But she's working with shorter material than usual and no one's perfect.

Indeed, Gothel's pretty far from perfect. The grand climax of this movie is the reveal that Gothel was dated King Wilhelm (also had to look that name up a shit ton of times), Rapunzel's father. When he didn't marry her and make her queen of the land, she decided the appropriate response was to steal his daughter and frame the neighboring kingdom.

Gothel: "She should have been my daughter!"
Everyone with a brain: "So that's why you treated her like a slave? What?" 

Rapunzel defeats Gothel by tricking her into falling through that painting-portal to the tower she had made earlier.

Of course, because Gothel has always been a liar, she is now trapped in the tower forever. It's a nice little call back to the actual story of Rapunzel, where Gothel either fell to her death when she was climbing back out of the tower or starved to death because she dropped the hair-ladder and had no way to get down. 

So now Rapunzel and Stefan are free to get married - after they wait for Rapunzel's hair to grow back.

I think there's some law about horse-drawn
carriages and princesses. 

And then Kelly can finally start painting. 

Kelly: "I wish I had a magic paintbrush."
Barbie: "You do! You can paint anything you want."
Me: "Oh, that's such a load of crap."

Oh Jesus, that's right. There was a point to all of this; inspiring some little kid to paint. I'm not exactly sure how being afraid to paint something and being honest and whatever other morals you want to pull out of all of this fit together, but that's it. That's the movie.




It's not that the movie was bad. If I had some small girl creature that need entertaining there are certainly worse movies to show them. I just don't understand why this movie need to be about Rapunzel, especially when they take so many cues from other Disney movies like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. The magic paintbrush thing was really interesting for a deus ex machina, but it wasn't really showcased in the movie. On the other hand, the parts of the movie that are identical to the original are awkwardly integrated.




My guess is that they wanted the name recognition of the story of Rapunzel (even though it wasn't a very popular fairy tale until recently). Maybe they just wanted to sell a princess doll with longer than normal hair. I'm frustrated by the potential in this movie. Take at look at the IMDb page for Barbie as Rapunzel and you'll notice a lot of talented and recognizable actors. I know the animations is nothing great to look at but the music was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and is quite pretty throughout. I think the people behind the Barbie movies eventually figured out that they would be better off telling original stories and so started making things like Barbie as the Island Princess and Barbie and the Diamond Castle.

Progress...maybe. I don't think I could stand to try the
one about the Three Musketeers.

In the case of Rapunzel v. Barbie of Rapunzel, I find the movie to be a recognizable adaptation suffering from Adaptation Decay.