The Last Airbender

Shyamalan takes a stunningly sophisticated cartoon and reduces it to one of the most insultingly dumb films I've seen in years. From the script to the visuals, the directing, the acting, there is absolutely nothing that did well, either as an adaptation or as a film in its own right.

Characters who were once powerful and spitfire (Katara) or entertainingly sarcastic (Sokka) are now bland and exist solely for the purpose of exposition. In fact, the entire film comes off as exposition, far too much of the dialog serving as "by the way" explanations, never allowing the plot or characters to really take form. The scenes seem episodic and unconnected, and the film never comfortably establishes its universe, always retreading with an "as you know" or "aren't you that guy who..." to establish (often unnecessary) continuity.

The style, too, is disappointing, capturing none of the magic of the series. Most noticeable was the "bending"--while the series took its martial arts seriously, carefully aligning real-world arts with elements and making the benders' movements coincide with those of their elements, the film gives us characters flailing in generic martial arts forms for a few minutes, only to effect one splash, boulder, or blast of fire. In the series, every movement had a meaning; in the film, only about one in ten does.

Many fans of the series who were angry at the "whitewashing" of the cast hoped that it had at least resulted in the best actors for the parts. However, the acting was at best uninspired, and at worst painfully awkward, though part of this can be attributed to a truly atrocious script. Dialog is stilted and unnatural, certain phrases are repeated needlessly throughout ("great library," anyone?), and in all the only chance the script stands of being remembered is through memetic appreciation of its unintentional, awkward hilarity.

Not even the collective will of a devoted fanbase wanting so much for this film to be good could make it even remotely watchable.

The world is divided into four kingdoms with each being able to control (bend) an element to their will. These benders (stop tittering at the back) are held in balance by the influence of the Avatar, a being who can control all elements as well as being a link to the spirit world. It has been 100 years since this Avatar vanished and in this time the various benders (stop it) have all been in conflict. The wars have been led by the flaming benders (seriously, stop it) who control fire and wiped out the air benders because they knew the Avatar was one of their number. With the air benders gone and the Avatar nowhere to be found, the benders are all under the thumb of the fire nation, with bending outlawed (like it used to be in the Isle of Man). When sibling waterbenders Katara and Sokka discover a child frozen below the waters near their town they rescue him only to quickly learn he is the Avatar. They join him in his quest to learn to be bend the other elements and also free the kingdoms from the tyranny of the fire nation.

I've not watched the original series so in a way I came to this film free of the built-in criticism of those who love the series and were always going to be upset by a poor copy. Normally this would mean that a poor version might still be a good film but obviously in this case I did come with the knowledge that it had been universally slated by critics and mostly ignored by audiences. So basically I had no preconceptions of how the film should look or be but at the same time my expectations were low due to all the criticism I had heard. So I guess it is understandable that I come out of the film saying "c'mon – it's not THAT bad" because it is not the crime against humanity that some have suggested. The effects are pretty decent and as a result some of the sequences are decent if only on a technical level. And. And. Well, I guess I'm done providing the critical balance here, so onto the parts of the film that are not the "pretty good" effects.

Sadly this "rest of the film" is the vast majority of the two hour running time and it is pretty poor. Maybe the plot has potential but from the evidence of this it is a terrible heavy mess of mythology and nonsense that might have struggled to works in the hands of someone really able. M. Night Shyamalan is not an able person – he is someone who appears to have had a couple of good ideas (Sixth Sense and Unbreakable), a couple of so-so films and then a growing collections of stinkers, in which camp this film belongs. In the hands of Shyamalan it is overly worthy, clunky, self-important and just a big bore full of gas. It is no surprise that within this frame he has written dialogue that is equally pompous with lots of terribly stiff lines which are almost a pain to listen to. As director he fails his cast. The adults seem to have enough about them to at least have presence but the younger cast members seem totally lost in terms of what they are doing and are painfully stiff and have no presence. As a director of action he is lacking as well; OK he handles the effects well but the fights lack tension and excitement and just seem silly most of the time. To those that say that the action sequences were cool then I would suggest you check out the countless martial arts films that do them better, with actual excitement and impressive director and choreography – because those on display here are a poor copy of the genre.

Overall, it comes to something when the best that one can say about a film is that it is not the abomination that he majority say it is. However this is not me saying it is good; because I'm not; because it's not; not at all. It is clunky, stiff, self-important and lacks any sense of adventure, fun, character or charm – it is frankly a bore. I could care less if Shyamalan has upset fans of the original series with his version – he could have done that and still presented the rest of us with a decent film – but he hasn't He can get shirty with journalists who ask him about the downward trajectory of his career but ultimately he is doing nothing to suggest it is headed any other direction – The Last Airbender is not the worst film ever made, but it certainly another in the growing pile of stinkers that has his Shyamalan's name attached to them.

