Brief Summary

I enjoyed it. It wasn’t nearly as good as the cartoon (more detail later), but taken on its own, for what it was, I thought it was OK. Not great, but certainly not deserving (IMHO) of the bashing it has received, especially relative to that other recent “Avatar” movie, which I thought was pretty bad (way worse than this).

It hit the main points of Season (Book) 1 of the cartoon. They obviously trimmed out a lot of detail, but that’s too be expected when condensing 20-something episodes down to a movie-length tale.

Keeping in mind the fact that I liked it – here are two of my nitpicks, followed by a general rant that isn’t specifically about this movie.

“Race-bending”

I’m not sure how prevalent this complaint is outside geek circles, but there is quite the controversy surrounding this movie in regards to the racial makeup of the cast. [Here's a brief overview of the main problem]

I think the problem as it relates to the main characters is definitely a bigger (perceived) deal to people more familiar with eastern or Asian cultures who were very aware of the ties that were present in the original cartoon (not as much in the movie), whereas it may not even occur to most other people, probably largely due to the manga-esque eye styling in the toon.

That being said, the voices for the main characters were spot-on, so that helped quite a lot. To be honest, I took much more of an exception (in regards to “racebending”) with the fire nation casting, but let’s not get off on that tangent.

Humor / Darkness

This was by far the biggest departure from the source material. The cartoon contained healthy doses of humor, usually coming from Sokka and sometimes uncle Iroh (my fave in the toon). In stark contrast, I can’t remember a single joke or humorous scene in this movie.

Even Aang is much more light-hearted (at times) in the toon. Sure, there were serious moments when he reflected on the reality of the things that had happened with the appropriate level of somberness, but in the movie they may has well just have changed his name to “Angst“. And this goes across the board for the whole story; I think when it came to chopping stuff out they just decided to eliminate all sense of happiness, which I don’t think was entirely necessary and definitely makes it a significantly different experience.

General Rant

The biggest problem that has been bothering me about this started well before this film was released (or even made). It’s the general concept of re-doing stories that have previously been told (well, in many cases) in animated form, as if animation is somehow not quite good enough, and that something can only be really big or significant as a live action feature. I call BS.

Taking this as an example, while it was OK, I’d strongly recommend to anyone that they get the DVDs of the cartoon series and watch those instead, and maybe only follow up with the live action version if they’re interested. I have the feeling that for a lot of people who see this version first, it might turn them off from the cartoon, which would be a shame, since it’s so much better.

Just in case you don’t believe me on that yet, here’s exhibit B: Transformers. I don’t know about you, but personally I think the recent live action versions have been steaming piles. Yes, I know the original cartoons were essentially just long toy commercials… and yes, I realize that they want to show off their cool, ever-evolving special effects powers by putting stuff on the screen that’s more “believable”. The problem is that they often end up going overboard at the expense of story-telling. In TF, the millions of interlocking and spinning gears on each character may have been “impressive”, but for me, it just wasn’t as good as plain old boxy robots; sorry.

Now I also know that the reason they do it is because the dollars prove that most people do not share my position on this (with rare exceptions like Pixar), but I guess that’s really the primary target of my rant: people who for some reason can’t grasp the idea that great stories might be available in animated form, so they won’t even pay attention to any of them until someone “live-action”’s them up. The problem is that conversion is almost always for the worse. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but at the moment I can’t think of a single case in which the live action was better (IMHO) than the original cartoon.

OK, so a couple days ago I posted this Twitter message:

The iOS/AppStore model is essentially making the same appeal as AOL (vs. open internet) in the early 90’s – safer, polished, easier to use.

Unfortunately, the constraints of Twitter just make it too difficult to really explain or discuss that kind of thing, so I thought I’d flush out what I meant by it here instead.

What prompted this initially was I was thinking back to the early 90’s when I had a NetCom (“real” internet) dial-up account. Almost everyone else I knew personally who was “online” was using either AOL or some similar competitor (CompuServe, etc.). More specifically, I was thinking about how I used to try to explain to people why the “real” internet was so much better than the AOL walled garden, and mostly I was remembering (having flashbacks to) how utterly unsuccessful those attempts were.

People still weren’t sure whether WWW stood for wild, wild west or world wide web; all they “knew” was that there were dangerous hackers waiting to infest their computers with all manner of virii and use them to launch nukes at Russia after draining their bank accounts. Not to mention the porn. And, perhaps the most frightening of all, the people talking to each other unmoderated, uncensored, and anonymous. But most importantly of all they “knew” that AOL was “keeping them safe” from all of this. (of course all these things they “knew” weren’t accurate, but the important part was that they believed them).

But even those who weren’t put off that way (intimidated away from the open net and towards AOL) still had little interest in the open internet. Another common reason was the usability. AOL was insanely easy to get up and running relative to a true internet account. AOL’s content was polished and clean; the internet was extremely messy and for the most part ugly (relatively speaking). AOL was the gatekeeper, because you don’t want “just anyone” putting stuff out there with no “quality control” – that would be a disaster.

Truly the only real, substantial and present (at the time) appeal of the “true” internet over AOL in those days was one thing: freedom. The problem is that for most people, that isn’t a benefit they can see, feel, or imagine in the moment. Its biggest payoff really comes in the long run, but that’s not a trade-off most people are willing to make for ease of use and beauty today.

However, the primary encouraging thought that occurred to me was this: it didn’t actually matter that I wasn’t able to sway many people over to what I saw / foresaw as the ultimate better solution, because all of the advantages that a free platform offered DID eventually cause it to surpass the walled garden approach, and looking back now, I think it’s easy to see that it was the inevitable conclusion.

Yes, it took a long time. Yes, most web sites still sucked. Most (going by raw numbers / percentages) still do. Yes, there were/are dangers out there to be dealt with. And (perhaps most importantly), all along the way the “average user” never really cared much at all about the conflict, or was even aware that it existed. In spite of all those things, enough people, motivated by both creative opportunity and commercial gain, embraced the open platform and eventually made the walled garden model it was competing with obsolete.

Basically, the point of all of this was that it is both futile and unnecessary for me to try to convince people to see things from my point of view in regards to issues like the Apple App Store. It doesn’t really negatively impact me much personally, and most people just don’t care, and they don’t need to. I think there is too much to be gained by the success of the open alternative for it not too eventually overtake the ultra-closed / restrictive model. So I’m not really going to worry about it too much anymore, and I don’t think anyone else really needs to either. Awareness is still important, but for the people who aren’t, it’s no big deal. They’ll eventually get off of AOL once the plug has been pulled and/or the rest of the world has moved on / passed them by.