The Last Airbender/YMMV
These things about The Last Airbender are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.
- Adaptation Expansion: The novelization had a lot less cut from it and was said to be far superior in comparison.
- And the Fandom Rejoiced: Aang and Zuko's Polish dubbers returned for the movie as their regular characters.
- Badass Decay:
- Zuko. He goes from the angsty but determined powerhouse in Season 1 and turns into a whiny, Pirates Who Don't Do Anything type. His Crowning Moment of Awesome from Season 1, defeating rival Admiral Zhao and proving his worth as a Firebender, is instead given to a handful of random Waterbenders. And unlike Zuko, they KILL Zhao.
- The Fire Nation in general. Not only are its soldiers somewhat wimpy ("It really hurt!"), Zhao finds more time relying on the Fire Lord (and the scroll from the great library) rather than be ambitious and power-hungry, Fire Lord Ozai is not as menacing as his animated counterpart.
- Firebenders can only manipulate pre-existing flames. Sozin's Comet, which previously allowed firebenders to wipe out entire civilizations in a day, now apparently only makes all firebenders roughly equivalent to a normal, non cometed firebender in the series.
- While not a Badass until the end of Season 1, Katara underwent this via Chickification.
- Katara more closely resembles the Flanderized Love Freak that the show itself parodied in "The Ember Island Players" than her character in story.
- The fact that she seemed five minutes away from Tear bending at any moment.. really didn't help matters any.
- Sokka in particular is much closer to his initial idea of being a wannabe macho-man twat as opposed to a clever funny guy, and doesn't crack any jokes throughout the film, or even much of a smile. Sokka's fans were equally unamused.
- Complete Monster: Fire Lord Ozai, like always. Like in the cartoon, he burned and banished his son for speaking out of term. If that weren't enough, in the Novelization, HE was the one who ordered Zhao to blow up Zuko's ship and make it look like an accident.
- Dull Surprise:
- Aang in particular.
- Katara: At least Aang shows some emotion for about 2 seconds in the Water Tribe. Katara, however, is (to quote a fan review) "like the secret love child of Keanu Reeves, Kristen Stewart, and a brick wall."
- Sokka as well. He has some moments of emotion, but not as much as is probably appropriate.
- Fan Dumb: To quote many a message board "Where's TOPH?! I'm not watching this because she isn't in it!" (For those unfamiliar, Toph joined the main cast in Season 2, after the material this film is adapting.)
- On the other hand, a recurring joke in fanart is to draw Toph celebrating the fact that she isn't in this.
- Fan Hater: With enough numbers and force to equal a veritable religion.
- Fan Nickname: For the Fight Scene Failure below. Everybody do the Pebble-Dance!
- From the same scene, Katara pushing one soldier to the ground and then just standing there doing nothing else is called the Ka-Tackle.
- Fight Scene Failure: When the Earthbender prisoners are staging a revolt, we see six Earthbenders moving in perfect precision and choreography, stomping the earth and releasing a mighty battle cry... and a tiny rock barely bigger than a football floats by very, very slowly. A seventh earthbender then launches it at a guard. Now, the scene makes more sense if the six are instead responsible for two walls of earth that block fireballs, but due to the awkward camera angles, coming to this conclusion takes watching the scene several times on a computer.
- Worse, the fight scenes are all shot with a single camera, with no jump cuts. This leads to the problem of showing the audience a large number of mooks standing in the background, not doing anything while their friends are getting knocked senseless.
- Ham and Cheese: Aasif Mandvi plays Zhao pretty similarly to how he always plays himself on The Daily Show, only, well, evil.
- Internet Backdraft: What's that? The movie wasn't that bad? Tell that to the internet.
- Jerkass Woobie: Zuko, when he's not yelling or being his general angry self.
- Large Ham: The Fire nation seems to be a World of Ham. Seemingly to contrast the Dull Surprise people from the Water nation.
- Magnum Opus Dissonance: While filming the movie, M. Night Shyamalan claimed that it was going to be his greatest work. All those Razzie Awards beg to differ.
- Memetic Mutation: Before the movie had even come out, early test screening reviews mentioned a scene that has turned the phrase "punching the fish" into a meme[1]. Other gems include the pebble dance (the most notorious example of the Flynning mentioned above [2]), Kat-tackle (Katara pushing over a random guard and then just standing there), Zhao constantly mentioning the secret library, Ozai's glowing ass (from a screenshot in which the source of light appears to be Ozai's rear end), Yue's line about believing in beliefs, and her penis hair (how it looks like when viewed from the back.)
- AANG! JUST ONCE!
- X, there is Y under your feet! Why don't you fight?
- X scene was cut from the movie because it was too "distracting".
- It really hurt!
