Avatarded- THE LAST AIRBENDER Review

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.
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In The Last Airbender, a war that has raged on for a century puts a mystical world at the mercy of a powerful Fire Nation. Certain peoples of the world have a telekinetic relationship with the elements, and the Avatar, the only one who can control all four- Air, Water, Earth and Fire- has long since vanished. His return in the form of a young boy called Aang threatens the supremacy of the firebenders, as it is this young airbender's destiny to restore balance and end the war.

I watched the first season of Avatar- The Last Airbender, the storyline of which is covered by this film adaptation, over the last two weeks. I'm not going to deploy comparisons too much except where it fits my argument, because I've always said that adaptations should be assessed on their own merits rather than how they measure up to the source material. In any case, to say where they deviated from the unspeakably excellent animated series is to only scratch the surface of what is wrong with this version of the story.

For one thing, it's an exercise in world-building rather than story development. The reason why fans of the series are fans of the series is because its creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, managed to do both. Instead, this film is pre-occupied with building the story into a potential trilogy on the scale of The Lord of the Rings. To that end, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie does some fantastically good looking work, but at least the thrill of seeing Middle Earth come to life was complemented by Peter Jackson's direction and script.

Here, Lesnie's working at the behest of M. Night Shyamalan, who is entirely wrong for the material. Yes, I'm busting out the "wrong for the material" label because Shyamalan's talent and capabilities have now finally disintegrated before the filmgoing audience's eyes. Can we now accept as a cinematic axiom that he only makes good films if Bruce Willis features in them? And those two films he made with Willis are so very good that it just makes the sheer ineptitude of The Last Airbender hurt even more.

He told Empire Magazine around the time Unbreakable was being released that he had unlocked some great secret of filmmaking that only he, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg were privy to. If you didn't think he was talking out of his arse then, you certainly will by the end of this film. While the visuals are fine and occasionally great, the film is swamped by the same interminable dialogue from The Happening and the same hokey acting that has plagued Shyamalan's downward descent. The best I can say as far as he's concerned is that he at least refrained from acting in this one, and from making a twist ending beyond the clumsy sequel hook.

The main thing that will bug everyone about the film, whether you're Avatar-literate or not, is how didactic it is. Heavy amounts of dialogue are dedicated to explaining the plot, and more annoyingly, recapping what's just happened. Narration is clumsily delivered throughout by Aang's friend Katara, lazily explaining stuff that even the younger audience is clever enough to figure out if they'd only represented it visually. Other characters, especially the villains, exposit with the exact same diction and delivery as Charles Muntz's dogs in Up. Film is a visual medium! I haven't made a single feature film and I know that! Why doesn't Shyamalan know that after making nine films?!

The actors they've got to deliver the dialogue aren't a lot better. Almost the entire cast are Narm artists. Jackson Rathbone is notably awful as Sokka, a character who is supposed to be a well-developed if comic relief-friendly sidekick in the mould of Ron Weasley but pans out as a non-entity, and Aasif Mandvi is by far the worst as Commander Zhao. For those who aren't familiar with Mandvi's role on The Daily Show over the pond, his presence here is the equivalent of casting Ian Hislop or Russell Howard as a straight-faced antagonist. Having seen Zhao, you'd be hard-pressed to remember a villain more fruity than him, especially one played by an actor so willing to milk the awful dialogue with ludicrous pauses and drawn-out syllables.

Dev Patel is the only one who escapes this mess unscathed, making a pretty decent turn as the disgraced Fire Lord prince, Zuko. His portrayal is the closest to that in the series, and he's about the only character you can latch onto. The only problem with this is that he's a villain, and we spend more time with villains standing around telling each other things they already know than we do with our three heroes. To understand how big a problem this is with a more widely seen example, it'd be like a Harry Potter film where you saw more of Voldemort and Draco Malfoy than Harry, Ron and Hermione. Katara and Sokka, the Hermione and Ron in this equation, suffer the most.

