I do believe I’ve found a new favorite program online and its name is Pitch Meeting. Anyone that’s offended by CinemaSins or Honest Trailers probably isn’t going to like this but at the same time if you can laugh about pretty much anything then this is going to be perfect since it takes any given movie and turns it into one of the worst-sounding pitches in the world. With some movies that’s not really too hard since as it was with The Last Airbender, the movie really didn’t fire on all cylinders and kind of ripped the animated version to pieces in order to get one single movie out with a hope for a sequel that kind of crashed and burned without fail. It could have been that there wasn’t enough character development, or that there wasn’t enough time to develop a single story line, or that there was just so much source material that trying to jam it all into one movie was bound to backfire in a very big way. If anything the first movie should have been focused on about half of the material that was actually presented, so as to give viewers the idea of what the story was really about and why certain plot points were important. Instead we were given a movie that sped through points that might have been a lot more helpful if they weren’t flashed by us as the audience was carted through the movie at a lightning pace.
There was a lot of hope for this movie since the story is one that a lot of fans have embraced when it comes to the animated series and there’s a great deal of material that has gone into the making of it. But as it happens in Hollywood sometimes, the mangling of a franchise isn’t anything new since Hollywood continually does its level best to cut down on as much exposition as possible and deliver something that will make money. Of course, the more explanation that was afforded for this story, the better it would be since realistically a lot of people that went to see the movie did not watch the show and as a result they knew next to nothing of what to expect. That’s not necessarily a bad thing since it can mean that the audience is in for a surprise and will possibly walk out of the theater with big smiles on their faces after realizing that they now want to know more about the franchise. A lot of the smiles on the faces of those coming out of this movie however were due to laughter that was levied at the ridiculous notion that it was worth the money. That might sound unkind, but it’s the closest I can come without truly saying what this movie made a lot of people feel.
Realistically it is kind of frustrating to see a favorite movie torn to pieces like this and it make a lot of people wonder just what those folks in Hollywood are doing when they pitch a script, or when they even write a script. The trick is that a full book, or series, can really be made into a movie since it would be hours and hours long, and the average attention span of a person in the theater isn’t much more than a couple hours, though many people will gladly stay for a three hour movie so long as it’s something they enjoy. Packing as much as can be dumped into a two-hour movie means cutting out a lot of vital information, a good chunk of character development, and scenes and moments that might otherwise be vital to the story. In an instance such as this it’s certain that Avatar had a lot of stuff pared down again and again until they came to nearly bare bones and to decide just what to keep and what to ditch. But the problem there is that with everything that was pared down it should have been a cinch to make one movie and set everything up, then another and move into the real conflict, and then the third perhaps for a resolution that would have enticed a lot of people to keep watching and keep hoping that it would get continually better. Instead we were given a movie that felt mashed together and for the most part cherry-picked in a way that left out a lot of key details and possible plot points that would have people feeling far more enlightened and less as though they’d been given a movie and told to simply understand what was going on.
The Last Airbender could have been a great movie and it looked like it might have been, but there was just too much missing and not enough explanation for why.
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