E nigma

Things Raya and the Last Dragon Does Right -Stunning Visuals -Soundtrack Things Raya and the Last Dragon Does Wrong -Just about everything else The major problem is that this 2 hour movie should have been split into a series instead of a feature length. It honestly reads like a kid telling a story, marked with long periods of exposition. Characters are wasted, not used, or set up to be bigger than they actually are. The side characters? Well, they look nice at least? It makes all the mistakes that The Last Airbender made (I'll get to that to a second), where it just jumps from one point to another, without having any real character development. Don't believe me? Look at the opening of Avatar, and the opening minutes of Raya. Difference is the amount of time. Hell, Sisu and Aang even come across as very similar characters. Like most of the characters, locations are visited, talked about, and spent 10 minutes in. Characters are set up to be a major hurdle, only for them to be either dead or turned to stone. I think one scene sums up the movie pretty well. They go to basically a black market city, where everyone is supposed to be con artists and the like. When Raya goes to visit the leader, we find out that the leader has changed, and is described as the most ruthless leader the city has ever seen. Pretty big build up, right? Going to be a primary antagonist through the rest of the film? Nope. Plot thread is literally snipped 5 minutes later, where they escape from the city, and the plot hook is never visited again. So, what are the primary antagonists? Well.... there is two of them. The former friend of the main character, and the black voids of energy known as the druun. Nemaari is basically Zuko. Seriously. Even her ark is very similar to his. Even the smug attitude she shows to the main characters, and the very (and I mean VERY) brief period of self reflection we get in the movie. She's alright, nothing great, but she does the job. So what about the Druun? Well, they don't talk, are clouds of rolling energy, and are literally repelled by water and the stone the main character has. This effectively means they... really aren't much of a threat to be honest. For all the exposition about why everyone is afraid of them, and showing the aftermath of their attacks, the Druun themselves only have two scenes where they present a legitimate threat, and one is at the very end. This movie could have been SO much better, but it honestly seemed just so rushed, and took elements of movies and tv series that have done the same concept better. Honestly, go watch Avatar: The Last Air Bender. It's so much better than Raya and the Last Dragon