Why I Won't Be Seeing The Last Airbender

Racewank aside, the odds of me ever going to see this film are astronomically low. Yes, I realise that the film was whitewashed to all hell, but that's not even why I'm not seeing it.

I might have even been able to get over the director. Sure, he's not done a single film that I've been able to watch more than once, EVER. Depending upon reviews, I may have been able to ignore him and see it anyway. But I'm not.

I'm not seeing the movie for the same reasons I really loved the cartoon. The cartoon was gorgeous; wonderfully cinematic and amazingly fantastic. The bending sequences were epic (

Iron Toph? Seriously Epic

). Best of all? It's a show about a bunch of 12 year olds out doing their thing in the world. You know they're 12 year olds, they act like 12 year olds, but for some reason, you forget that they're 12 year olds. There's a certain key feature to their 12-year-old-ness that's very cleverly missing, which makes these children very easy to relate with.

That right there is why I won't be seeing The Last Airbender. Even if they do have 12 year olds providing the voice acting, the physical character acting is animated by adults. With a live-action film (with, what I've been able to gather, mediocre special effects to top everything off), there's a new element being added to the mix. Children. As an adult, I'm not sure that I really want to watch a bunch of 12 year olds, who don't know how to act and who probably don't quite know how to control their own bodies yet, scramble around on the screen for what's sure to be three hours.

But wait, I hear you say. Zed, you're a Harry Potter fan. Stop being such a disgusting hypocrite.

The Potter films are a little different in this regard. Mainly, in that I wasn't much more than an awkward early-teen when the first film was released, myself. As the films have been released, I've grown older, but so have the actors. These kids (who aren't even kids any more, mind) were cast because the Potter books were more or less about the awkward things kids to, but also about big bad Dark Lords and stuff. Now that Deathly Hallows is about to be released, DanRad, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint have matured and evolved into characters that as an adult, I absolutely adore. The weirdness of adolescence wasn't something that ever bothered me with this series because it was instead relate-able.

Now, as an adult, I'm not sure I'd be able to really want to watch a bunch of kids running around on the screen. These are characters that I came to love as an adult, and because they were animated and voiced by people a considerable amount older than the actual characters, they lack the awkwardness that the live-action actors have already displayed in the trailers, promos, and previews being shown.

So, I'll say of The Last Airbender the same thing I said about Avatar: TLA: the reason I watch something is because I want to be equally entertained and visually pleased. I can't say that either have applied to the promos and bad acting I've already witnessed. The cartoon was fucking beautiful in every regard, and I think I'll just stick to being an oldschool fan on this one.

I imagine there's already an epic fandom divide happening with this one. I'm not part of t he fandom for one reason, and the same reason I avoided the Potter fandom like the fucking plague: because of the sheer amount of young people. I've nothing against young people, and like everybody, I used to be a young person. I just don't really want to be subjected to a whole bunch of them at once.


Now, I'm going to go back to sitting on my porch and yelling at the damn kids to get off my lawn.