By Stefan Koski
Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished…
So begins the introduction to Nickelodeon’s Emmy-award winning cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. It ran for three seasons before coming to its planned conclusion in 2008. It has since spawned a number of video games, action figures, stuffed animals, and now a movie written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan.
The film The Last Airbender (the “Avatar” part was dropped from the title to disassociate it from the James Cameron movie) is supposed to be the first in a trilogy of movies based on the television series, which follows the saga of Aang (in the film played by Noah Ringer), the one destined to be the Avatar, as he travels around the world to master control over each of the four elements and defeat the Fire Nation. Each film in the trilogy is planned to be an adaptation of one of the three seasons. This immediately poses a host of problems. The run-time of the twenty episodes that make up the first season of the television show is over eight hours. It would’ve been impossible for Shyamalan to condense that massive amount of plot into a one hour, forty-three minute film in any kind of cohesive manner.
Despite that, he tries to do it anyway. The first season has been boiled down to its most salient plot points, which are then jumped to one after another as quickly as possible in order to not lose time. This means that the majority of the film is exposition story-telling that recounts the numerous things that were revealed over the course of twenty television episodes. A number of scenes that serve no other purpose than to set up more expository descriptions are strung together one after another, with occasional voice-over from Katara (Nicola Peltz), a water bender traveling with Aang, to fill in even more details. If this sounds like it’d be terribly uninteresting to watch, that’s because it is. By trying to fit in so much material, the movie only succeeds in diminishing the impact of each individual scene, creating an unevenly paced, slapdash montage that bears only a superficial resemblance to its source material and an even more superficial resemblance to an actual movie.
With such a shoddy foundation for the film’s overall structure, it’s only downhill from there. Apparently Shyamalan thought that one of the main problems with the original cartoon was that it had a sense of humor. With that in mind, the film has been fastidiously scrubbed clean of any gags, punch lines, or moments of levity, save for one about half an hour in. The acting performances do little to make up for their absence. Some, like (surprisingly enough) The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi as the villainous Commander Zhao and Shaun Toub as Iroh, the exiled Prince Zuko’s uncle, are competently executed. Others, like Dev Patel as Zuko and Jackson Rathbone as Sokka, Katara’s brother, are inexplicably awful. One wonders why the character of Sokka was kept in the film at all, considering that his primary role in the first season of the series was as the comic relief and Shyamalan clearly didn’t think that aspect was necessary.
As for the rest of the cast, it’s hard to tell whether the actors are to blame or if the script was simply past any redemption that method acting could have afforded. In either case, the dialogue is a mostly stilted, emotionally lifeless affair. But then how could it have possibly been anything less when the pacing and exposition ensures that the viewer remains as detached as possible from the story’s events?
That just leaves the fight sequences, which are thrown in whenever the movie gets tired of flat out explaining everything. The ability to bend the different elements to one’s will allows for colorful combat, and the special effects used to render the act of bending is interestingly done, even if they don’t particularly gain anything from being in 3D. The really big battle scenes still lack a sense of being truly epic, most likely because they, like everything else, are rushed through so the movie can cram in more plot points.
I’m not familiar with much of Shyamalan’s work, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt when I say that this is the worse film he’s ever made. For those who have never seen the original television series, this movie will do nothing to endear you to either its plot or its concept. It’ll come across as an underwhelming kung fu action flick with decent special effects and a sweeping orchestral soundtrack that constantly tries to fool you into thinking that what you’re watching is any good. Normally this kind of schlock is something that reviewers recommend only for fans of whatever the film has been adapted from, but since I think fans are the ones who will be the most angry about what’s been done with it, I’m not sure who’d I recommend this movie to.
There are two good things about it. One: it’ll make fans nostalgic for the television show and remind them of how amazing it was (all three seasons are available on the Netflix Instant, by the way). And two: it’s hopefully bad enough to convince Paramount to stop Shyamalan from making the next two movies in the trilogy before he can commit anymore crimes against cinema.