And more than that, the villains come from the gloriously inept world-dominating model of the Empire in Star Wars. Sure, we see powerful badasses at the head of the enterprise, but their will is enforced by a bunch of utter nincompoops. In the series, firebenders could generate fire by themselves and then manipulate it, making it a deadly fighting technique that you could believe would bring a world to its knees. Here, they need an external fire to manipulate. When your enemies can control water, air and earth, all of which are plausible extinguishers to any fire you don't materialise yourself, you have enforcers who are inferior even to the Stormtroopers. They're more on a par with the stupid comic relief droids in the prequel trilogy, especially seeing how goofy their fighting style is.

I'm only now comparing to the animated season this is based on because these are fundamental issues with how the story is translated. The most part of the film is the climax, based around the three-part season finale, but in animated form, this had followed an entire season of character and story development. In the case of a film, and this film in particular, it just follows because that's how the formula goes. As adaptation goes, this is the way you would make a film based on the series if you were drunk. That would also explain why so much is repeated, almost as if Shyamalan had forgotten the parts he'd already explained as he slurred his way through the story.

What's annoyed some fans in particular though is the pronunciation of Aang as "Aung", but that's actually quite fitting. "Aung" is a noise I would make if I were hit in the face, and The Last Airbender amounts to 103 minutes of M. Night Shyamalan hitting fans of the series in the face with a film that I fear will forever make this story a laughing stock in the broader public consciousness.

Shyamalan has taken a beloved, colourful and witty animated series and manipulated it into the most stingy, lifeless and poorly assembled film of the year. In the time you'll spend thinking about how bad this was after seeing it, you could have watched 20 episodes of the animated equivalent, so do that. Go and watch the first season of Avatar- The Last Airbender, because this film has done it a great injustice. I implore you not to go and see The Last Airbender, lest Shyamalan be allowed to get his poobending mitts on the story once more. And if there were any justice, this would at least be the surprise twist ending to his career. 

The Last Airbender is screening in advance in 2D and 3D at selected cinemas nationwide, and opens everywhere else tomorrow.
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If you must see The Last Airbender, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? I strongly advise against seeing it though, even for the LOLs- if you have to know, here's the biggest LOL to be had.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch. 

Welcome to Camp Victory- 2010 Oscars Postmortem

Ladies and gents, it's always nice to be wrong twice. Because when you have two choices, you can pass it off as "I was right all along!" The Academy Award winners now validate the original sentiment from my Avatar review that...

"It's probably not going to win an Oscar for Best Picture..."

... and we can utterly ignore my more recent assertion that...

"...Avatar will win Best Picture on March 7th. Not because it's the best film nominated, but because that's what the Academy's like."

It's really a good thing I didn't put any money on anything. It was a sweep for The Hurt Locker, which picked up Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow. In the end Avatar picked up three awards, all in technical categories. Arguably as it should be, really.

The acting categories were all fairly predictable, with Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique both being recognised for critically lauded turns and Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock receiving recognition for their hard work in their respective careers thus far. Yes, that Sandra Bullock, who is the only actor ever to win a Razzie (for All About Steve) and an Oscar (for The Blind Side) in the same year, and fair play to her too. She's immensely likable in even the most awful shit, and I daresay she deserves it more than Mo'Nique deserved hers.

I was also pleased to see Up make a strong showing, winning Best Animated Picture and Best Original Score, both very well deserved nods. And Up is the only nominee that might have deserved Best Picture more than The Hurt Locker. I was also gleeful that the make-up work on Star Trek was recognised too, along with a laugh-out-loud presentation from Ben Stiller in full Na'vi make-up.

However, I always have my bugbears with the Oscars, and this year, being the first where I've pulled an all-nighter and watched it live, is no exception. So after four hours of caffeine and speeches, here are the top 5 most annoying, silly and downright bizarre things about last night's ceremony.


