When Nerd Tries to Go Maintstream

Let's venture slightly into the realm of nerd-dom for a while shall we? Subject of the day is the "American-anime" Avatar: The Last Airbender, why the series is awesome, and why the movie is downright horrible. This is mostly going to consist of the latter considering I just attempted to watch the film and only made it ten minutes in before I attempted to delete it off the face of my Netflix profile forever. Now the actual show started all the way back in 2005 (damn that makes me feel old) and told the story of a boy who was destined to save the world because he was the Avatar, or the sole person who could bend all of the elements. The big problem he faces is the leader of the Fire Nation wants to enslave the whole world and for the majority of the series his banished son, Prince Zuko, wants to hunt down Aang in order to be able to return home. The cast also features Katara, a young water-bender, and her brother Sokka. As far as entertainment, this series covers all of it; action, adventure, comedy,drama, romance, etc. I followed it obsessively for the three years it was airing and was thrilled and saddened at its conclusion.
When talk started of making the series into a movie, I was already skeptical, mostly because the majority of attempts at turning different cartoons into movies isn't very successful. This is normally due to time constraints and things like it. When I heard that M. Night Shyamalan was going to direct it, my hopes fell further. The cast slowly started to emerge on the internet and the doom of the film seemed complete already in my eyes. When The Last Airbender finally reared its deformed head in theaters I flat-out refused to pay to see it. Well, I finally gave in to curiosity and watched it on Netflix... Oh, for the love of the Goddess was it bad. I mean Shyamalan couldn't even get the pronunciation of the names right. Besides that they plot was rushed, the dialogue was horrible, and the character development was practically non-existent. See this is why people who don't have an understanding of things like this need to take a step back and think for a minute rather than just rushing into it and making themselves look like a total and utter fool.