I'd give this film 2 outa 10 and I'm not even a race bender.

I'm a massive fan of the series, got my 25 year old bf and year old 31 sis hooked on it too, was planning to take them and every friend i had to see it in multiple visits and now i can't even face taking my sister cos its to embarassing and upsetting.

I really really hope Mr M.N.S's(its to hard to spell and really I think we should just call him He-Who-Must-Not-Make-Films from this point anyways) daughter slaps him and disowns him for this insult.

Really think we should compile a list of errors with the film for him to read and make him answer for his crimes and to use as a guide for the new directors of the next film if its luckily to be made cos honestly I doubt he's gonna come back.

To be nice though and show future directors what they need to build on or to make sure the next film has I'll start with the ...

Good points of the film:

Fantastic trailers!!!! If only the film came close to them!

Special effects when bending is going on

Look of the Air Temples, Norther Water Tribe city, Fire Nation and Navy

Yue, Gram-Gram, Iroh, Azula and Zhao

Some kool looking martial arts

The early half of the invasion

Aang fighting on the training grounds

Bad Points:

Totally poor and pointless new ways of saying Aang, Avatar and Iroh! I mean seriously Ear-oh! Come on!!!!

Rubbish, emotionless, high school play like wooden, just reading the lines acting from Aang, Sokka and Katara

No humour!! 1 comic moment copied from the series don't count!

Pathetic writing and scripting!!! Honestly how hard would it have been to even do the basics like any normal situation! Introductions happen when people first speak!!!!! The narrator actually casually mentions Aangs name before Kataras even bothered to ask him it, even tho shes gone thru the bother of rescuing him based on the minute they spent together, despite the films reasoning.

Earth Kingdom village rebellions! Y??? Putting the Earthbenders in a quarry?! How hard would it be for metal cells and have the gang use some brains to escape!!

Characters in general not displaying an iota of intelligence

Sokkas only lines being, be careful, I'll protect you, don't do that and watch out!! And all of these were over acted!

Ozai having a heart?! "Do not hurt my son." Seriously, y throw that in?!!

Not enough violence or bending! The invasion in general was rushed ova so you hardly see any fighting and the soft touch with the tsunami not actually being unleashed was too much pampering for the kiddies!! Also rushing past action and blurring it was disapointing.

Roku, an amazing character being replaced with a random dragon!!!

The look of the spirit world and the Earth Kingdom villages!(sure that was just the reused Xena/Hercules sets)

Appa and Momo looking crazily evil! With Momo hardly ever getting a clear shot! He was soo creepy!

Aangs voice!! Awwful, I'd neva pick him and give him constant depressing lines!

Roll ur eyes martial arts scenes with Aang pointless spinning round and doing stuff without the air moving at all.

Iroh(or Ear-oh, if you prefer and should be shot) never fighting!

Using just "bender" constantly when talking with no mention of the element first leading to much **** in the cinema

The music missing completely from sections of the film for no reason

No Ocean Spirit! Aang disappearing in the pool and kicking ass woulda been amazing! But instead he just raised a tidal wave which we'd seen in the trailer already.

CONSTANT CLOSE UP HEAD SHOTS OF BAD ACTORS JUST REPEATING THEIR LINES WITH NO EMOTION!

NO CHARACTER BONDING! SURE SOKKA NEVA EVEN REALLY HAS A PAL MOMENT WITH AANG!

Overall key points for the next film if it gets made through much fan prayer!

- Have actors who can act and not just be robots!

- Have directors who can tell when a scene looks awful and forced and drama class like

- More bending and violence!

- Have the story flow naturally, don't rush it or cram things in using the narrator!

- Write characters dialogue better!!! Seriously, talk! Don't just set up or skip or posture unless for the latter that's in the characters character! And have the lines be meaningful with emotion or purpose! I mean Katara might as well have said "Zuko! I like juggling marbles with my toes!" for all the relevance her actual lines had before her confrontation with him.

- Have better music throughout the film

- Keep plenty of the films finale secret please and have kool moments we aint seen in the trailer like the training ground fight

- Put characters name pronounciations back to what they should be!

- Return the humour back to the film!!!

Ok I'm done, gonna find a way to send this to He-Who-Must-Not-Make-Films so he can experience my ire and understand y I may hurt him if i eva have the chance...

[/QUOTE]20" isn't big enough for an Appa plushie; it should be big enough to use as a pillow. [/QUOTE]

I would want one big enough to use as a bed. It's kind of like Venture Brothers not having any merchandise, although with Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick it's probably because they're so beyond busy making their show.

Mike and Bryan, more wearable merchandise please.

I say we should all at least just get brown, red, blue or white shirts ourselves and calligraphize our preferred element on them.

And I think Shymalan should force himself to through film school or something like that to allow himself to maybe make movies with a differrent world view.

My general rule now is watch only the series and never expect anything else good to bear the Avatar name.

Sorry, I know that another review isn't really what you guys want, but I really would like some more people to read it, even though I know it's kinda long and plenty of people will just skip over it. Thank you to those people who stick with it!

