Mistress At The Movies

The Last Airbender

My husband and daughter are huge fans of the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender so naturally they were climbing the walls to see the M. Night Shamalan live action version that hit the big screen. I finally took them to see it last night. I will admit that I was a little excited to see this as well. I watched the cartoon a fair few times and out of all the anime style cartoons I have been forced to watch over the years I enjoyed Airbender quite a lot. So off we went prepared for M. Night to pull his switch.

Over all the look of the movie was very good. M. Night succeeded in making an epic style movie. Beautifully rendered scenery and cgi. Ong, the Last Airbender was fairly cute and did a decent job of showing his turmoil. The rest… well, they did alright as well. Over all the movie was alright in My opinion. It might have even been good had there not been a conspicuous lack of Chinese leads. This is a story that is based out of China. They are named Chinese names. They read and write Chinese. They dress in the Chinese style. So why was I up to My eyes in white kids? Expect of course for the Fire Nation which seemed to be mainly Indian. What the heck would have been wrong with having at least one of the characters resemble what they looked like in the cartoon? It became distracting. Especially during the fight scenes where all of the extras were some sort of Asian, and then peppered throughout were the white leads.

Ugh.

Not a bad flick by any means. And if you can get past the white washing then you may have a good time watching this. It’s a huge world that M. Night has managed to put together. He even managed to make it believable.