Let me start by saying I’m Canadian and I love my country. Canada Day is one of my favorite holidays, so spending several hours of this celebratory day in a movie theater was not a choice I took lightly. It was only the promise of a live-action adaption of the Avatar animated series that could entice me to cope with the line-ups, funky smells, and everyone else’s little wiener kids. If I had to live in a post-apocalyptic world with no new TV shows I could survive just fine with only Avatar and Firefly – they are just that good.

Having now established my fanaticism I will go on to actually talk about the movie. Overall it was good. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t spectacular. There were lots of little disappointments, but there were some things I was really pleased with.

I thought the CG was amazing, but it was done by Industrial Light and Magic so I guess that should be a given. The animation of the bending was spectacular, absolutely everything I could have imagined possible. Perhaps if I had just put in some earplugs and watched the movie in silence it would have been a better experience. The creatures truly came alive in this film as well. Jasmin didn’t like their interpretation of Appa the air bison but I thought he was perfect. That pretty much wraps up everything that was great about this film.

Now I know a fanatic tends to be a bit more picky about film adaptions than the average movie-goer, but I don’t think the flaws in this movie are just things the fans are going to notice. The first and biggest downfall was the lack of character development. The TV series is almost a perfect balance of character, story, and action. The Airbender movie puts magic into the action sequences but forcefully shoves the story line into you with a pointy stick and has locked character development up in a closet somewhere. Aang should be a youthful and exuberant kid, but they’ve turned him into a quiet and sullen little emo boy. Saka and Katara should exude compassion and morality from their pores but instead you kind of wonder why they are even following the emo boy around. I want to tell you everything that is wrong with uncle Iro but it’s too painful. Let’s just say that my favorite character no longer exists – he is dead to me.

The story is driven so forcefully fast I’m sure that anyone not familiar with the series would leave the movie theater still wondering what bending actually is. Update: Uh, yeah, I guess I’m right about that. I get it, there was a lot to explain and a lot of story to move through, but there were also twenty minute chunks of movie that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor to make way for more character development. There were lines in this movie that sounded like a ten year old wrote them. To make things worse, the lines were delivered with the kind of emotion reserved for phone-book recitals or “grocery on line one, grocery on line one” calls from the checkout. It was truly cringe-inducing.

The 3D fad does nothing to make this movie better, but that can be said for just about any movie these days. I will be so glad when this trend dies.

Lastly I will mention what will surely be the most annoying feature of this film for fellow fans: pronunciation. For whatever reason (probably clinical dementia) the filmmakers decided to change the pronunciation of many of the lead character’s names:

• Iro: pronounced “eye-roh” in the series is now “ee-roh”.
• Sokka: pronounced “sa-ka” in the series is now “soak-ah”
• Aang: in the series the name rhymes with “twang”, in the movie it’s more like “ankh” without the “k”.

I’ll tell you what; if you want to make a movie based on a (popular)TV series, how about you DON’T MESS WITH THE MAIN CHARACTER?!!!!??

So yeah, I was kinda let down by this movie. Maybe the saddest thing was that I didn’t get my hopes up in the first place, knowing what movies are like these days. Always the optimist I am still going to look forward to the next movie. I mean, they can’t possibly screw Toph up that badly, can they?

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