Let me start out by saying what a huge fan of Avatar: the Last Airbender I am. Even now, nearly two years after the Sozin's Comet finale, I will sit down and watch old episodes. I recently got two of my best friends hooked on the show because it was that good. When the news came that they would be making a live-action version of Avatar (the REAL one, mind you), I had the reaction most fans had: excitement mixed with apprehension. Despite the mixed bag of news that came over the Internet over the past year or so (Jesse McCartney anyone?), I remained hopeful that it would all work out, that the movie would be on par with the show, and that it would at least be visually stunning.
Unfortunately, only one of those things happened. As a moviegoer, I will admit that the actual bending was pretty awesome. But that was a given in a movie that required the bending to simply be what it was in the show: the vehicle for the action sequences. The show that I love, though, doesn't rely on action sequences to get by. If that had been all the show had been about, I would have given it up as another crappy anime a long time ago. What Avatar did best was give us characters that we could relate to in this fantastic world and watch them grow. This movie took everything that was special about the series and removed it. What the producers and M. Night Shyamalan did was strip the series down to its core and put it up on the big screen. What does that mean? SPOILERS BELOW
First of all, the Kyoshi Warriors are gone, along with most other good characters from the series, including Jet, Bumi, Bato, Teo, the Mechanist, and the pirates. On top of that, the minor characters that they did keep were merely shadows of their former selves. Haru had, I think, one line. Roku was never actually shown and everyone was made to think that he was a dragon spirit, and not the former incarnation of the Avatar at all. Meanwhile, our favorite trio were all as flat and one-dimensional as the screen you're reading this on right now. Aang (oh, I'm sorry, Ahng) was far too serious. For someone who is supposed to be portraying a 12-year-old, Noah Ringer really didn't bring anything to the table besides his background in martial arts and his resemblance to his character. Katara was reduced to nothing, which really made me sad. Her growth in waterbending wasn't even shown in the movie and her fight with Zuko at the North Pole was incredibly short and the only reason she beat him the second time is because he didn't see her coming. Her strongest character moments in the series were instead given to Aang, like her speech rallying the captured earthbenders in "Imprisoned". Sokka (a.k.a. Sohka) really didn't do much for me. His whole purpose in the series is comedic relief, which make his growth as a character that much more striking when you see how far he has come over the course of the series. There were a few good laughs at his expense, but other than that, nothing.
These were all problems with the script, which should never have been approved. If they had given this script to any fan of the original series, such errors would have been pointed out almost immediately. Another major script problem was that hardly any names were ever used. If I didn't already know who each of these characters were, I wouldn't know what to call them. Aang's name wasn't even said until about twenty minutes into the movie, when they were at the Southern Air Temple. Momo's name was said once, when he was trying to catch the koi fish in the Spirit Oasis at the North Pole.
But there were equally bad qualities on the production side of this movie. For one, the movie moved entirely too fast. I can appreciate how difficult it must have been to get twenty half hour episodes into one movie, but they could have made the movie longer to compensate. Who did they think this movie would appeal to? If they had made the movie over two hours long, the fans would have sat through it as long as the quality remained. Because of how quickly everything moved, certain scenes seemed almost pointless and downright confusing. Then there was the acting. This could be blamed on a variety of things, such as the pace of the movie, but there was no acting to be found. Everyone was rather bland and one-dimensional. The only saving grace in that department was Dev Patel who played Prince Zuko and if there was a person that needed to be layered, it was Zuko, but the rest of the characters should have been just as deep. For example, as a die-hard fan of the show, I found myself questioning why Sokka and Yue were so upset they had to separate when Yue had to give her life back to the Moon Spirit. Their love and their connection were never really established and, subsequently, their kiss had little to no meaning for me.
Finally, and this was the real crime, almost the entire mythology of the show was changed. Aang looks as if he can fully control the Avatar State as evidenced by his creation of the tsunami at the end when that control is a vital plot point of the second book; the altering of the firebenders to make it so that they need fire present to bend made the entire purpose of the eclipse in book three irrelevant; the absence of the Kyoshi Warriors means Sokka cannot end up with Suki in the end; and the fact that the purpose of the Avatar is not to harm others (Roku's words, not mine) is pure and utter bull. I thought the one saving grace of the movie would be the final scenes, in which Aang becomes one with the Ocean Spirit and single-handedly defeats the Fire Nation army at the North Pole. But that didn't happen. Instead, Aang created a wave. A BIG wave. That's it. He didn't even make it crash down on the Fire Nation fleet, but instead allowed them to run away. Well, at least he did what Roku told him to and he showed them "the power of water". Whoopdifreakingdoo. END OF SPOILERS
As a normal moviegoer, I would have been utterly and completely confused by this movie. Not only did it move too fast, but the background of the story just wasn't there. But I wasn't just a normal moviegoer; I was a fan of this show with extremely high expectations. I should have known better, but I was hopeful. Not only did it take my beloved characters and give me cardboard cutouts of them, but it also took everything I loved about this series and deemed it as unnecessary. Will I go see a second movie if they make one? Unfortunately. But do I hope that they realize how angry they are going to make the fans and make some immense changes before then? With my heart and soul. Surprisingly, the one thing that truly impressed me was the one thing that had been causing controversy for quite some time now: the cast was incredibly diverse and each nation seemed to have its own race. But one good casting choice could not restore my faith in this movie. In a movie fraught with horrible acting, gaping plot holes, and source material discrepancy, let's hope that M. Night Shyamalan is going to create the biggest plot twist of them all by making the next two Avatar movies actually respectable.

Grade: D+

It??s been over month now since I saw the movie... Not the best, but not total failure either. I had heard and read many negative reviews about the moviebeforeand I decided to watch it like I haven??t seen Avatar before. For someone not familiar with the story or characters it would have been a good thing to start. Of course I agree with everyone who says that the animated series was far better than the movie. They could do much better, there is a lot of potential. Instead of adapting the whole story, maybe they could have come up with totally new adventures that would have taken place between the episodes and been more linked to the original series... Well, at least The Last Airbender made it to the big screen...

It is just my opinion. Feel free to argue.