5. The acting profiles
While nothing trumped the oddly erotic sound of Sir Ben Kingsley saying "Randy the Ram" last year, this year's ceremony saw an irksome return for the back-slapping profiles on the acting nominees before they got to who'd actually won the buggers. They were seemingly picked for the most tenuous of connections in a couple of cases, i.e. Forrest Whittaker reminding us that he directed Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats, which boded worse for her chances of winning than we actually should have anticipated. With that link, I'm surprised they didn't dredge Chris O'Donnell up to say "George was a fantastic Batman, and I feel another sequel would've really shown that..."

4. The Best Original Score dances
Sure to be the most lampooned aspect of the whole affair, a group of break-dancers took to the stage before the award for Best Original Score was presented. What followed was an interpretative dance routine to each of the nominees. While the tribal dances of Avatar were fairly appropriate, and I think actually imitated the final scene of the film itself, the others were just bizarre. I mean, you can imagine without me telling you how surreal a Hurt Locker dance was. And I don't know why the Married Life refrain from Up warranted a re-enactment of the clockwork musical number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or why Sherlock Holmes just screams "the worm" to interpretative dancers.

3. The rude orchestra
The formidable Get Off The Stage song is feared by all, and maybe it was only because I've never seen it in use before, but I found the orchestra playing off speeches to be incredibly rude at certain points this year. Most unforgivably, Juan José Campanella was cut off in the midst of a rather marvellous speech after the surprise win by The Secret in their Eyes for Best Foreign Language Film. The guy seemed incredibly endearing and deserved his say as much as Mo'Nique. I for one wanna hear more of Juan José Campanella! Fuck off, you trombone-wielding cads!

2. Lack of love for Moon
And assorted other films that were sadly overlooked. OK, so it would have been more than just a minor upset if Moon had won an award despite not having been nominated for anything, but it should have got something, dammit. And so should The Lovely Bones and Me and Orson Welles, and even some of the films that were nominated but overlooked, like In The Loop or Up in the Air. But I'm always going to disagree with the choices on some level, so I'll be content to post my own picks in certain categories later in the week.

1. The Sky panel
Courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, the UK coverage of the event was chaperoned by a panel moderated by Claudia Winkleman. Said panel comprised David Baddiel, Ronni Ancona and Balls of Steel's Mark Dolan. Way to round up whoever was around the studio, Sky. Those lot obviously know nothing about film and yet minutely explained everything after each ad break. The absolute nadir of the show was a "bawdy" review of the In Memoriam sequence, in which potential Bizarro-Me (Dolan) said that dying was a great career move to get in that montage. At various points, I was moved to paraphrase Avatar. "The Sky Panel have sent us a message... that they will not shut the fuck up. We will send them a message... AND MUTE THE FUCKS!"


So it's over for another year, and it's been a particularly long night for me having watched the whole ceremony. As co-host Steve Martin said, the ceremony lasted so long that Avatar now takes place in the past. If you want to chart my all-nighter on Twitter, through all the suspense, ("I'd happily be declared a turkey fucker if the underdog here won...") from the dizzying highs, ("Oh my God, the Married Life song") to the crushing lows ("Michael Sheen's killed my video stream with awesomeness") then by all means, do so. I tweeted up a storm as a document to my struggle.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, support your troops over the Smurfs.

Blue Will Get Gold- 2010 Oscar Predictions

The nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards have been announced.

Not very many surprises in there, but here goes with my thoughts.


Avatar is a good blockbuster. It was the most enjoyable blockbuster of last year in my estimation, but is it an Oscar calibre film? No! I suspect the Academy disagrees, nominating it as they have for nine awards. It's tied only with The Hurt Locker for the most nominated film at this year's ceremony. The thing is, with its $2bn box office receipts and the massive hype surrounding it pre-release, people are determined to be polarised on the matter.

Internet message boards are full of fanboys who declare it to be the best film ever, and if you don't agree with that to the letter, you must hate it, and thus be blind in some way or other. And vice versa- if you don't despise the film, that makes you its biggest fan in certain quarters. It's an OK film, everyone! And it's OK that it's OK! Story-wise, it's certainly not perfect, and it does suffer from Cameron's seeming inability to cut the flab from the running time of his films. Hell, you can find my original review here. Most of what I said still holds true for me, except for one sentence in the last paragraph.

