The Last Airbender

So with M. Night Shyamalan continuing to squander the fame and potential he earned himself with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable on the resoundingly despised The Last Airbender, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to watch the show on NetFlix.  Glad I did actually.  I haven't watched anything Nickelodeon had to offer since they released the first Rugrats movie and proceeded to take a steaming dump on the things that made their network popular in the first place.  Yet the Avatar series turned out to be fresh, tightly written, and intelligent.

I bring this up because there's a glaring difference between the show and the movie that nicely illustrates a problem I have with a lot of magic.  In the first season of the show, a group of earthbenders are being held prisoner on a shipping yard in the middle of the ocean.  They're kept under Alactraz-like conditions miles away from the very element they use as a weapon.  Smart move.  And no amount of heroic speeches on the part of one of the main characters was enough to motivate the prisoners to launch a jailbreak.  These men and women were broken.  It struck me as very realistic and a surprisingly grim and unflinching portrayal of spirit-crushing imprisonment I never expected from a family-friendly show.

The movie on the other hand does away with all that logic nonsense and keeps the earthbenders in a regular prison on dry land.  Standing on top of a couple million tons of magical munitions.  And it only took a heroic speech on the part of one of the main characters to motivate the prisoners to remember they have superpowers and launch a jailbreak.  Huh?

If you're going to perform magic, it has to make sense.  Don't violate your own canonical rules, mythos, and restrictions simply because it's convenient.