[Freya-dæg] All About The Last Airbender

{The Last Airbender's movie poster, found on Wikipedia.}

Plot Summary
The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing

M. Night Shyamalan, a director best known for movies like The Sixth Sense and The Village should stick to what he knows, or at the least to doing what he does best: creating an engrossing plot that strings the audience along until they reach some crucial twist.

Not only is adaptation outside of his wheelhouse, so too are movies where his signature twist is missing. Put the two together, and, somehow, you get the live action adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Last Airbender

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Plot Summary

Based on the idea that each of the “books” referred to in the title cards of the animated series could be turned into a movie, The Last Airbender follows the plot of “Book One: Water.”

For those unfamiliar with the Nickelodeon show about a world where people can bend water, earth, fire, and air to their will, this section of the story introduces Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern water tribe shortly before they discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen in a glacier with his sky bison. He winds up freed from the ice, and after a brief encounter with the reviled Fire Nation, the three of them set out to help Aang realize his potential as the Avatar, the one who holds the four elemental forces of the world in check.

Ultimately, Aang, Katara, and Sokka end up at the city of the Northern Water Tribe, so that Aang can master water bending, and also so that they can help to defend it from an upcoming Fire Nation assault. As General Jao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation plots to kill the spirits of the moon and ocean, thus robbing the water tribe of its bending power, defeat looms over the last truly free city in the world and only our three heroes can help to avert it.

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The Good

As you might expect from a movie about a world where people can bend the elements to their will with movements that Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan would be proud of, the choreography in this movie is decent. And the effects are fairly well done. Whatever else may be said about it, it has no shortage of spectacle. Especially when the fire and the water fly in the final battle.

Also, and this was more a surprise than anything else, but Dev Patel does a good job of playing the brooding, exiled Fire Nation prince Zuko. His character is softened, but it's still really obvious that he's absolutely brimming with conflicting hatreds and loyalties and desires.

Aasif Mandvi's appearance was also a very pleasant surprise. He didn't play anything up for laughs, and a movie based on an animated series (other than Avatar: The Last Airbender) might not be expected to offer up the chance to show your dramatic chops, but he definitely hits it out of the park as General Jao.

{The Daily Show's Senior Hollywood Correspondent goes a little too deep undercover for his exposé on bad adaptations. Image from a screen capture}

Seychelle Gabriel also works well as Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe – she even puts some feeling into her lines.

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The Bad

Cool World is not a very good movie. However, having seen The Last Airbender, it seems as though the quotation used to introduce The Bad in it was used too soon.

The biggest problem with this movie is the absolutely bizarre pronunciations of names and things that are pronounced in entirely different ways in the animated show.

Where the series pronounces Aang as “(r)ANG,” and Sokka as “Sock-ah,” the director of the movie (Mr. M. Night himself) has them changed to “Ah-ng” and “So-ka.” At one point, a character even refers to the "Yang" in "Yin and Yang" as “Yah-ng.” So, first off, why not just follow the pronunciation that fans have become familiar with over the course of three television seasons?

The next biggest problem (a very close contender for the title) is that all of the character arcs that are presented throughout the show's many episodes are almost entirely shaved away to make sure that this movie is feature length. This is an understandable change, but, if The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask teaches one thing about building character, it's that it can be done in a limited space and a limited time.

Rather than trying to pack the movie with all of the side plots and diversions that the show presents so wonderfully, why not just have Aang, Katara, and Sokka interact with people in the Northern Water Tribe city as stand-ins for the characters they meet in the show? It'd even be possible to just move some of those characters into the city so that they could still be interacted with.

To be fair, the movie doesn't try to pack everything in, but it skips over so many key moments for character development that the characters are left to develop through dialog that's not only written so it conveys almost no subtlety but that's often delivered as if it's being read for the first time.

Dev Patel works well as Zuko, and Seychelle Gabriel does an alright job of playing Yue, but the actor that was cast as Sokka just doesn't seem to get it. In the show, Sokka is a goofball of an older brother who's always hatching plans and making schemes that have some hole or other in them. He isn't solely a comic relief character, but he often is the one that audiences are meant to laugh at – at least early in the series.

As the three travel together and their characters develop, Sokka does become more serious, but that seriousness is always undercut with a bad pun or a silly gag. Instead of this nuance, Jackson Rathbone plays Sokka as some kind of straight man who hardly ever smiles. And when he does – especially when Yue is telling him about how she died when she was born and is alive because the Moon Spirit gave her its life – it's really poorly timed.

