Fans of the animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” should be very pleased to hear that Nickelodeon has announced a second series to air next year that is a sort of sequel to the original. The new series will take place 70 years after the events of the first series and feature a teen girl named Korra, who is the next Avatar after Aang. She’s a water-bender who needs to learn air bending and travels to the new air-bender city to learn from Aang’s son. The creators of the first series, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, are producing the new series, but the press release says the animation is being done by Nickleodeon Animation Studios rather than the Korean animation company that did the first series. And, no, M. Night Shyamalan isn’t involved.
Speaking of which, I do have to say that the movie did not suck nearly as much as people said. There was an awful lot of piling-on from people on the Internet (quel suprise!), but I suspect that most of the reviews (and not the ludicrous ranting about the non-Asian casting, which is another whole can o’ crazy) came from people who didn’t watch the animated series. The script tried very hard to squeeze in as much from the original show as it could, which resulted in too much exposition to try to fit in all the stuff from Season One into a movie not quite two hours long. The acting ranged from meh to eye-rollingly hammy (the guys who played the Fire Lord and the admiral really stank it up bad). But if you’d sat through some of the excrement that has been foisted off as kid flicks that I have had to pay money for these last several years, you’d agree that this was far from the worst movie ever made. The reality is that Shyamalan is only a mediocre director, best left to his usual ham-fisted gotcha suspense films, but anyone would have been hard pressed to really capture the sweep of three seasons of a TV show in a single movie; just look at all the other shitty movies based on TV series that have been made in the last decade or so. “The Avengers”, anyone? Or “The Mod Squad”?
(Thanks to my friend Ailsa for clueing me in on this!)
“I suspect that most of the reviews came from people who didn’t watch the animated series”
Actually, no. The most scathing reviews are coming from folks that did watch the animated series and know just how good it could have been. This isn’t just a case of high-minded critics hating it, its about 92% of everyone hating it. And the die-hard fans aren’t most angry about the cut scenes or even the race bending, we are mad because the screenplay was stilted and flat, the acting was limp, the story disjointed, the “bending” effects bizarre and the overall presentation just terrible. It was simply a horrible film. It pains the die hard fans to say all this as we love the source material, but we’d rather there be no sequel if Shyamalan is going to be given the reins again.
Angry fanboys on the Internet don’t constitute “92% of everyone”. The $114 million gross demonstrates just how little all that fan hate affects the movie-going public.
I’m not trying to argue that it was some work of cinematic genius, but it’s not even the worst movie of this summer. Have a little perspective.