Hey kids! Do you like Avatar?
[screaming]
Well, stay tuned because it's all new, next week!
Whaaaaa?
That's right! The Legend of Korra Season 5 is coming right here to Nickelodeon.
You can catch episodes 1 & 2 at 7:15 Eastern on Tuesday.
Make sure to set your DVR, because episode 3 is premiering at the exact same time.
Over on Nick 2!
Huuuh?
Do you like Spongebob Squarepants?
Uhhhhhhm...
Well, make sure to watch on Saturday because Korra episode 4 will air during commercials!
That doesn't make any sense.
Episodes 5 & 6 will be available online for a limited period before being arbitrarily pulled!
If you want to watch the rest of the season, send us a [inaudible] at P.O. Box 77
and the rest of the episodes will be delivered to you directly by carrier pigeon!
"Ow! What was that for?"
"That's how I show affection."
And now, back to the show!
After nearly an hour of nonsense, the Trio have finally reached the Northern Water Tribe.
At this point in the film I remember thinking,
But I underestimated the power of Katara to ruin things.
"We arrived [No!] at the Northern Water Tribe."
"We presented ourselves [Noooo!] to the royal court."
"My brother and the Princess [Shut up! Stop it with the voiceover already!] became friends right away."
The ending of The Last Airbender is a dumpster fire disaster.
The one saving grace up until this point was that the story was at least simple.
The good guys are trying to get somewhere and the bad guys are chasing them.
But the moment they arrive at the Northern Water Tribe, the story needs to go in two directions at once
and doesn't have enough time to properly handle either.
We've got a training scene with Aang and Pakku,
and then we've got a love plotline with Sokka and penis head for hair.
Now I do have to admit that the film is in a pretty tough position because of the source material.
Figuring out when to put what scene where is what 90% of every book on screenwriting is about.
Movies usually adhere to a specific story structure depending on genre,
and while every writer out there has their preferred formula,
I can bet you not a single professional screenwriter would ever suggest putting the scene
where the main character meets mentor and learn something
in the final third of the movie.
I mean just think about every sports movie you've ever seen.
In every one of them, you've got the Mr. Miyagi character.
The Mickey. The coach.
This is often the second most important character in the story.
The story is in fact about the main character's relationship with his mentor.
So they need to meet that person right at the beginning, otherwise you run into the problem
that The Last Airbender has.
The entire movie is supposed to be about Aang finding a mentor.
So when he finally does, he doesn't have enough time to form
a meaningful relationship with that character.
Pakku should be like your favourite high school teacher,
not the guy who takes your picture at the DMV.
"Yeah, congrats you're an officially registered waterbender. Next!"
This structure worked on the TV show
because of the serialised format.
There was a whole episode about Aang and his new teacher,
and then two more where that character played a role.
These three episodes are essentially a whole movie in their own right,
and shoving them into the last act of this movie means that everything is even more rushed than before.
"Um, the only thing that was difficult was like the last two episodes of the season ["Yeah."] were packed."
[laughter] "They were."
"They were ["Hahaha!"] packed with stuff,"
["Yeah."] and literally that would been half a movie ["Mhm."] and still,"
"When you see the third act to this movie, it's packed."
The movie needed a creative way to get around this.
Like maybe have a scene up at the Northern Water Tribe
earlier in the film to establish the characters up there,
so that there's a story already in motion
that the protagonists can engage with.
Or have them run into Pakku earlier in the movie
without knowing who he really is.
Or instead of Pakku, why not make Yue the waterbending teacher?
Then we can start setting up the romance earlier on
while also handling the training.
Or here's a radical idea:
Does this movie have to end with the battle in the Northern Water Tribe?
I mean why not just put it in the sequel?
Starting a movie off with a giant battle in an icy location
while two characters fall in love isn't a totally unheard of idea, right?
There are plenty of other options here. ["Hahaha!"/"They were packed!"]
But if you're absolutely going to do a training sequence in a movie,
here is how you don't completely f**k it up.
One: don't have the teacher say and name zen phrases like "Let your emotions flow like water".
This is just lazy screenwriting, especially when the lesson you are teaching
is the exact reverse opposite of the one the character actually needs to learn.
Last time Aang let his emotions flow like water
he got trapped in a giant ice sphere for a century.
This whole movie has been about his need to control his emotions
and the consequences of him not doing so.
And then at the end of this movie, the thing Aang does to win
is control his emotions.
Had he let them flow like water,
he would have murdered the entire fire nation fleet with a tsunami.
So maybe think a little bit harder about
how you phrase your hastily written fortune cookie bullshit, okay?
["Haha!"/"They were PACKED!"]
Two: don't just cut to your character already knowing
the thing that they came there to learn.