{Maybe Rathbone's Sokka is off because his timing, the heart of comedy, is off. Image from a screen capture.}

Aang and Katara are a little bit better, but again, because we see them in so few situations compared to the show, they aren't as nuanced as they are in the original. Aang's Monkey-King-like energy and playfulness are replaced by a more sullen, “I-don't-wanna-be-the-Avatar-because-then-I-can't-have-a-family” nature, and Katara is, well, just Katara. By the end of the first book in the series, it was already clear that there was some chemistry between these two characters, but in the movie there's practically nothing to suggest this.

Mercifully, Zuko's absolutely mad sister Azula, is only shown briefly in only two scenes. But, these two scenes set her up as more of a giggly little girl than as the scheming, psychologically twisted monster that she is in the series.

And, to end on a minor detail, a running joke in the series is that everywhere Aang, Katara, and Sokka go, they wind up upsetting a man's cabbage cart. Even the new series Avatar: The Legend of Korra, includes a scene where a cabbage man is dispossessed of his cabbages.

It might be fan service, but it would at least show the fans that you care about something that they admire, Mr. M. Night. And, including the scene would also have assured people familiar with the series that you had actually watched it and not just written your script based on some sort of terribly truncated SparkNotes summary.

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Judgment

The Last Airbender is not the movie it could have been.

Now, it's unrealistic to expect any filmmaker to be able to condense 20 episodes of a television show (about 6 hours and 40 minutes) down into something that's less than two hours while retaining things like characters, a coherent story, and a fully realized world. But there are ways that such an adaptation could have been made to work.

The discovery of Aang could have happened during the opening credits. Then a voice over could give the background of the setting and what had happened up to x-point as the characters did something (maybe fly somewhere on Appa, or walk between villages with a group of people trailing them since Aang is, you know, the Avatar and all). From there, most of the movie could be based in the Northern Water Tribe city with flashbacks to fill any gaps, fully realized relationships with the city's inhabitants to develop characters, and simply more dialog that revealed the story in an organic way, rather than lines that even the actors seem to balk at from time to time.

Unfortunately, M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation was not so bold as to make this many changes. Instead, he seems to have taken a more scissor-happy approach, trimming away everything excess until only the bare outline of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender's plot remains.

Some of the actors were definitely well picked, and the spectacle that the movie offers is quite impressive. But the four elements of Patel, Gabriel, Mandvi, and spectacle alone aren't enough to save the world of water, earth, fire, and air.

Freya, feel free to shed a tear as you fly over this one, but do no more save let it remain.

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Closing

Check back here next week for more creative writing, an editorial on the newest news, and a hunt for the good in, and hopeful redemption of, another generally despised movie.

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[Freya-dæg] Hey Musketeers, Don't Forget about the Pointy End!

Plot Summary
The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing

{Arya Stark learns the rudiments of swordfighting, and gets more one-on-one practice than any of the musketeers. Image from the HBO Quote Wallpaper collection.}

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Plot Summary

The Three Musketeers (the 2011 adaptation) is a new take on an old tale. It doesn’t stick too closely to the original novel by Alexander Dumas in terms of it’s story, but the basic structure remains. There’s a special corps of soldiers known as the musketeers, D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) grows up hearing about them, and when he’s old enough sets out to join them.

But, in this version, our three major musketeers - Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans), and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) - are all washed up. Or, to paraphrase Aramis:'they exist to fight for great causes, and there are no great causes left.'

Enter Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) with an evil plot to throw England and France into war so that he can usurp power from France’s boy king Louis XIII (Freddie Fox). But the three musketeers and D'Artagnan find out about the cardinal’s fiendish ploy, and set out to stop it.

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The Good

The effects are well done, and they’re used sparingly. And the same can be said for most of the major characters.

In fact, all four of the major players in the movie's action - Athos, Aramis, Porthos, and a woman called "Milady" (Milla Jovovich) - are nicely complicated. In the case of the musketeers, we're given a brief explanation of their current state and so we can see how they each deal with it in their own way. But, in the case of Milady, we're only given half of a good character since we're not shown why she's as duplicitous as she is. Though perhaps this is because the writers were too busy making her the main source of fan service in the film.

Actually, it's quite easy to get the sense that a lot of thought went into the script and how plot and character are revealed through it. This is especially true of the movie's fine details (like D'Artagnan saying “in French?” when Aramis speaks to him in legalese). The costumes worn in Louis XIII’s court are also nicely done, though the less said about the rest of the extras' costumes and props the better.

