Send Dunes

the short of it: i was really interested in the movie from the get-go, having been a massive fan of the series from a young age. the movie is VERY gorgeous and has a lot of impressive moments, but narratively i find that theres barely any substance.

if you prefer not to read my criticism, feel free to stop here

there's one fight scene after the other, and while the animation was impressive, the choreo was often strange with the camera constantly cutting away. the cast overall, with katara being an exception, feels a lot less able than their teen counterparts, which makes the fight scenes a little lackluster. it's mainly a movie about aang and tagah, the gaang is there mostly for what i cant help but describe as anything but fanservice. katara has her moments that are narratively important, but the rest are kinda just there. the Denied only existed as a means to uncover the MacGuffin, other than that they were nonexistant in the story

the movie did never really linger, never really gave any time to breathe, which is a damn shame honestly its not entirely fair to compare it to the original show, being different formats in different eras of production, but all those small moments between characters, where we learn, where they interact with each other, where we see what makes them tick, those are just absent from the movie at best we get a massive expo dump (i think we got three exposition flashbacks in the movie in total?)

i wish i could have liked it more, but if im being entirely honest about everything, this was a letdown halfway during the movie i thought "this isn't a bad movie, but it's also not a good movie" and that opinion changed after tagah got the staff and the whole movie just kinda fell apart. we spend too little time getting to know tagah as a character (and the same is true for the characters themselves), so the villain reveal (as obvious as it was) fell flat. cant feel betrayed by a dude you know nothing about. aang summoning the ocean spirit and creating a portal back to republic city would get the same vitriol that the mech in korra got, if it werent atla. also, tagah knowing that republic city exists is okay, theres a single line of dialogue where aang tells him that it exists. but how does he know its location?. the pig spirit was just a gag machine, i miss Wan Shi Tong and Koh the face stealer, THOSE were spirits ultra instinct aang was funny, as was warwick tagah, i found it difficult to take the dialogue seriously at all aang getting corrupted by the spirit world is just nonsensical, the avatar is the bridge between spirit world and human world

like, i can appreciate how much work went into this, i truly can the animation is gorgeous, the scene work is beautiful, the big moments are epic as hell

but this lacks what atla had, the little moments, the life lessons like, we all cried during Tales of Ba Sing Se at the Iroh reveal, the movie doesn't even have a modicum of the soul of the original series

have you seen that one post that talks about how modern movies are progressively more often made to be side-content material that you have running on the side while you do other stuff? lots of flashy action, epic shots, expositionary dialog, very few moments where you have to sit down and pay attention

thats how this movie felt to me

im fully assuming this movie had the same problems that KPop Demon Hunters had, where they had to fight over run times and had to cut a ton of stuff (like ropedart girl, she clearly seems to have been intended to be a much bigger character who got almost slashed out of the movie), so i get it

and this is gonna come across funny now that ive basically done nothing but bitch about the movie, but overall it was fine

just fine

its an entertaining movie