The Good: The only good thing I can say about this movie is that the special effects were superb. Appa, the large flying, six-legged bison they ride upon, looks absolutely stunning. The animated for all their different elemental powers looks exactly like one would imagine it to look in real life. I think I would have enjoyed this movie a million-fold if it were a tech demo.
The Bad: First off, the acting was horrendous. I always feel a bit guilty criticizing child actors, but I have seen good child actors. Hell, I would have settled for decent child actors. These kids are bad. Everytime one of them would open their mouths, I felt myself cringe. It was like if a bunch of little kids got hold of several million dollars and decided to do a fan movie on youtube.
Now the idea of "Racebending". This has been a controversial since the movie was fist cast. Dark-skinned, Inuit people(water benders) were cast as white people. And oddly enough, the fair-light skinned, pale people(fire-benders) were re-cast as all Indians. How very odd, considering that the firebenders are probably the most bad-ass, and M. Night himself is Indian.
*Now here is something I simply cannot forgive. Almost EVERY name and EVERY term within this movie is mispronounced. Aang(Ae-n-g) is pronounced Ong, the Avatar (ah-va-tar) was pronounced (Ae-va-tar ), Sokka (Sock-ah) is pronoucned (Soak-ah) and many many more. Some people seem to think this is not a big deal, but imagine if a character was named Jim, and everyone called him (Jeem). Most of these names are two or three sylables long. How flippin' hard is it to get your actors to pronounce a name right?! It boggles my mind.
Closing Thoughts: The original series this movie is based on is absolutely amazing. How M. Night managed to make such a horrible movie with such great source material is beyond me. I would suggest checking out the original series, particularly seasons 2 and 3, and if you are ready to have your dreams crushed, watch this when it comes out on DVD. Everything about this movie just feels unpolished, poorly-cut, horribly-cast, and lazy; which I find to be a great shame, because with the special effects that were used, under a different director, this could have been absolutely amazing. With two planned sequals, I can only pray that this movie really is "The LAST airbender".
1/2 out of *****