After waiting extremely eagerly for this movie, I sat in the theater and was extremely eager for it to END. Ear-oh? Oong? Soak-ah?! Could they have butchered the names anymore than they did? Worse, the entire movie felt like a string of clips put together for an hour and a half and not like a movie at all. All the major parts of the Book of Water were skimmed over, while things like the freeing of the earth nation village (while important) were given screen time that could have been given to major events like the southern air temple.

The actors were dismal, with the exception of Dev Patel as Zuko and to a lesser extent Shaun Toub as Iroh, who wasn't an accurate portrayal of Iroh visually but at least captured the character's wisdom much better than many of the other actors on board for the movie. He however failed to provide many of the aspects of Iroh that made him endearing in the series.

I will give that the northern water kingdom was gorgeous, but that's about all I have to say kindly about this movie.

If you love Avatar: The Last Airbender as the series, I recommend giving this movie a miss. It's heartbreaking how they butchered something that had such fantastic and barely needing change source material.

I have been a fan of the series for a long time and ever since I heard that there was going to be a live action version, I was looking forward to it. I live in Europe so I had to wait till last weekend to see it. I did read all the bad reviews on IMDb, but I thought it's probably just people dissing the movie because they are upset over the casting. But oh my god was I wrong! This movie is the an absolute disgrace to the series. Really, it's a disgrace to professional film making! And it's not even the acting or the casting that are bad. It's the writing and directing all the way. Yes, the acting was bad, too, but I don't think it's really any of the actors fault. Every single actor had at least one moment that showed that they had great potential that the director failed to bring out - even Noah Ringer really sounded like Aang sometimes. They just needed someone directing them... About the screenplay: I don't know what Mr. Shyamalan thought while writing that screenplay. It was like watching random scenes from the first season of the cartoon with no connection and no seg way. The little dialog the movie did have was stiff and unnatural. There was no character development. A story like this needs to be told in an epic way, not in what seems like a theater student mash up! Where did all the budget go? Another thing that was wrong with the movie: The music! The music was horrible, a mere shadow of what we heard in the cartoon. How can the same person who composed the music for The Dark Knight do such a horrible job on another movie. There was no recognizable theme at all! Why does Shyamalan hire his friend who clearly didn't care for the movie or try hard, when he could have just hired the cartoons composer. The music from the cartoon was perfect and more than worthy of a big Hollywood production. There is much more I could say about this movie but I think it amounts all to the same thing: M. Night Shyamalan ruined this movie, and that saddens me greatly. I wish he had cared, but the end product proves he didn't.

The Last Airbender (2010)

1/2 (out of 4)

After being freed from an iceberg, Aang (Noah Ringer), a long lost Avatar who is the only one able to bend the four elements, finds himself doing battle against the Fire Nation who who attempting to take over all three Nations (Air, Water, Earth). M. Night Shyamalan's THE LAST AIRBENDER is based on the very popular television show, which is something I've never seen so I pretty much walked into this not knowing what to expect from the story. I'll admit by the ten-minute mark I was pretty much lost in regards to the story and each passing minute I found myself growing even more confused. I then had to do something I never do, which was stop the movie and call someone familiar with the TV series and this film to try and find out what the heck was supposed to be going on. I painfully sat through the rest of the movie and afterwards I started to read other reviews and I was happy to see that I wasn't the only one who couldn't make any sense out of this material. I will say that I think Shyamalan has gotten some pretty bad beatings over his recent films, which I think were unfair but there's no doubt that he deserves the majority of the blame here, although I think a very strong argument could be made that those who hired him should be on fans hit list more than Shyamalan. The biggest fault of his was the screenplay, which simply doesn't make any sense as the story is always jumping from one place to another and none it ever seems connected. From what I've gathered he was jumping around so many parts of the show that unless you're familiar with it you weren't going to know what's going on here. Even worse are the actors who are all extremely bad and come off even worse when they have to say the bad dialogue. I don't like to attack child actors so I won't mention any of them by name but what were the producers thinking when they agreed to cast them? Surely there were more talented people out in Hollywood. The special effects are all poor, the action badly directed and even worse is that there's simply nothing here to care about. Some nice cinematography is about the only thing going for this turkey, which is every bit the misfire its reputation would have you believe.