However, little is skimped on the swords in the movie, and reflecting this are a number of well done sword fights.

Particularly in group fights, the fight choreography is nicely done. Whereas other movies have the baddies line up and throw themselves at the hero one by one, here group fights leave you with the sense that they're all trying to get in to fight the hero at the same time. The épée itself is essential to this effect, since, more often than not, it's swung in wide arcs to intimidate the group while a single one of them steps into the fray.

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The Bad

However, with all of that praise for the movie's sword fights, they also deserve quite a bit of scorn. Or, rather, their absence does.

This movie simply does not have enough one-on-one sword fighting. Throughout the movie there are promises of duels, but most of these promises are tossed aside to advance the plot or to make way for a melee scene. The final fight between D'Artagnan and the head of Richelieu’s guard corps., Captain Rocheforte (Mads Mikkelson), is definitely a great one. Yet, the rivalry between these characters is played as little more than a formality. The dynamic between these characters would be more engaging if we were playing as D'Artagnan, but since we’re just watching it’s hard to be really engaged in that dynamic.

But the mishandling of this rivalry isn’t the only thing that can be pinned on the script writers.

The first hour of this movie is essentially nothing but set up for what the focus of the movie should be: D'Artagnan’s quest. If you watch the movie without this knowledge, then you risk feeling like you’ve lost an hour of your life.

Now, for the sake of analogy, this movie follows the exact same pattern as the Avengers does. It starts with some action (the three musketeers and their heist), moves on to a long section where plot and character are supposed to be developed (court intrigue, political posturing, and the like), and then finishes off with more action (a pirate fight on airships, capped with the only memorable one-on-one sword fight in the movie).

With the Avengers this pattern worked since there were a lot of characters and we’re actually shown how they interact and what they’re like through these interactions. With The Three Musketeers, the long middle section just drags. This should not be.

A 17th century movie about musketeers, a group of soldiers famous for their dashing derring-do and fencing ability, needs to have sword fights. Not big melees, but proper, good sword fights. The Three Musketeers would benefit tremendously from a duel or two in the middle section.

Maybe Louis XIII challenges his rival, Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), but Richelieu steps in and persuades the king to step down - in a scene where the two spar until Louis gets the Cardinal’s point.

Or maybe some smoldering difference amongst the musketeers causes two of them to duel, revealing a difficult issue from their past that they can’t keep from bubbling up after D'Artagnan's idealism opens old wounds.

Something was needed during the middle bit of this movie to keep the tension up - this movie needed a Loki. And no one delivered. Least of all Richelieu.

Now, it’s not really fair to single out specific part of a movie, a particular line or gesture, that completely sours it, but it can’t be helped here. Andrew Davies and Alex Litvak have both committed an atrocity in this movie's script and it must be made known.

The character that’s supposed to be the movie’s big, scheming, villain, the man who is played by Christoph Waltz - known for his role as the coolly intimidating Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds - utters a single word that practically ruins this movie. In a scene with Milady, at the 53 minute and 34 second mark, Richelieu offhandedly and completely casually, almost to the point of giving it a goofy delivery, says “yup.”

{What a movie breaking moment looks like. An original screen grab.}

Maybe it's a sign of the power of an actor, but completely unraveling your character with a single word is not a good thing.

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Judgment

The Three Musketeers, in its finished form, is a movie that seems to have been written with three purposes in mind:

• One: to entertain.
  
• Two: to start off a franchise (completely clear in one of the movie’s last scenes).
  
• Three: to take every existing action movie cliche and put them into a 17th century setting.
  

As of this writing, it accomplishes one of these purposes, and let’s just say that a dragging middle is never attractive in a movie, and there’s been no official word yet of any sequel.

A lot of care and thought obviously went into the script, but after that first draft it was poorly directed, produced, or edited, because all of the time that’s spent developing plot and character in the middle section takes us so far away from the action movie at the film’s start and end that the end result might as well be two movies spliced together.

So, Freya, fly high and leave this one where it lay. Hopefully it will do no more harm to a story that has been adapted and redone so many times that there are nearly as many adaptations (36) as Alexander Dumas had original works of fiction (39).

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Closing

Next week things will be a little bit different.

On Monday, part two of the essay on the Western and Korean media coverage of the Bombardment of Yeonpyeong will be posted, but that will be it for the week's posts. Instead of regular updates, over the course of the week a few more pages will be added to this blog, and things in general will be tidied up.

Come 4 June, the Monday-Wednesday-Friday rhythm will return.

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