the last airbender is a movie that has real trouble with combat magic
actually let me start that again the last airbender is a movie that has
trouble with consistent cause and effect in its magic system
and that makes the combat swing between actually pretty decent
and downright ludicrous yeah that's right stick around i'm actually going to
say something nice about the last airbender even though it's illegal on
the internet also spoilers. my name is jill bearup and
on this channel we mainly talk about screen combat and all of the myriad
things you can do with it because by gosh i love theatrical
violence and apparently so do all of you. and the thing is, on
screen you can fight with your fists or swords or staffs or whatever but you
can also fight with magic and the last airbender
contains some useful examples of how and how not
to do that. for the uninitiated avatar the last airbender was an animated
nickelodeon show which ran for three seasons. the story follows aang and his
friends as they seek to save the world from the fire nation's
conquering frenzy aang is not only the last airbender he's also the avatar the
only person in the world who can manipulate
fire earth air and water and he's got to learn to bend water earth and fire so he
can defeat the fire lord and save the world it's a really really
good series i have a video about the last agni kai from the third season in
which i talk about why that fight specifically is so good and a couple of
older videos which are more like character studies on zuko
and aang but the series and the way they set up
water earth air and fire bending in particular was pretty darned impressive
one of the reasons for that was that it used real world martial arts as a basis
for each of the four bending styles to wit: tai chi, hung gar kung fu
mostly northern shaolin kung fu again mostly and bagua
in 2010 the live-action adaptation directed by m night shyamalan came out
adapting the first season of the show book one water to film and it was not
well received let's go with not well received very
quickly the plot of the film goeth thusly katara and sokka katara and
soaka whatever find aang or ong in the ice at the south
pole they discover he's the avatar, ooh. Aang has to get to the north pole and
learn waterbending the fire nation is trying to stop that happening
including the fire lord's banished son zuko at the end there's a big battle at
the north pole aang symbolically accepts his role as the avatar to be continued
never because audiences were not impressed now the bending styles of the
series were carried over at least somewhat into the film for example there
are some very lovely sequences of katara and aang doing their tai chi water
bending thing i don't really know very much about tai
chi so i don't know how their form is but you know it looks pretty and flowing
however there is a major problem with the bending in the movie and it boils
down to cause and effect specifically
proportionality and timeliness the effort expended by
characters to achieve certain results is inconsistent and the time taken to
perform bending moves makes them seem really ineffective for combat let me put
that more simply too much of the time there's too much
bend and not nearly enough element pretty
pretty tai chi but no water is moving anywhere near them i mean we could argue
that one's a kata but eh lots of staff waving but not much air
going anywhere lots of posturing but the effect produced is meh... and
just to round things off with the most egregious example of dodgy filmmaking
too much bending effect equals pebble? side note this is actually an editing
problem these dudes are the ones who put up this wall to save earthbending dad
and his son but what it looks like they're doing is all of this posturing
and then a pebble lifts into the air now if you
keep watching you'll see that the pebble is actually being controlled by this guy
right here but that's not the point chaps you already made the wall there
was no need to continue going through the moveset because you're not actually
doing anything right now if as a filmmaker you wanted to signal
to the audience that these guys were the ones who put up that
earthbending wall then what you do is you have earthbending dad look over to
them and they do one more move obviously a finishing move for that
moveset which they just did which put up the earthbending wall
great. i get editing problems and we'll get to that in a bit
because this scene is particularly bad for them but
this was just not necessary bending is supposed to be impressive you have the
power of the element in your hands you have telekinesis
albeit of a very specific variety you can make your
element do the things including fighty things this impressive
effect is somewhat lessened when it takes 10 seconds of hand swishing to do
anything during which time someone could have just run up and
punched you in the face i could give you an example of earthbending from the
series oops i just did where one move does one thing
one move one move but the movie does get it right sometimes on the
proportionality and timeliness front just not consistently and that's very
frustrating to watch for example in this scene our heroes
arrive at the north pole and there are no fewer
than 12 waterbenders standing in line doing their tai chi thing why does this
work? proportionality and timeliness or if you
prefer: effort. 12 waterbenders performing
synchronized movements for several moves in a row managed to lift
this giant ice wall as the audience we buy
this because we instinctively feel that a bigger thing will require more effort
to move than a smaller thing the bigger the thing the more people you'll need to
move it at all and the longer it will take to
get it where it needs to go the effort definitely does not have to be directly
proportional especially if you're in a soft magic system like avatar
but it does need to be reasonable. yoda lifts the x-wing out of the swamp in
empire strikes back the ship is obviously a lot bigger than anything he
could affect by natural means but we buy it because
the force we buy it because not only does the force grant telekinetic power
it's also a... force multiplier that wasn't even meant
to be a pun never mind i mean it grants greater
power than you could produce with your physical body
for a more martial example return of the jedi has luke in what is
possibly an editing oopsie or not who even knows kick the air while rescuing
his friends on the sandbarge and has this dude react like he's been
legit kicked in the face force kick! why not you can totally do
that in a universe which contains telekinesis no contact is made but your
intent combined with your force powers makes it happen
sure we'll buy that in revenge of the sith count dooku fights anakin and
obi-wan on general grievous's ship dooku is force choking obi-wan which again is
a telekinesis thing and then dooku kicks his leg back at anakin anakin goes
flying back into a wall telekinesis force multiplication great
or in the last jedi rey kicks three dudes with her one foot and they all
fall backwards telekinesis force multiplication to bring it back to
the last airbender sorry got distracted we will buy that people
with special powers moving their bodies in certain ways will bend the elements
to their will it's magic no problem but instinctively we still
require cause and effect to be somewhat consistent even
if the magic system contains a force multiplier which
bending the elements clearly does and even if people have differing levels of
power which they do we expect the effort
necessary in terms of time taken or concentration level or level of physical
