Movie Review - 'The Last Airbender'

The Last Airbender Starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, and Nicola Peltz Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Rated PG

A brain-dead movie devoid of new ideas, drowning in creaky dialogue and unquestionably miscast, M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is an appallingly, unrelentingly bad film. It's unimaginable that this story could be told any worse. To give you an idea of the unpleasantness, I attended a midnight showing on opening night, with the kind of audience anticipating it the most. Within 40 seconds of the prologue crawl on screen, there was audible mocking and giggling. It lasted for 100 minutes. Some of that reaction, of course, is group think. When people are heckling in the dark, it's human nature to get in on the fun. However, in this case, it's mostly justified. While a movie version of a TV show doesn't have to cater specifically to the fans of the show on which it's based, it's probably better if endless complaints about the new version aren't heard more loudly than the dialogue. In this case, though, hearing anything over the dialogue is like an oasis in the desert. Unless, of course, it's James Newton Howard's Musical Score By Numbers orchestration, which is just generic enough to still be irritating. From beginning to end, and in almost every way possible, The Last Airbender is a failure, incompetent, uninteresting, moronic, poor. Night Shyamalan made two-and-a-half good movies, but from the moment we saw the reflection of the alien in Signs, it's been a steep drop-off. There was hope for this, though, because of the beloved Nickelodeon animated series that serves as the source material. But Shyamalan has ground it into a pulp here, reducing the scope of an epic story that spanned three seasons on TV to just over an hour and a half. The setup will be familiar to fans of the series. The film flashes a title card - Book One: Water, which is the designation for the first season. Presumably, follow-up films would use Book Two: Earth and Book Three: Fire, but it doesn't seem likely that there will be sequels to this movie, not if Paramount has any sense of self-preservation. Shyamalan's film doesn't veer too far off the story established in season one: Aang (Noah Ringer) is awakened from a century-long slumber thinking he'd only been out of it for a few days. Aang learned 100 years earlier that he is the Avatar, the chosen one who can control all four elements masterfully. He's got one of them down already, hence the title The Last Airbender. Benders can manipulate the elements to do their bidding in battle. Handy. But Aang is only 12 and when he discovers that the Avatar is essentially the Dalai Lama with party tricks, he runs away from the life the universe has chosen for him. In his absence, the Fire Nation has overtaken the other parts of the world, a world defined not by borders but by natural wonders and the ability to control those elements. With no Avatar to keep the peace, it's been a hard century for the other nations. So, the stage is set here for Aang to break the stranglehold of the Fire Nation, represented with crazy-eyed abandon by Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) and Aasif Mandvi (The Daily Show). Perhaps because he's a comedian by trade, Mandvi, for much of the movie, seems like the only one doing a decent job on screen; it's like he's aware of the joke being played on the audience. Aang takes up with other teenagers, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), a brother and sister act who are experts at exposition. The girl's also a Waterbender, but her real talent lies in setting up the next scene. Together, Aang and the siblings travel to small villages helping the locals fend off the Fire Nation, weakening the bad guys for one final showdown. Paramount has dragged this film into the 3-D arena, and it's a money grab. The effects, manipulation of the elements, mainly, just aren't impressive enough to make the extra cash you'd pay worth it. Water and fire effects have been convincing for a long time, and if a movie leans on them this heavily because everything else about the production is so embarrassing, that's hardly going to make up for it. Had Jurassic Park featured the exact same dinosaur rendering with a terrible story, it still would have been worth seeing. But, you know, The Perfect Storm had pretty impressive water effects. Ten years ago. The action scenes look fumbled together. The characters don't appear to be spaced well on screen, so all the fighting and effects happen in one spot. The staging is just as bad. Watch a Jackie Chan movie to see how he incorporates the environment he has to work with rather than forcing something he wants to do in the filming location. The Last Airbender just hurtles a bunch of stuntmen into a semi-circle and hopes it works out. And then there's the terrific ten-second sequence in the film's climactic battle. But it's literally no longer than that and it doesn't match anything else in the fight, let alone the rest of the movie. If Shyamalan had done a bit more trickery like that, borrowing from The Matrix and 300 to make slo-mo and sudden, tight zooms carry our eyes for the duration of an action scene, then maybe we'd have something. But as it is, it's like watching a second-rate chef desperately throw a dash of his favorite spice on a dish that's lacking something he can't identify. The Last Airbender is torture. Even people looking forward to it turned on the film within seconds. And they were right to. This is simply an embarrassing, confused, unenthusiastic motion picture that never finds the right tone and wouldn't know it if it had.

Comments

[William Munney]

Awfultar ...

[Chris]

Dang, this movie actually looked kinda good in the previews. Oh well, thanks for saving me $10 Colin.

[Orinn]

dammit, I so wanted it to be half good. It looks half good, but now I will not be seeing tonight as I planned.
thanks for saving me $20 because my girl wanted to see it too.

[Brandon]

Yeah Colin.. I was hoping this would be the first really good live sequence film of the summer. I had a feeling though when I saw the latest full trailer that it just seem to be missing something. That something I figured out after reading the review was good dialouge in the trailer. The trailer had music and good looking effects but just seemed to be missing more. Those great movies always have a very very good trailer usually, like inception for example. The trailer has everything so it has total pontential to be the best movie of the summer. It could totally end up being only a half way decent film but I doubt it. I know one thing for sure. Inception will NOT get ZERO damn dirty apes.

[Honz Brix]

I'm still gonna give it a shot but i am now waiting til Monday instead of going today

[Feisty]

I would have LOVED to be at that midnight premier if YOU (Colin) joined in on the heckling. That would have been worth my money. Besides that I never had even the slightest intentions of seeing this but it I will be passing it along to ANYONE who wants to see it. Thanks in advance.

[Mom of Avatards]

Very entertaining and enjoyable movie and we are anticipating the rest of the trilogy!! Our children loved the animated series, probably partly b/c the heroes there are mostly children working together outsmarting/outfighting grownups and yet for the Gang, there are kindly adult mentors who offer guidance and direction. The Last Airbender offers the same childhood fantasy of children heroes - Good job!! Also in the live-action movie, Sokka's crush on Yue was very sweet! For the past six months our children were very skeptical that a live-action movie would work for LA and it appears many fans on LA fansites have also been voicing that skepticism. There are some differences from the animated series, like Koizilla, but the live-action replacement scene in the movie provided a good substitute! It would have been fun to have more impishness displayed in Aang's character and to see the Kioshi Warriors. Maybe the critics haven't watched every episode of Avatar, The Last Airbender, but we definitely have in this household and we found the movie worth going to see and we recommend it. Enjoy!!

[SEAN]

wow really that bad?

This movie was one I wasnt going to see in the 1st place, not my cup of tea, but I wanted other people to see it so M. Night could make some money & studios can have confidence in him again......

FUCKKKKK!!! Ugghhh I hope his career can survive & he can go back to writing original material b/c I may be one of the few fans of his out there that still believes he can do great work....

This one time guys how bout everyone ignore Colin's review lol, just a thought lol