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 For real, the disappointment was so intense. Shyamalan had a lot going for him at the time and he dropped the ball so hard. 
 I was speechless when we walked out of that film… I was just… “what the fuck did I just watch?”

I’ve never heard of a casting decision so retarded, as picking a young lead with no acting experience… based on nothing more than a karate video. This kid has to CARRY THE CHARISMA OF THE WHOLE SERIES, and it has to be a child actor, and he literally cast a hollow wooden block as its lead. That should’ve been seen as the single biggest and most important problem on their hands for making that film work. Can they find a lively, liveable, bright, playful kid, who can do some elaborate flow and dance movement (or enough to use a stand in) that every person in the audience is going to care about, and who can put up with this crap for 6 years of films if it’s successful.

“Can he do karate” is not even on the list of “stuff that fucking matters.” Just get a kid who dances FFS. Get a Bollywood kid, they’d be perfect. They sing, dance, have a more stage acting presence so they exaggerate emotions and delivery. Thats what they need for Aang. Literally anything other than what they did. The whole cast was like this. That casting director should be ashamed, lol.

The awful casting choices alone are hard to recover from if they didn’t make 100 other absurd choices that they piled on top of a script that sounded like the characters were reading a bullet point outline of the plot as dialogue lines.

….

You can see why I had the motivation to fix this stinking mess of a film 🤣 
 Preach