exertion required to be at least somewhat consistent we
expect it to make some kind of intuitive sense we also
expect timeliness with which the film has some problems for an example of
where the last airbender does this right see daddy earthbender bringing up a wall
to protect his son during the earthbender jailbreak thing
proportionality is solid and that was also a pun you know what
nevermind proportionality is appropriate the wall is big enough to
protect the kid it's substantial but it's not the size of a house say so
we buy it and timeliness is also fine it's a combat situation he
needs to move faster the kid is toast there are just unintentional puns
everywhere today aren't there let's pretend that i meant them
speed is really important in combat and this is where the proportionality thing
really tends to bite i know i mentioned it already but they already did the
thing they needed to do i.e putting up the wall to protect earthbending dad and
son having them continue to move without any earth bending seeming to happen on
the screen is at best disorientating for your audience
and at worst just hilarious in the non-good way
this also shows up in the fight between zuko and katara at the north pole
now my opinions may be coloured by my knowing the series
but i thought at this point Katara was meant to be
like good at water bending yeah in the series when the moon is out
she has the upper hand but as soon as the sun rises
zuko has the edge 'you rise with the moon i rise with the sun' but here she's
beaten because in his third set of moves against her zuko sends two
fireballs from different directions and it takes her so long to block the first
one that she completely misses the second one this
is a timeliness problem the number of moves taken to block a fire blast goes
from basically one: reach behind you bringing
your hands forward and the water appears in front of you
to wave your arms about turn around and pull the water over your head to wave your
arms around and then pull the water up speed is really important in combat
that first single move would have blocked all three of these strikes
why the extra moves it just makes katara look incompetent if they decided that
okay katara was not going to be good at waterbending at this point
then fine but very shortly thereafter they have katara save aang from zuko in
a suitably impressive way and aang looks at
her all impressed and stuff and it just seems a bit inconsistent
really the timeliness problem is down to the choreography but not necessarily the
choreographer because if someone higher up the food chain
say the director i don't know whoever has decided that each element related
move should require multiple steps then that's what's gonna happen maybe
all of this hand waving was the choreographer's idea
maybe not but still in a system which clearly has one move does one
thing options having them do all of this
really overly complicated stuff just to block a fire blast makes them
look incompetent the other timeliness problem that you see
is a special effects one kinda the problem which shows up
most egregiously in the earthbender breakout is that the element isn't tied
to the movement properly you would intuitively expect
the kick the most powerful movement to launch the fire but no
the awkward hand movement afterwards does this air bending move immediately
shoots the dude up into the air great this move comes a second or two
after the movement is complete ah this one directly after it has the
movement of the air tied to the movement of his hands perfectly again and because
they follow one after the other it's really hard not to
notice but i know exactly why the timing of this is off and probably so do you if
you've watched this scene more than once: this is one shot and the effects are all
added in later we go from here yep keep going keep going
keep going right the way through to here and there are no cuts which means that
every awkward moment every mistimed piece of choreography or wire work is
going to show up on the surface this is a special effects
problem but the special effects team can only work with what they've got and so
they have to time the movement of the air effects
to the movement of the wire work regardless of what aang is doing with
his hands they have to make it work and so sometimes the
element is tied very precisely to the movements
and sometimes it's just not that is still no excuse for the earthbenders you
know what the worst part is though the one shot thing which works so poorly
in the earthbender breakout can work beautifully
and does in this very film i really genuinely like this bit right here where
aang air and waterbends his way through all of the fire nation soldiers to get
to the wall. for what 10 15 20 seconds we see what
this film's fight scenes could have been and it's painful because
it just looks nice and it has a point on like a
character level at a plot level go with me here the slide
is perfect a beautiful airbending avoidance and entirely in keeping with
the character of the aang of the series he flips over the second guy's head and
makes the ice collapse beneath him with waterbending he saves a waterbender
with some more waterbending as he lands there's ice there's water there's
acrobatics it's gorgeous there's slow motion which
enhances it rather than just making it look weird and it's great and
then there's this air corridor thing which is a bit
off looking but you know what i really enjoyed that previous part there's even
a sensical point to it in terms of the story
aang has spoken to the dragon spirit 'show them the power of water' really
could you be more vague than that spirits honestly the moon spirit is
killed and in a scene which contains both the worst and best lines of
dialogue in the film which is not strictly relevant to the main point of
this video and so i've put it in the extended version available on patreon
and nebula more on that later, Yue gives herself up
and the moon is restored zhao is killed and aang makes a run for
the city walls so the avatar can show them the power of water
which he does without killing absolutely everyone which is an interesting
departure from the series we don't know aang's objective at the start of the
scene but we see his urgency and when he gets
to the wall we see that was his aim he says i know
what to do and that is enough the point of this scene
is to show that aang has accepted his role as the avatar the
bowing ceremony thing is a callback a bookend for that scene
earlier in the film but we see everything we need here in the way he
flawlessly combines water and airbending the earthbender prison
scene is messy and inexplicable like guys
you're earthbenders in a prison made of dirt
what are you doing but this bit this does everything it needs to
and even though it's a combat scene there is a grace and an ease to it which
the rest of the film really just kind of lacks see i told you i was going
to say some nice things eventually the last airbender treatment
of bending falls down because it's inconsistent
some impressive things take one move some impressive things take five moves
and characters inexplicably choose the five move thing
in a situation where the one move thing would have been much more effective but
even that's not consistent because sometimes they choose to do the
effective thing and that inconsistency is intuitively
baffling to the audience and so it distracts us from the point of the scene
whatever that happens to be i mean i don't think a good grasp of the bending
disciplines could have saved the movie it has too many other problems but
the moments where they get it right just underscore all of those other moments