This post is a review and may contain spoilers. Read at your own risk.
RottenTomatoes Rating: 8%
Rated: PG [See Full Rating]
Runtime: 1 hr. 43 min.
Genre: Action & Adventure, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Kids & Family
Theatrical Release: Jul 1, 2010 Wide

Starring: Jackson Rathbone, Cliff Curtis, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Noah Ringer, Shaun Toub
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan
Studio: Paramount Pictures

Synopsis:

Avatar: the Last Airbender is based on “Avatar: The Last Airbender” (2005), a Nickelodeon show that ran from 2005 to 2008.

The show synopsis is that Aang, the young man who is the next in a long line of Avatars, is forced to grow up quickly and learn all the elemental powers [air, water, earth, and fire] in order to defeat the power-hungry Fire Lord Ozai. He starts off on this path 100 years late and faces it all with the help of the two Water-tribe children who originally found and released him from the ice: Katara and Sokka.

Review:

The movie is the next in a long line of “might-have-beens” that come out of M. Night. Syamalan’s [MNS] stable of attempts. There. That is the simple version. If that is enough for you, I’ll spare you what is coming. If you are made of sterner stuff, or a hard core fan of the Nickelodeon show as I am, you might want to put on the body armor.

Ok. You’ve been warned. Here we go.

Unlike so many wonderful remakes¹ [Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, based on the Tolkien books; the Harry Potter saga; 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960), based on Akira Kurosawa's epic 'The Seven Samurai' (1954), and many more], The Last Airbender [hereafter called TLA] strayed from the original in many many ways.

I’ve seen at least one review that, while I agreed with on the whole, gave Shyamalan a pass for the way he absolutely destroys the pronunciation of the characters’ names. We are told Aang is instead pronounced Ung, Avatar is now Auvutar, Sokka [Sawkaw] is now SOka. Only Katara gets a pass to keep her name as it originally was.

TLA opens in the frozen wasteland that is the South Pole. Sokka and Katara are out hunting and manage to get lost in the open expanse of ice as they chase a tiger seal. All this is explained to you by the voice you soon come to recognize as Katara in her position of “Exposition in place of scene”.

As the children begin to fight over what to do next in the flat, humorless way we’ve come to expect from the show; a light in yonder ice breaks. Look tis the missing Avatar? Katara hacks Aang out of the ice and they bring him and his furry thing back to their camp.

It is at that point that the Fire Nation appears and Prince Zuko shows up to round up the elderly and check for the Avatar that he has followed from the shocking light that happened when Aang was freed from the ice. So far, mostly good.

At this juncture it is important to point out that the movie could be forgiven the small changes that have already happened. However, from here on out there is just simply no excuse.

Aang wakes up in the tent and Katara sees his tattoos. He is all business and a sad, emo youth that is in no way similar to the happy child from the show. Fire Nation guards come in to look for the elderly and drag him off when he is recognized as the Avatar.

Zuko is asked by Aang to leave the villagers in peace and they disappear into the ship. It is at this point that Grandma tells the children that he is the Avatar. Moreover, she explains about the Spirit world being the source of guidance for all things in the normal world. Only the Avatar can get into the Spirit world, and that is why the Fire Nation wants him destroyed.

Katara and Sokka then proceed to fight over if Aang is their responsibility or not and Katara has to convince Sokka to go with her on Appa to find Aang. There is no humor. There is no fun. The characters are flat and unconvincing and the whole thing practically drips of “I’m about to cut myself from sadness”.

If you watched the show, you are intimately aware that the only reason Aang has a clue how to get things done is due almost solely to Avatar Roku stepping in and helping him from the Spirit world.

Avatar Roku first appears as a statue within a shrine in the episode “The Southern Air Temple,” and Aang mentions that although he never met him, he felt a particular connection to his previous incarnation. In the episode “Avatar Roku (Winter Solstice, Part 2)”, Aang finally meets the spirit of Roku for the first time.²

However, in MNS’s version Roku just isn’t around. His dragon is the only form of Roku we are ever privileged to meet. The dragon is called the Dragon Spirit and is, out of the whole movie, the only Spirit in the spirit realm that Aang ever meets.

No doubt it will come as a shock to you that the Spirit realm in TLA is nothing more than shaky cam vision akin to Frodo putting on the Ring. There is no wonderful world of animals, snarky monkeys saying ‘ohm’, or even the Face Snatcher. No panda spirit, no past Avatars, nothing beautiful about the place at all.

As if these things are not enough to make you want to get up and walk out, MNS then decides it is time to implement movie number 2. We begin the process of jumping back and forth between the Fire Lord and his crew and Aang. Aang’s movie is highlighted by its “tell don’t show” method mixed with a healthy does of subtitles telling you where they managed to get to while we were attending movie number 1.

Movie number 1 on the other hand is a 45 vinyl that seems stuck on the same script while we see different scenes flash by. “We must find the Avatar.” “We need the Avatar.” “Find the moon and ocean spirits.” “I’ve found the moon and ocean spirits.”

I sat through this for an hour and forty some minutes and can honestly say that I talked through most of the movie. As a naturally polite sort of movie goer, this was highly unusual for me. But any guilt I had was assuaged by the fact that most of the viewers around me were just as talkative.

