I’m going to cut to the chase: The Last Airbender is a terrible, terrible movie. M. Night Shyamalan has taken one of my favorite TV shows of all time and turned it into a plodding, humorless piece of crap that still haunts me more than a week after leaving the theater.
I confess that The Physicist and I did not enter the theater with high expectations. Almost from the moment we heard about the movie, we had cause to worry. M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t exactly have a track record of recent box office successes, and we were a bit worried by his decision to condense an entire season’s worth of material into a two hour movie. Right before we actually saw the movie, we were bombarded with a string of negative reviews. Now I’m not one to pay much attention to the critics, but the sheer unanimity of their condemnation gave me pause. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can safely say that the critics were absolutely right.
For starters, unless you’ve already seen the TV show, the plot is going to be pretty much nonsensical. Actually, I think I’m being generous by using the word ‘plot.’ It’s really more of a series of random vignettes strung together by awkward expository dialog. I suspect that M. Night Shyamalan had good intentions: he probably wanted to remain as true as possible to the TV series. But, in his quest to shoehorn in as many facts as possible, he resorts to an irritating amount of bland narration, making one wonder if they are watching a movie or listening to a really bad audiobook.
In fairness, the narration isn’t much worse than the rest of the acting. I don’t know what kind of direction Shyamalan gave the actors, but it seems as if he told everyone to read their lines as if they’d been heavily sedated. The result is that Aang, who should be a happy-go-lucky kid, seems clinically depressed. And Sokka, who should be the sarcastic comic relief, spends the whole movie being furrowed and angsty.
The only character whose behavior resembled that of their cartoon counterpart was Prince Zuko. Dev Patel did a nice job of capturing the character’s testiness without resorting to scenery-chewing.
Even worse, the actors managed to mispronounce characters’ names on a number of occasions. If you’re a loyal viewer of the series, the result is akin to nails on a chalkboard.
In defense of the actors, even Sir Laurence Olivier would’ve had trouble turning in a decent performance with the sort of insipid dialog that abounds in The Last Airbender. In addition to the bland narration, there are a number of lines that make you laugh for all the wrong reasons (“We need to make them believe that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs.”).
But perhaps the biggest travesty of The Last Airbender is that none of the humor that made the series so enjoyable shows up on the silver screen. It’s like the whole movie is one big Very Special Episode.
The Last Airbender is the first part of a trilogy. Sadly, Shyamalan is currently on track to write and direct the other two films. If Nickelodeon has any sense, they’ll replace him. Otherwise, he’ll have singlehandedly ruined one of their greatest franchises.
FINAL GRADE: F
Codex Lochianus 