"It's probably not going to win an Oscar for Best Picture"

Sorry, past Mark, but you were wrong. That was a key case of me underestimating James Cameron's ability to dress Dances with Wolves up as a Direhorse and convince everyone that it the best film of the year. So sadly, with the voters blinded by the 3D-abetted box-office receipts instead of remembering they gave Best Picture to this very film 20 years ago, I predict that Avatar will win Best Picture on March 7th. Not because it's the best film nominated, but because that's what the Academy's like.


The only two films I haven't seen out of the other nine nominees are The Blind Side and Precious, both of which are yet to be released in the UK. Five of my top ten favourite films of last year made the shortlist, but I was most pleased to see A Serious Man, Up and District 9 in there. However, I can't see any of those films beating the sheer hype juggernaut of that blue-cat-people film. Let's just hope Kathryn Bigelow beats her ex-husband to Best Director for her excellent work on The Hurt Locker, which Kevin Smith says would be "a victory for ex-wives everywhere".

To the acting categories, I can't say an awful lot, because I haven't seen The Blind Side, Precious, The Last Station, Crazy Heart, A Single Man, Invictus, The Lovely Bones or The Messenger yet. The momentum seems to be in favour of Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Mo'Nique for Precious and Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, in their respective categories. A further Avatar related annoyance is in the fact that they didn't nominate the film in one of the categories they actually should have- Zoe Saldana for Best Actress, seemingly opting for old favourite Meryl Streep holding her nose and gurning through Julie & Julia.


As an aspiring writer, I was very interested in the screenplay categories, and was delighted to see In The Loop and A Serious Man get noticed. Up in the Air and Inglourious Basterds are both awards darlings this year, but both will likely be overshadowed in the other major categories by the Battle of the Exes. Expect them to win their respective screenplay categories, though I'd personally have said In The Loop for Best Adapted and A Serious Man for Best Original. But then I don't get to pick- there's probably a good reason for that.

To wrap up then- some of the overlooked films...


(500) Days of Summer
Should have been nominated: For Best Original Screenplay
Why for? It's the most original entry to its genre in years. Besides which, in amongst the bluster (blue-ster?) of Avatar, there wasn't another film this year like Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. Up in the Air was seemingly a de facto entry to that role, but I preferred this film. Good screenplay, well acted- shamefully overlooked.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Should have been nominated: For Best Animated Picture
Why for? Because Fantastic Mr. Fox was rubbish! I know it probably appeals massively to middle-aged voters, but it also excluded Roald Dahl's target audience completely. Also, Cloudy should be up there because it's a lot better than you'd think- a genuinely funny script with some great voice acting and no pretension about itself. It's a film by "a lot of people", not a vanity project for Wes Anderson.

Moon
Should have been nominated: For Best Actor (Sam Rockwell), Best Visual Effects and Best Picture
Why for? Sam Rockwell is amazing in Moon and this really should have been the role that got his consistently great work in supporting roles some kudos from the industry. It also used visual effects to less showy effect than Avatar and on a smaller budget. The Best Picture thing is probably a stretch, but in an enlarged category, it's a real shame this didn't make it into the top ten, in a year where the stigma against sci-fi has been dulled by the likes of District 9.

Me and Orson Welles
Should have been nominated: For Best Supporting Actor (Christian McKay) and Best Cinematography
Why for? Christian McKay is Welles in that film. Maybe they satisfied their real life figure quotient with Matt Damon in Invictus, but I think McKay brought to the screen all of what made Welles the imposing and legendary figure he is. More than that, this is one of the few films that makes you feel like you're in the theatre for reasons that aren't to do with poor pacing- it's down to the excellent cinematography.

