Review: The Last Airbender

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The Last Airbender

With The Last Airbender, I've officially given up on M. Night Shyamalan.

In 1999, the young writer and director was crowned the Next Big Thing for his smart and suspenseful The Sixth Sense, a nuanced and captivatingly creepy ghost story. But Shyamalan's follow-up efforts like Signs and The Village were disappointingly clichéd and forgettable. And now, the dreadfully dull and incoherent The Last Airbender (opening today in a far too wide release) has convinced me that Shyamalan has forgotten how to write and direct a watchable film. This may sound harsh, but if this lifeless, overwrought clunker is the best Shyamalan can do nowadays, I think his career has run its course.

A live-action film based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, a popular Nickelodeon animated series, The Last Airbender (apparently, some other obscure film already claimed the Avatar part) is a mystical tale about the relationship between humanity and nature's delicate balance. The film is set on a fictional Earth with four nations, Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; for a century, the Fire Nation has been waging a brutal war against the other three. The story follows the adventures of Aang (Noah Ringer), a young "airbender" who also is an "avatar" with the power to manipulate all four elements. Aang uses his extraordinary powers and enlists the help of Katara (Nicola Peltz), a "waterbender" (a lot of stuff gets bent in the film), and her brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), to stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the others. Meanwhile, the evil Fire Nation leaders try to capture Aang.

I must confess that I cobbled together this synopsis from information I found on various websites, because after sitting through this jumbled mess of a film, I still had almost no idea what it's about. The film condenses 20 half-hour episodes of the series into about 100 minutes, and the result is a disjointed sequence of undeveloped scenes thrown together with little transition or explanation. As with any modern action fantasy film, there is plenty of elaborate computer-generated 3D eye candy. (Much of it is well executed, although the 3D elements are very subtle.) But the underlying story is totally confusing. That is, when we care enough to bother with figuring out what's going on, which isn't often.

Before writing this review, I watched two episodes of the original TV series for comparison. I've never really cared for anime or fantasy-based entertainment of this sort, but I do understand why the show is so popular among its target family audience. The episodes I saw were smartly paced, spiritually engaging, often funny and full of cute, likeable human and animal characters. In the right hands, the show could have been the basis for an entertaining and even thought-provoking fantasy film.

But thanks to Shyamalan's woefully artless, Cliffs Notes-style script, little of the show's meaning -- and none of its charm -- survived the journey to the big screen. The concept might have worked better if Shyamalan had scripted an entirely new, film-friendly story that captured the show’s spirit and ideas. But instead, he merely filmed brief watershed moments from the show's complex story arc, filling in the gaps with voiceovers and clumsy dialogue describing what's missing. This abridged form of storytelling obviously left out a lot of vital plot and character development that is fundamental to the show's appeal, because what's left isn't the least bit interesting.

Then again, even an Oscar-caliber script might not have survived Shyamalan's plodding direction. (Did I already mention that he's forgotten how to make a watchable film?) The slow pace of The Last Airbender can work well in a character-driven indie, but it's unbearable in an action film. There are occasional hints at visual excitement. But whenever someone isn't bending fire, summoning powerful winds or sending plumes of water into the sky (skills that would be great icebreakers at a cocktail party, by the way), the film drags terribly, bogging down in listless, overly serious dialogue about moon spirits and various mystical whatnot. Even the film's theoretically climactic battle scene is so morose that it goes almost unnoticed.

I suppose the cast of mostly young and largely unknown actors do their best with the material, but they're given no chance to do anything interesting or develop their characters at all. (Although The Last Airbender portends to be about the balance of nature, there is a glaring imbalance between its 3D visuals and one-dimensional characters.) Much of the actors' delivery is painfully wooden, but this may be due to poor direction and the stilted expository dialog rather than any lack of talent. The most familiar face is probably Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame, who is totally miscast as the largely evil Prince Zuko. He's too pleasant an actor to play such a brooding, menacing soul; his surly demeanor isn't believable, and he looks less like Prince Zuko than Slumdog's affably nerdy Jamal Malik wearing a Prince Zuko costume.

It's a shame that The Last Airbender is such a sloppily crafted bore, for it apparently does a great disservice to its spritely source material. And judging from the audience's reaction (or lack thereof) at the screening I attended, it will sorely disappoint the show's fans. The audience grew restless halfway through the screening and did not applaud at the end. And my guest -- an avowed Avatar: The Last Airbender fangirl -- absolutely hated the movie, saying it wasn't anything like the TV show.

The Last Airbender is based on the first of three "books" in the series and ended with an obvious setup for a sequel, which Shyamalan also is slated to write and direct. (Obviously, the deal was made before the film was completed. Or knowing Hollywood, maybe not.) Let's hope this sequel doesn't happen, and The Last Airbender is the last of its kind; the show and its fans deserve better.

I completly, 1500% agree

I completly, 1500% agree with this review. I am a fangirl that has watched the television series from when it first started on nickelodeon through when it was cancelled on nick and moved to its sister channel nicktoons. Shyamalan messed up so much of the movie that it really wasn't the same! The simple NAMES for one were screwed up so much that it didn't even sound like it should. The bending, which the previous reviewer Don Clinchy said wasn't so bad, was HORRIBLE! Everyone freaked out because Iroh could make his own fire in the "epic battle" at the north pole, when my friends and i just looked at each other and said angirly, "THAT'S WHAT'S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!!"
My brother and sister and I were so excited to see this movie but my dad watched the trailers with a wary eye. A huge Harry potter fan, my dad has learned that books(or television shows) are never like the movie, and he has sat through all the movies mumbling how this never happened and that never happened. After seeing The Last Airbender with my friends at the midnight premiere last night, i wake up this morning to my family all asking me how it was. Being completly honest, i looked at my dad and said, "you would definately not like it." My review for this disappointing movie would be a generous one star, maybe not even one star.