G-Max
Deity
- Joined
- May 20, 2006
- Messages
- 2,556
(repressed memories of mispronunciation and other inexcusable flaws begin to resurface)
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Crap, now I'm going to have to watch that movie again.
Katara. Just Katara.
She went from a character who passed The Bechdel Test with flying colors to a character who serves no real purpose in the movie
Well, that's what happens when you cut 7.5 hours of material down to 2. A lot of chaff gets tossed, and worthless side-stories like the All-Girls' Ninja Club of Kyoshi tend to be first on the chopping block.
and generally do whatever the man in the particular scene tells her to do
Five minutes into the movie...
Sokka: "Do not hit that sphere!"
(Katara hits it anyway, thus setting the entire movie's plot in motion)
Yup. Does nothing important except what the men around her tell her to do
magnetic water and fire and earth
?
the dragon that seems to serve no purpose other than being a dragon
Dude. It's a DRAGON. Simply being a dragon is a good enough purpose.
an empire which relies on an available source of fire at all times somehow managing to conquer 75% of the entire world; further bolstered by the fact that the King of the Water Tribe specifically points this out, and yet they still don't don't put out their fire
That seemed tactically unsound to me as well, but I just figured "meh, the fire dudes always bring their own fire sources anyway... putting out your own fires probably wouldn't make much difference"
The Dragon's unnecessarily cryptic advice
(suddenly remembers which dragon you're actually talking about; repressed memories of other inexcusable flaws begin to resurface)
STOP DOING THAT!
Or how about simplifying the entire reason for the Fire Nation's aggression?
I don't recall it being ever mentioned in the first season, which is as much as I could force myself to watch.
In the show it's about imperialism, and "exporting our success to the rest of the world".
So in other words, some Nickelodeon blowhards were making a shallow jab at the War on Terror and "exporting democracy". That's actually worse than whatever was in the movie.
80% of the movie was narration:
If you can't see this one, just rewatch the movie. There's a reason that one of the very first rules you learn in film school is "show; don't tell". The concept of saying more while doing less is fundamentally important, mostly because nobody wants to sit through 2 hours of goddamned narration/exposition.
In the first 10 minutes, I count 40 seconds of opening narration/scrolling text and 25 seconds of Katara talking about her background. That's hardly 80%.
I'll come back and edit this when I've finished re-watching the whole movie.
EDIT:
Okay, 30 minutes in and still at 65 seconds of narration. Even if the entire rest of the movie was narrated nonstop, that still wouldn't be 80%. Fail.
Also, I remembered that by far, the most disappointing thing about the firebenders vs. earthbenders battle was that it was so short and so little happened... not anything about the special effects. Oh, and Katara participates in the battle without getting her ass kicked, so there goes THAT claim.