The Last Airbender

1. Dev Patel as Zuko. He played Zuko in such a way that I could easily imagine his cartoon counterpart doing everything the same way. The way he spoke, emoted, and even moved himself about the scenes was very... Zuko. Excellent casting choice. The scene where Zuko asks a random child to recount the banishment and disgrace of the Fire Lord's son in order to show Iroh why he desired to reclaim his honor was a nice touch. It showed that they were at least willing to expand on ideas from the series in some places.

2. Iroh. Though not quite as jolly as everyone's favorite uncle, Shaun Toub portrayed Iroh as a laid-back, kind and caring father-figure who could also be quite intimidating. No complaints here. The way he showed that he was honored to meet the Avatar while simultaneously regretting the circumstances (capturing him) without explicitly saying so was one of my favorite scenes.

3. The music. The movie's rather average visuals are accompanied and uplifted by an amazing score by James Newton Howard. I liked it so much that I purchased the album before the movie came out.

4. Noah Ringer. This surprised the heck outta me. For a kid with virtually no acting experience, who Shyamalan basically just pulled out of a karate class -- he played Aang pretty well, despite sounding depressed a lot of the time (though I don't think that was his fault). I just wish the director had stopped him a couple times from. Reciting his lines. Like this.

5. "We are now the Gods." I liked that line... Very Zhao.

1. The stupid benders. There's a reason why, in the series, most Firebenders didn't need a source of fire in order to bend it... If they constantly needed something on fire in order to use their abilities, they would have been defeated 10 minutes after Sozin's Comet passed by. Earth, Water, and Air benders could all easily extinguish any source of fire without so much as flicking their wrists. Constantly throughout the movie I had to wonder why the water benders, with water everywhere, weren't just splashing it on the Fire Nation's puny little campfires and proceeding to kick their asses. The fire nation came off as a bunch of weaklings and the other benders as incredibly dumb.

To me, in the series it seemed that there were different levels of bending for each nation. The fire nation had the basic fire bending, and then lightning for more experienced masters. Waterbenders had bloodbending, Earthbenders had metal... and the Air Nomads' advanced bending ability was never explored, but I'm sure the writers had something in store for them as well. My point is that the fire nation in the movie is portrayed as the weakest of them all. In the series it's easily understandable why and how they could rise to power, but it just doesn't make sense in the film. Even with a few masters on their side like Iroh who can create fire without a source, it wouldn't be enough against an army of earth kingdom and water tribe warriors who could bend mountains and tidal waves at them.

2. Coherence, plz? The entire first act of the movie is a confusing mess of cuts, jumping from one scene to another with an obviously tacked on exposition from Katara each time. Someone who had never seen the series would be totally lost. I assume this was a side-effect of them cutting so much from the movie (Kiyoshi Warriors, etc) in order to get more time slots at the theater. When cutting scenes compromises the coherence of your movie to this extent... you should probably just leave everything in

3. The characters. In the series every character brought something new to the table and expanded on the mythology and world of Avatar. We felt like they were real people with real struggles. We understood why they fought and why they cared about each other. In the movie we get creepy, boring, cardboard cutout representations of characters, and we are literally told that they care about each other... and the filmmakers must have assumed that we would care about them because we're told to.

4. The final insult. In order to further drill into our heads that Katara and Sokka have absolutely nothing resembling a real friendship with Aang, Shyamalan has the two walk away and bow down to him  at the end of the movie. I got the feeling that Aang appreciated Sokka and Katara's friendship in the series because they didn't treat him like the Avatar, they treated him like an equal. They were a family. In the movie they should have stood at his side, helping him to accept the weighty responsibility forced upon him.