Aang's entire training with Pakku is rushed in one scene.
Show him learning it, struggling!
It might be cliché, but the training montage is incredibly effective.
It works in every single Rocky movie,
every sports movie in general,
and as a musical number in Mulan.
In all of these examples,
learning how to do something is a metaphor for the
more important internal growth the character goes through.
It's not just about becoming a better fighter,
it's about becoming a better person.
Putting a training montage in here would have also helped
with the second plotline of this section,
with Sokka allegedly falling in love with Yue,
which brings us to "how to fuck up a romance subplot".
So after they arrive, some guy we never met starts telling us
about the battle plans.
"The city was designed to withstand any assault."
Any assault, eh?
You know, except for the drill helmets
and the flamethrowers and the giant lizards
and the catapults and the assassins with heat hands.
So long as they don't have any of THOSE we'll be FINE!
Did anybody proofread this?!
Okay. So then he says that the princess needs a guard during the battle,
and Sokka says he'll do it and it's supposed to be like
this big moment.
"I'll do it. That's me; I'll be her guard. Nothing will happen to her."
His tone implies that this job is somehow more dangerous than fighting the war itself.
He's already willing to die in battle.
Why is this so surprising?
And then Pakku is like,
"I had a feeling you might volunteer."
I mean what the L? None of these three characters have said a word to one another
and we're already asked to understand by default that
one; Sokka is in love with Yue, and that
two; Pakku knows about it.
"I've loved spending these weeks with you, Sokka."
Great! Would have loved to have seen that too,
instead of just having you say how awesome it was?
"My grandmother will... ask you a lot of questions."
Yeah, I bet she would, seeing as your grandmother is
a peasant on the other side of the planet,
and you're bringing home a princess.
Pretty sure anyone would ask a few questions.
Who wrote this!
Oh, but I know why he says that!
It's so Yue can explain her entire backstory to us
so that we're ready for the whole thing with the fish in the pond later and
/God/, everything is just a puzzle piece and this movie stars robots!
This is the one scene in the movie that's supposed to show us
that Sokka has fallen in love with her and even /it/ is plagued by the cancer of exposition.
Then again, handling this exposition
before the battle is actually a rare improvement on the TV show,
which awkwardly shoves it in at the last second.
["Haha!"/"It was PACKED!"]
But there are still more natural ways to do this, even if the timing is better.
And meanwhile, we've been in the Water Tribe for a while now,
and somehow Katara hasn't spoken to a single other character.
She's the narrator of this story, and she might as well be a ghost.
If they had done the training montage earlier with Aang,
you could have a falling in love montage running in parallel
to handle both stories at the same time
in a way that the audience can actually feel.
Okay, so we've had all of one scene on a love plot
and one scene on a training plot, so it must be time to get to the
next plot point and right on schedule,
we've got an invasion!
'Cus every movie's got to end with the f*cking Battle of Minas Tirith, doesn't it?
And hoooooly spirit world, nothing makes sense!
Everything from this point on in the movie might as well have been a montage
of seven different films edited together at random by a monkey.
So we get to this uber spiritual place, so that Aang can meditate
and Yue says,
"I have to get back."
"I'll take you."
Where. Where is she going to go?
She's not going to fight the battle.
Is she going to oversee the battle?
Why? Does she have any military experience?
And why would she want to leave the side of the Avatar,
literally the most important person in the entire world,
when he is in mortal peril?
And where do they go? Oh, that's right. We never see.
They just disappear, and then come back a few minutes later.
Yes, but we know the reason they left was so that Katara could duel Zuko alone.
"The Fire Lord's son."
"You took him from our village!"
We know who he is, Katara!
Someone get this woman some donepezil!
And then cut and we're into Aang's hallucinogenic dream
with the blue dragon in the world of shitty film filters.
The dragon tries to make this about his character for a moment,
but then he abandons any talk about this being about something important,
or about Aang's inner demons and just literally says,
"Use the ocean."
"Show them the power of water."
"Come. Do this now."
Use water! Use water. That's the message.
That's the mind-altering, fate-inspired, life-redefining
cosmic secret of the universe and that was the best you could come up with?!
"Hey hey hey, them dudes use fire."
"Try using - try using water!"
That's it?
In the one moment in the film a character can literally look at the audience
and give us the theme, the thesis -
and you're going with "use water".
Use water?! Is this even real? Is this a joke?
Is this just an elaborate 150 million dollar prank?
So Aang wakes up, and he's captured for the fourth time in one movie.
I didn't realize he was being played by Princess Peach.
"Oh, what's going on. Did we get captured again?"
Ha ha but hey, maybe we'll get a cool fight out of this one.
Or we can just make it like a Bugs Bunny cartoon,
whatever.
