The Last Airbender 2010

They tried to warn me. When I told my friends that after finishing the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I was planning on watching the maligned theatrical film as something of an interstitial curiosity before I started television show’s second season, they cautioned me against it. They told me it was bad, that it was a waste of time, that it added nothing to the viewer’s understanding of the show relative to the movie or vice versa. But I didn’t listen. I thought that The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 cinematic fumble, would at least be the entertaining sort of awful.

Suffice it to say, I was wrong. The Last Airbender is a complete misfire, that misunderstands its source material and the demands of the cinematic form, but which is competent, and dare I say dull enough at a basic level, to where it never reaches into “so bad it’s good” territory. The film’s problems are the sort that make the audience disengage, not the kind that make them laugh, and that may be its worst offense. If The Last Airbender wasn’t going to be good, it could at least have been entertaining.

Most notably, the film fails as an adaptation. There is the blueprint for an engrossing two-hour movie in the first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender T.V. show, which this film is based on. But writer/director/producer Shyamalan stumbles and falls in trying to translate this opening chapter of the hero’s journey into compelling cinema.

That problem, oddly enough, does not stem from the array of baffling, seemingly pointless differences between the film and the show. Why Shyamalan felt compelled to change the pronunciations for the characters names in the movie is beyond me (and hearing Sokka pronounced like “Sohka” is particularly jarring for Star Wars fans), but it doesn’t impact the quality of the film. Similarly, substituting rising tides for water monsters or channeling the spirit world through a single figure are defensible choices in bringing the story to the silver screen. And while the white-washing and other race-lifts Shyamalan performs on the characters speak to pernicious problems in Hollywood overall, even these serious and worthy issues are external to the film, and are not hindrances, in a vacuum, to Shyamalan creating an engaging piece of entertainment.

What is a hindrance, oddly, is what Shyamalan leaves in. There’s a certain streamlining necessary in order to take eight hours of television and boil it down one unified film. Shyamalan does omit a number of the show’s “village of the week” stories in favor of focusing on the main narrative, which is to his and film’s benefit. The problem is that he doesn’t finesse or organize the remainder of the story into any sort of logical progression.

Instead, he just races through the plot points in the show’s first seventeen episodes, without any time for important details like the worldbuilding, the character dynamics, or even the stakes of the story to land. By the halfway point of The Last Airbender, Shyamalan essentially commits to retelling the show’s series finale as the entire back half of his film. That leaves the first half feeling incredibly rushed, with plot developments and character relationships happening by fiat and the characters developed. So by the time the bloated third act arrives and the story is reaching its climax, nothing has been established in a satisfying enough fashion to make any of it matter.

This is also “Tell, Don’t Show: The Movie.” Between the opening scroll, the rampant use of voiceover, and the way ninety percent of the characters speak in exposition dumps, the film doesn’t trust its audience to understand anything that’s happening on its own. Worse yet, Shyamalan uses it as a substitute for plot and character development. He simply has characters declare that a romance exists, or that some cool things happened, rather than depicting these things in a way that conveys those points and themes. Most of the film consists of Shyamalan simply offering a grab bag of cool but disconnected scenes from the show, with boatloads of expository dialogue thrown in to try to explain why we should care about them.

That flaw extends to the characters themselves, whom the audience barely gets to know over the course of the film. While cheesy or annoying at times, the television quickly established distinctive personalities for its main characters. In the film, those characters are bland and inert, with various characteristics being declared by one side-character or another, or their motivations established in voiceover, but never really seen in who the characters are or what they do.

That particularly extends to Aang. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with Shyamalan’s departure from the source material with regard to the protagonist. While T.V. Aang is playful and ebullient, Movie Aang is sullen and, if we’re being honest, flat from the getgo. But that idea fits with Shyamalan’s arc for the character, of being detached as a way of not confronting the pain from the genocide of his people, a genocide he could have prevented. In different hands, it could be a powerful story and a poignant characterization.

Unfortunately, Noah Ringer, the young actor who plays Aang, is not quite at Jake Lloyd levels of child acting awfulness, but is still pretty terrible every time he’s asked to carry a moment or deliver a meaningful line. I put that on Shyamalan though. The television show used an actual child to voice Aang, but made the character exuberant and childish, to where Zach Tyler’s unpolishedness lent an authenticity to the role. But Noah Ringer is, understandably, not quite up to the challenge of communicating repressed guilt beneath a stoic exterior at twelve years old. Instead, his Aang simple comes across as affectless or occasionally grim. His awkward line delivery doesn’t help, but the issue lies with an untenable choice from Shyamalan, not an overmatched young actor.

You could also be forgiven for thinking this is Prince Zuko’s movie, not Aang’s. Not only is Dev Patel one of, if not the best actors in the film, allowing him to pick up the slack with performance to craft a compelling character where the screenplay falters, but Zuko is one of the few characters in the film whose struggles and past are dramatized, given time to stew to where we relate to Zuko and sympathize with his difficulties. He’s better served than nearly anyone in the film, which makes sense when you consider Patel’s talents relative to Ringer’s, but which shifts the balance of the movie in ways that don’t always work.

It’s worth asking -- what, if anything, is good about this film? Well, the art direction is generally quite good. There’s a high contrast vividness to many of the settings, creating a certain hyper-realism that sells both the naturalistic beauty and the otherworldly qualities of this realm. Those gorgeous environments create visual splendor even when the rest of the film is lacking.

Unfortunately, even that is hampered by the chintzy-looking effects of the film. Everything from the element attacks to Aang’s kite-staff make it seem like the characters are trapped in a videogame cutscene rather than integrated into that world. And there are some issues with green screen effects and composition that similarly hurt immersion. To boot, Shyamalan and his collaborators don’t quite have a beat on translating the elemental magic from animation to live action. Much of that comes down to the choreography and wire-fu. The martial arts forms blended with supernatural abilities has a certain fluidity and grace in pen and ink, and the attempts to replicate it in flesh and blood veer between merely looking silly and coming off like a bad stage production of Peter Pan.

Still, Shyamalan does offer a handful of well-done sequences, which speak to his talent for visuals if not storytelling. There’s a long-take battle early in the film that has herky-jerky pacing, but shows some visual flair. A spinning shot of Aang and Katara practicing tai chi in an arctic setting has a still beauty to it. A confrontation between Aang and Zuko with minimal fire- or air-bending displays a creativity in staging and shows what the movie might have been. And at one point, Shyamalan even goes full 300, with overexposed 2D-platformer-like visuals that use digital zoom to jump in and out of the action.

But it’s weak broth overall when it’s hard to care about anyone in those fights. Some of the talent present is able to overcome the weakness of the script. (In addition to Dev Patel’s showcase, Jackson Rathbone and Seychelle Gabriel almost sell a severely underwritten romance with their performances alone). Nevertheless, it’s all in service of a work that not only fails as an adaptation, but which fails as a movie.

Shyamalan’s film has the tenor of a ten-year-old giving a book report. “And then this happened; and then this happened; and then this happened.” Gone are the close-knit personal relationships, the interesting contrasts between the characters, the well-formed world of the series. Instead, there’s a rush of weightless events and one long, underdeveloped climax. The Last Airbender isn’t for fans of the original series, liable to be angry at the divergence from the source material; it’s not for newcomers who would easily get lost in the rush of major plot points; and it’s not for cinephiles, who are apt to be annoyed at Shyamalan's strained attempts to spackle over that problem with obvious exposition. It is a film for no one, and no one should waste their time or energy watching it ever again.