A Serious Man
Should have been nominated: For Best Actor (Michael Stuhlbarg)
Why for? OK, so two nominations, one of those for Best Picture, is hardly a snub. On the other hand, Stuhlbarg hasn't been getting the love he very richly deserves for his breakout role as Larry Gopnik. The Coen brothers have enough gold on their mantle and won't lose too much sleep over losing to the prestige pictures. Stuhlbarg will hopefully go on to do more great things, but I'd really have liked to see him get nominated here.

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With that dirty business over for another year, the next bit of Oscars coverage will probably be on March 8th, the day after the ceremony. Maybe I'll don a tux and do my own bloggy awards. As far as reviews go, the next post will probably cover The Princess and the Frog and/or Youth in Revolt.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't give an Oscar to an anti-corporate film if it makes more money than Jesus feasibly could.

Dances With Smurfs?

The hype behind James Cameron's first film in 12 years, Avatar has been fairly massive. The Titanic director has been pioneering 3D since 2005 and promising a total game-changer for cinema in the form of his latest big-budget epic, but I confess I've been skeptical about that. 3D thus far has been little more than a gimmick, and I don't think Cameron has made a decent film since Terminator 2. The trailers for Avatar didn't impress me either. The first teaser had a bunch of CGI money-shots with no discernible plot or dialogue except the words "This is great." Thanks, James, but I'll make my mind up for myself. The second trailer was more plot-heavy, but as Eric Cartman observed in a recent South Park episode, it looked like Dances with Smurfs more than anything else. Now of course, the film has finally landed in cinemas worldwide, and I've been to give it a look.

I'll point out in advance that I've now seen Avatar in both 2D and 3D, and the latter still adds nothing. Although Cameron has used it more competently than any of the releases this year that pipped him to the post in terms of release date (except Disney and Pixar's output), 3D is still a gimmick. It's not really much more immersive in 3D, because credit where credit's due, the film is immersive on the merits of its cast and script. However, if you've been holding out on seeing your first 3D film in the cinema, this is probably the one to go for. For weary veterans of animated films and horror remakes, plump for 2D, cos it looks just as good. And so without further ado, I'm going to give the film a review. As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion on here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.


Avatar is all about Jake Sully, a crippled Marine who is drafted into a 22nd century science experiment ran by his late brother on the planet Pandora. The principle is that Jake's mind would be remote-beamed into a hybrid body, cloned from his brother's tissue and that of the native Na'vi. The Na'vi are hostile to the encroaching humans, and the idea is that the avatar bodies would be able to negotiate a diplomatic understanding between the two species. Because if they can't, the Ahab-esque Colonel Quaritch will send in the troops in the name of the dying Earth, aiming to dig out a rare mineral called Unobtainium. No, that is what they really called it. However, Jake goes native when he falls for a real Na'vi, Neytiri, and begins to question his calling in life.

I went into the cinema with low expectations for the film, and I'm pleased to say from the off that I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I stand corrected from all my assertions that this would be visuals at the expense of narrative. It'd be naive to say that the opposite is true- the very theme of Avatar is seeing everything, (something I suspect Cameron hoped would be epitomised by the 3D) so even when the narrative's foremost, it's about visuals. And the visuals are pretty staggering- in the assault of quick shots in the teaser trailer it was easy to dismiss the floating mountains of Pandora as "just floating mountains". But think about it for a second- floating mountains! We finally have time to savour those trailed visuals, and it's a tremendous feat of special effects. I've never been a proponent of style over substance- my favourite special effects in films were all done practically rather than digitally, especially in the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So I was relieved that there was something more solid to the film than just the computer generated creatures and vistas.


There's a shot of a six-legged horse galloping along while on fire somewhere in the middle of the film that just about sums up the approach to most of the creatures in Avatar. Cameron can create anything with CGI, so he has, just for kicks. But in the Na'vi, we have something a little more special. They're cat-faced, ten feet tall and blue, and yet they're our protagonists. The bad guys are us- humanity and its greed, represented with scene-stealing vigour by Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi. This subversion of the usual human-alien dynamic (see War of the Worlds, and every other alien invasion film) only works for a (mostly) human audience because the Na'vi are written and performed so well. Zoe Saldana gives a motion-captured performance as Neytiri, and in a narrow field for standout female roles this year, it's one of the best of 2009. It's through her that you empathise with the Na'vi, even over the aforementioned brilliance of Stephen Lang's downright awesome Colonel Quaritch.