So we cut to Katara walking through the battle
and she looks up and sees light in a random window and thinks,
"That's gotta be where Aang is!"
What?! You're in the middle of a war zone where every single bad guy can shoot fire
out of his fingertips and any one of them could be up there in that building
and you think "That's where Zuko has to be!"
Why.
But forget this noise.
What are Mandvi and his helmet up to? So Zhao and Iroh arrive, and Iroh learns Zhao's plan to kill the Moon Spirit.
"Your brother Fire Lord Ozai and I, have decided it is in our best interests to kill the Moon Spirit."
But despite knowing this crucial bit of information he decides to not stop Zhao
even though he is strong enough to do so, and waits until Zhao goes and succeeds
directly leading to the death of Yue.
"Commander Zhao."
"There are certain things humankind should not tamper with—"
"The Spirits in the Spirit World is one of them."
*Are.
What?
The Spirits and the Spirit Worlds are two of them.
What?
Or you could say the Spirits and the Spirit World are among them.
It's plural. Did anybody proofread this?
["Haha!"/"They were PACKED!"]
"The Fire Nation is too powerful...
...to worry about children's superstitions..."
What! Hey you're the one who believes killing this fish will make the moon change colors.
What part of this do you think is true?
And what parts are superstition?
"It is time we show the Fire Nation we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs."
That is the worst line ever said in the film.
And then for a second it looks like we might actually get a duel between two characters
who actually have some conflict between them, that the movie has earned.
"He wants to fight you so he can capture you, Zuko."
Hey, uh, Iroh, how do you know that?
I mean earlier in the film, Zhao tried to have Zuko assassinated.
So what makes you think he's going to just capture him now?
How do you know this?
And then we're robbed of the catharsis of seeing Zuko beat Zhao
and they instead leave him to get murdered by drowning in a floating ball of water by four ran—
I can't believe this is an actual scene in a major motion picture.
["Haha!"/"They were PACKED!"]
And only then, do we finally get to see Aang go to town with his bending powers
and take down a bunch of Fire Nation guys and it's over in one shot.
Seriously, this is the only shot of Aang fighting in the battle. Enjoy it while it lasts.
So this is followed by what is probably the most effective sequence of the entire film
and that's Aang's memory from before he gets trapped in the ice:
His time with the monks and when he found out he was the Avatar.
This all actually works.
You can see how peaceful the world was
and how Aang's one decision led to the hellscape he is currently facing.
It's a little late to save the entire movie, but it is the one moment of the film that actually rings true.
The Last Airbender isn't just one of the worst movies ever made.
Its failure actively ruined something great.
And I don't mean that it ruined the legacy of the show.
The show will always be great and the film doesn't change that.
it's on par with The Lord of the Rings,
Star Wars, or Harry Potter.
But it doesn't have that kind of reputation.
While you're unlikely to know anyone who hasn't at least heard of those previous examples,
the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender is still surprisingly unknown
and that has a lot to do with the failure of this film.
If this movie were well-made, The Last Airbender would have claimed a permanent place in our collective imagination.
But with one of the worst reviewed movies of all time, the franchise has faltered.
The Legend of Korra, the sequel series to the Last Airbender aired four full seasons on Nickelodeon.
All of them were fantastic, but you wouldn't know it with the way that they treated the franchise.
Seasons 3 & 4 were inexplicably aired in the same year. The show was plagued by leaked episodes,
a confusing release schedule, slashed budgets, and a sudden move to internet-only distribution.
Nickelodeon was just not the best place for a series aimed at an older demographic.
In 2014, Korra was also adapted into a video game by Platinum Studios.
Like the movie, it was rushed out to capitalize on name recognition
with little to no appreciation for the world or characters it was adapting.
If the 2010 film had succeeded, the franchise would be flourishing right now.
And when I think back to that day, the reason I considered this film the more traumatic experience
is not just because it ruins something that I loved, but because of the empathy I have for the creators.
Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, and their team built, a world of fascinating characters;
a world with rich lore and outstanding storytelling, animation, music, and action.
They did it out of a real passion for their work
and then these corporations came along, ripped it apart, and sold the corpse for pennies again
and again and again.
The world of Avatar: The Last Airbender is one that deserves the proper treatment on the big screen
and I hope that one day, it gets its due.
Thanks so much for watching everyone.
These videos took quite a bit longer than I thought they would
but I'm thrilled to finally get them up and I hope you enjoyed them.
Make sure to subscribe for more video essays and film reviews on Sage Rants' channel,
which will all be much shorter than this.
But most importantly, let me know what you thought about the movie in the comments below.
I want to hear from you guys, and I will be replying so tell me what I got wrong here or what I missed.
See you guys in the next video.