The Last Airbender

or How to Completely Screw Up an Adaptation

Watched The Last Airbender, the live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series, last night on DVD.  If I felt flippant, I’d say I was recovering from the trauma.  But the truth is that the movie isn’t just bad, it is also utterly boring.

Listing the cons first:

The casting was terrible and the actors looked like they had no clue as to what they were doing in the movie. Wooden doesn’t begin to cover it with only the actor playing Soka even looking like he was trying. But I’m not going to blame the cast for it.

The directing by M. Night Shyamalan was absolutely terrible. Not only did he fail to get the best out of the actors, the camera shots ranged from pedestrian to very bad while the pacing was glacial. Which was an amazing feat given how much stuff was shoved into the film.

The fights were terrible and slow. Not just slow motion bits, but the actual fights took forever for each move to be executed.  The bending took way too many moves to make an element “bend.”  One scene in particular typifies how ludicrous it got:  a group of Earth Benders do an elaborate series of moves that takes a small eternity to make one small rock the size of a melon fly through the air. Oy…

The effects were okay, but suffered from “look at me, I’m in 3D!” syndrome.

The ending was 180 degrees from Aang’s emotional state in the original material. Instead of being utterly enraged, out of control and becoming an object of terror, he was made a pure serene pacifist. But that also reflects the lack of lessons learned that made the series so endearing.

That leads to the lack of character development in the movie. Avatar was heavy on character development and well defined personalities, neither of which are present in the movie.  Aang gets the worst of it. He was a stubbornly irresponsible kid always looking to have fun and constantly laughing in Book 1: Water. Here he is presented as a guilt ridden and morose boy. When you botch the main character, you blow the whole concept.

Finally, there was no sense of adventure or fun. Part of the appeal of the cartoon series was exploration and discovery. There was none of that in this as it was a race from plot point to plot point, often with dull voice over narration. How the movie pulled off being shallow and too serious is something I can’t quite comprehend.

The Pros:

None.

I’m going to stress again that I don’t hold the cast responsible. With a better script and director, this could have been something special. Instead it is a boring mess that was tedious to sit through. The movie bombed at the box office and deserved to.

M. Night Shyamalan’s career has to be viewed as a cautionary tale. I can’t recall another director hit such heights only to completely fall apart as a story teller. It is hard to believe the same man directed The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs.

The Last Airbender is not even worth renting to make fun of. Go watch the television series for a real treat.