A friend on LJ recently came across the following clip from the "Last Airbender" movie. I was deeply surprised by how amateurish it looked. Check it out:
1) The dialogue: "There is Earth underneath your feet!" Um... yeah, I think they kinda knew that.
Also, later on a soldier says "All airbenders should be dead! Kill 'em!" Cheeese!
2) The camerawork. It essentially involves the camera circling around Aang. Sure the camera is capturing all the action well enough, but it's not terribly exciting direction.
3) Doing a little dance!: Yeah, I'd already seen how silly the fight choreography looked and how slow the elemental attacks would be. (A gun would rather neatly kill off these guys long before they finish their little element-wielding dances.) However, I still found that Aang's first wind attack dance made me lmao.
4) Waiting for each other to finish: After Aang finishes his speech it appears that a soldier has been waiting the whole time without any interest in stopping him from possibly starting a riot. He rather cheesily says "Are you an Airbender boy?" before giving an evil laugh and Aang's female friend Kitara seems to wait until he's finished laughing before shoving the soldier and telling the him to "leave him (Aang) alone". The soldier then follows this up by waiting quite a long time (presumably for the wind machine to warm up) before charging forward at Kitana and being countered by Aang's eponymous skills. There's a feel throughout the clip that everyone's waiting their turn and it doesn't feel natural at all.
5) Comic relief character?: The whole scene seems deadly serious, so when Katara walks up to an armed soldier and shoves him saying "leave him alone" it's rather hard to imagine that the humour is intentional. Later, Aang's male friend Sokka seems like his comedy might possibly be intentional, but his over the top terror looks so out of place with the ultra-serious action that you can't help but feel you are laughing at the movie rather than with it. (On the plus side, I'm expecting some pretty good rifftrax from this.
6) Amateurish: No this isn't an early rehearsal, but it sure as hell looks like it.
(Via Sabrina_Il)
x-posted to moviebuffs