- Misblamed: Everyone still insists that M. Night is completely at fault with the movie's short comings when Executive Meddling forced him to cut 25 minutes from the movie due to being too cheap to pay for 3D effects.
- Though the blame has been shifted back to M. Night after the deleted scenes were revealed to be...less than stellar, potentially worse than what got left in. People blaming M. Night now also say that the studio only cut it down to its short runtime because the longer version was worse.
- Also, M. Night wrote the entire screenplay with next to no input from Brian, Mike, Ehasz, or any other writer from the series, who were dragged away from the project by their upcoming The Legend of Korra.
- Plot Induced Stupidity: Everyone who isn't a part of the Fire Nation suffers from this. Unlike the series, Firebenders (who aren't masters) need an available source of fire in order to bend it. This is all well and good, except none of the other characters ever think to put them out! Granted, some of the fire sources are fairly large, but nothing that couldn't be doused with a little effort. Taken to truly ridiculous extremes in the Earthbender camp when several Firebenders are literally bending from a single source they could not conceivably protect. Someone does give the order to douse the flames when the alarm bells sound... but apparently, they never got around to it, because all of the fires are still going during the battle.
- Then there's what happens during the Siege of the North. In the planning stage the Water Tribe said that they needed to douse all of the torches in the city. Fire Nation comes, THE TORCHES ARE STILL LIT. Granted it would have made a moot point because of all the flaming boulders the Fire Nation was tossing in, but really?
- Ship Tease: The ending of the Oasis fight was significantly more... Zutara-ish.
- Special Effects Failure: There is one scene at the beginning where Sokka is splashed with water and then is immediately dry. Also, it's an arctic area and you can't see anyone's breath.
- Also, the waterbending is sometimes not even animated.
- SLOW MOVING JELLY!
- Hell, every CG waterbending scene in this film look like something from before The Abyss.
- The firebending is pretty much nothing but poorly composited live-action fire elements with some CG that even the film version of Spawn would reject.
- What makes this even sadder is that Industrial Light and Magic were the ones behind the special effects. You know, the guys that did Star Wars, Transformers, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park?
- Also, the waterbending is sometimes not even animated.
- Tainted by the Preview: Part of the fanbase of the source cartoon already declared the movie a lost cause before the first trailers came out. M. Night Shyamalan did not prove them wrong.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Long before the movie was anything more than a casting list and a few trailers, fans were complaining about changes to the source material. One of the biggest examples from the movie once it finally came out was the pronunciation changes, which Shyamalan deliberately included to make the character names sound closer to their "correct" Asian pronunciations than the Americanized pronunciations from the cartoon. Fans were not pleased.
- And they weren't pleased because A. "Ah-vatar" doesn't exist because Sanskrit (the language that the word Avatar comes from) doesn't have a stressed "Ah" sound in it and B. the changes in pronunciation were arbitrary and downright stupid (where in the bloody hell do you get "Ki" from the word "Kai"?)
- Not to mention that the names Aang, Katara, and Sokka were made up by the creators. When they found out Katara was an authentic Inuit name, they were surprised. Aang and Sokka don't have "proper" Asian pronunciations. Besides, why would you care how Asian the names are and not care how Asian the characters are? Insisting on "real" Asian pronunciations is stupid and pointless when you cast white actors.
- And they weren't pleased because A. "Ah-vatar" doesn't exist because Sanskrit (the language that the word Avatar comes from) doesn't have a stressed "Ah" sound in it and B. the changes in pronunciation were arbitrary and downright stupid (where in the bloody hell do you get "Ki" from the word "Kai"?)
- They Just Didn't Care: Take a good, hard look at the unnecessary changes, the nonsensical adaptation of the first season, and the downright stupid direction Shyamalan brought the film in. Needless to say, it'll probably be nothing short of a miracle that a sequel would even be greenlit, much less with Shyamalan still attached.
- Took the Bad Film Seriously: Shaun Toub and Dev Petel, though at least the latter was somewhat close to the original character portrayal.
- Uncanny Valley: Appa's face in the movie, from what's been seen in the trailers and tie-in toys. Samples here.
- Unfortunate Implications: This explains most of the commotion. See: Unfortunate Implications: Film.
- Racebending, as horrible as it was, seemed to drown out the heavy sexist tone in the film, too.
- What an Idiot!: Here's an interesting bit of trivia: Nickelodeon was apparently so confident in Shyamalan, that they gave him full creative control over the film, while giving the creators of the TV show none to speak of. Needless to say, it didn't pan out very well. It's like none of them had even heard of the guy and his career.
- What the Hell, Casting Agency?: Aasif Mandvi as Zhao?
- White kids Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, and Noah Ringer as the dark-skinned, Inuit-based Katara and Sokka and the Tibetan based Aang. Surrounded by Asian extras and fighting dark-skinned bad guys.
- Back to The Last Airbender