BrandG was quick to point out that if I didn’t try to just let it roll off of me I would get no enjoyment out of it at all, and I tried. I honestly did. But this movie is one of the worst I’ve ever sat through. And I got up and walked out of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou³.

Some of the quotes from the movie that stuck in my mind as prime examples of the horrific writing were things like:

“We have to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs.” – Princess Yue, as she goes to save the Moon Spirit. Soon after her peroxide disappears and General Iro carries her to shore. Body never disappears.

“Earthbenders, there is dirt all around you. Why don’t you fight?” – Aang, as he gives Katara’s speech to the Earth benders they are trying to free from a dirt pit instead of an iron boat. Soon after they discover the water scroll and a butt load of other bending supplies in the Fire Nation’s foot locker at the same location.

“He will need you… and we all need him.” – Gran Gran, as she gives an off the wall reason why Katara and Sokka need to rescue Aang from Zoku.

“Aang: I will stop them. Dragon Spirit: I know you will try…” – a scene so unmemorable that I have no idea what they were talking about.

If you think I might be over stating the horror that is The Last Airbender, take a look at some of the quotes by well known movie critics:

“This is a film that resembles a video game in all the bad ways — Manichean premise, non-existent characterization, an obsession with dutifully explained “rules” — while still managing to miss out on the kinetic momentum of Xboxiness. If there has been a duller, more stagnant action film released this decade, I managed, thank God, to miss it.”
—Christopher Orr, The Atlantic

“The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.”
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“The Last Airbender is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film The Golden Compass, a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic…it’s a tossup as to which is worse: the script, which regularly grinds to a halt to Explain Everything until the movie curls up and dies; the shockingly dingy camerawork; or the execrable 3-D. The latter comes in two modes: barely noticeable, as if the technicians set the knob at 1.3 and went out for lunch, or actively irritating. Really, I’ve got winking-Jesus postcards that look better.”
—Ty Burr, Boston Globe

M. Night Shaymalan has really out done himself on the ‘thing’ that he has turned out. One of the more memorable movie tweets I saw said:

@nathanrabin: M. Night used to make movies. Now he makes hundred million dollar “kick me” signs.

As the movie draws to a close, the whole audience was eagerly awaiting the major battle scene. However, it soon became clear that just because Aang and Katara are doing Tai Chi moves does not mean they will be doing bending. So it starts being painfully obvious that either CGI graphics were left out, or they are both terrible benders.

Zoku makes it into the city by diving into the ocean and somehow manages to find his way inside the North Pole. No seals. No fore knowledge. Just an amazingly keen sense of direction I suppose.

However, I do want to give props to 2 actors who tried their best to make something out of a terrible script. And i09 said it so well that I’ll just sink to copy/pasting it here:

Through all of this chaos, two actors wander like lost souls, and they’re really the twin poles of this undertaking. On the one side, you have Aasif Mandvi, of The Daily Show fame, who plays Commander Zhao in exactly the same way he handles the most ridiculous crap he has to say to Jon Stewart. Every line he gets, he shouts and arches one eyebrow comically, in case you didn’t already know this was a send-up. (Anyone who’s watched Mandvi in the TV series Jericho knows he’s capable of subtlety and real emotion, so the fact that every one of his lines of dialogue in this film feels like it should be prefaced with an arch, “That’s right, Jon,” feels totally deliberate.)

And then there’s Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He’s an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that’s wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub’s face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who’s playing the uncle of Dev Patel’s tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage. (Patel is pretty good when he’s acting opposite Toub.) It’s a weird dichotomy in this film – the film’s villains are the only Asian people in the movie, but they’re also the only ones who have any personality whatsoever.

And at the end of this monstrosity we are shown a giant wall of water as the Avatar’s first real show of strength. No Ocean spirit form. No sending the ships out to sea. Simply a wall of water as he follows the Dragon’s advice that, “the Avatar is not supposed to harm anyone. Show them the power of water.”

No ships are cut in half. Commander Zhao drowns in a bubble of water at the hands of 4 very pissed off water benders, and Katara is declared a bending master by a North Pole master who could not have been less misogynistic than a hippy on pot.

Some final thoughts before I release you from this horror. Momo is a bat thing with about 2 scenes to his name and no personality whatsoever. Appa is something close to the Never Ending Story, but without all the lovable personality with which he is monumentally endowed. Though the Air temple has Avatar statues, they never light up and are in a secret room that apparently is so secret the Fire Nation is able to ambush Aang in it by being there before him. And as a final send off, Aang and crew begin putting up posters of him to change hearts and minds.⁴

I was very disappointed by the waste of celluloid. There should have been magic. There should have been awe. Instead what we got was a movie so pathetically bad that it wasn’t even good enough to be considered “so bad it’s funny.” If it comes out on BluRay, I’ll be the person putting up little post-its saying “Surgeon Generals Warning: May cause instances of death.”

My rating: 1 out of 5.

My final opinion: Don’t see it. Stay home. Make popcorn and watch Avatar:The Last Airbender (the show) in a back to back marathon. Then burn your dvd’s of The Village in protest to the movie gods for MNS’s being allowed to perpetrate such a crime against humanity.

1. Meaning book-to-movie or show-to-movie [↩]
2. http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Roku [↩]
3. A horrific movie that I have yet to be able to see all the way through. [↩]
4. The fact that these were wanted posters in the TV show that they took down wherever possible never crossed MNS’s mind, I guess. [↩]