Finally, The Last Airbender was released and I went to see it with my daughter. I was so touched by the beauty of this film! There were themes in the series that I recognized right away and loved. Those themes made me fall in love with the series. I was so happy to discover that the movie removed much of the toilet-humor type of jokes so the emphasis could be placed on them. I felt that the movie was intensely true to the original series.

What may possibly have been bad acting from the lead, I interpreted as a person being completely out of touch with their situation, in denial of and avoiding the truth. Whether deliberate or not it worked for me and made sense.

I loved the intricacy of the bending moves. It reminded me of an interview the series creators gave explaining how much thought they had put into the martial art bending styles. The complex and sometimes lengthy moves made the bending more realistic and even believable for me as it showed that it takes discipline, practice, and inner strength, to raise and control the energy required to master the element.

I do wish the movie had been longer to provide better and more enjoyable bridges in some of the plot points and really hope future DVD will offer that. In spite of that, I still thought it was a great movie even if a person was not familiar with the series. Being familiar with the series, I was very impressed with this presentation and how well it managed to translate 20 episodes of cartoon into less than 2 hours of movie.

Take this into consideration: If you were to judge a movie only on it’s merits and not by the product that comes before it, then a Star Trek movie would be possible to be successful even though the lead characters were changed. Imagine Captain Keerk who is a timid man, with his science officer Mr. Spook who is prone to emotional outburst because his species has them all the time. They travel around the sea on the USS Entropy encountering aliens from space.

While that movie may be ok as a movie, no Star Trek fan would give it a good rating and it would fail.

Even if I have to put up with Aang becoming Ong, some of the storyline changes make no sense. Why is it suddenly the moon spirit is in a cave pool? In the series, the pool is in a secret area but out in the open where the moon spirit can see the moon.

All fire benders can create fire from nothing, that’s just how it is. They create it from internal fire.

This movie qualifies as EPIC FAIL on the part of Shymalan and if the second book (movie) does get a go ahead, if his name is attached to it in anyway, I won’t be spending my money on it.

You raise some good points and speak to them well. But your opinion of the movie is based on how it compares to the original series, whereas I am judging it on its own merrits. Still, I can understand where you are coming from and know that if a series that I cared greatly for was changed significantly in a movie adaptation, I would have issues with it as well. I may very well have the same reaction that you did when and if the proposed Robotech movie comes out ,as I love that series.

I will say that I watched several more episodes of Avatar this weekend and enjoyed them, but they did not change my opinion of the movie. Yes it took many liberties with the source material but I still don’t feel like it completely disrespected its origins.