Sam Worthington is central as Jake of course, and he's as excellent here as he was in Terminator Salvation, only better here because he has a coherent script and a director who doesn't credit himself as "JCam"or some shite like that. I've been taking the piss out of his Next Big Thing label a bit because it was borne solely out of early buzz for this film, but I have to admit that Worthington has a very engaging screen presence, both as an action star and as an actor. He has some good support from Lang and Saldana, not to mention an emotive and memorable turn from Sigourney Weaver as the Avatar project's director, Grace. The role is just as much a showcase for her snarkiness and biting humour as it is for her instant empathy with her audience. I'm stressing these points because I feel it's easy to get swept away in the visuals of Avatar and not give due credit elsewhere.


As you might expect if you're even slightly aware of who I am, I don't think Avatar is without flaws. James Cameron hasn't made a film shorter than two hours long since The Terminator, and this film's 162 minutes carries more than a little flab between setpieces in the second half. I have to say that for the most part, it flew by, but my expectations of Cameron made those flabby bits drag a little. Mostly, these parts are concerned with the film's mixed message. The director's trademark worship of military hardware is increased tenfold by the futuristic setting, and yet there's a slightly hypocritical anti-war message at the centre. You can't convince me that you want to save the trees, on Pandora or anywhere else, when the very next shot is essentially saying "LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT GUNSHIP! BOOM BOOM BOOM, KABOOM! WAR IS AWESOME!" and decimating CG forestry. There's also a clumsy war-on-terror subtext in Quaritch's motivations and in the general Unobtainium scramble. And that's the other big flaw- that stupid name. I think they only mention it once, but they can surely come up with a better name than that for a McGuffin? That said, I wish oil was called Unobtainium instead- the alleged ulterior motives for the war in Iraq would have been laughed out of Bush's Cabinet room.

All of this aside, I wouldn't want to damn with faint praise by saying that this is Cameron's best film since Terminator 2, because in the 18 years since that came out, he's only made two films, and they were True Lies and Titanic. Nuff said. Instead, I can favourably compare this to Aliens. The two films ostensibly have several elements in common, like the non-descript evil corporation going into space in the name of greed, the wise-cracking and quotable Marines, the AMP mechs, and of course Sigourney Weaver. But more than that, it's a damn fun film to watch, a world away from the schmaltzy-ness that looms throughout Titanic and the utter lack of entertainment value in the bloated and self-indulgent True Lies. It's a game-changer in respect of the visuals, because special effects have now been advanced spectacularly by Avatar. There haven't been battle sequences this good on film since the Lord of the Rings trilogy closed off six years ago, and crucially, the effects complement the narrative rather than vice versa.


As I've said before, this has been a dog of a year for big-budget action blockbusters- summer of this year was an awful time to be at the cinema with the exception of Harry Potter and Star Trek, both of which were 2008 films delayed to this summer, and District 9, which was comparatively cheap to make anyway. In Avatar, we finally have the first, and probably last, bonafide, big-budget cinema experience of 2009. It's by no means a great film, but it should be applauded for not relying entirely on its groundbreaking visuals. It's probably not going to win an Oscar for Best Picture, for instance, but it's sure to clean up in the Visual Effects category. It will be a while before we'll see a cinematic event as big as this again, so make sure you see it there, because only time will tell if this holds up as well on DVD and blu-ray...

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Year's end is approaching faster and faster, and I'm now going to race to catch up on the films still playing- Nativity! and Planet 51 specifically- and the last week of the year brings a wealth of releases too, including Sherlock Holmes and Nowhere Boy. Reviews of those are sure to be up in the next two weeks, along with the long promised Special Project for this blog. Watch this space!

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.