The Last Airbender (2010)

Rating – 0/4 (Complete Shit)

        I’m just gonna say it: this is my most hated film of all time.

        Based on the popular Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, this film should have everything going for it. Great characters, great action, humor, romance, comedy, drama, and most of all, entertainment. Unfortunately, The Last Airbender has NONE of it. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, and Jackson Rathbone, this film is a waste of talent (if you can even say that) and is an insult to the fans of the original show.

I’m a fan of the show and this time, it’s personal!

       Following the story of Aang and his friends Sokka and Katara, their mission is to free their land from the evil Fire Nation and defeat the Fire Lord. Aang is a person known as a bender, one who can control one of the four elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. In his case, he is an Airbender and the last one alive.

Originally, the show spanned three seasons called “Books.” Book One was “Water”, Book Two was “Earth”, and Book Three was “Fire”, and all had about twenty episodes each. So, what happens when one movie tries to squeeze the first twenty episodes into two hours? A complete mess.

The story is rushed, the character development is absent, and everything is explained through boring narration and exposition. In the show, many episodes are spent exploring the characters and seeing their complex backstories. In the film, it’s just one scene after another, boring and bland, with no sense of fun or entertainment that made the show so great. Nothing is interesting. Not the characters, not the action, and not even the visuals.

And speaking of the characters, the acting in this movie is terrible. For characters in the show that were complex, clowns, or strong, the acting in The Last Airbender turns them into lifeless puppets. Katara, the strong female, becomes a complete pushover. Sokka, the class clown, was turned into a stiff and humorless wreck, and Aang, the innocent, loyal, and powerful twelve-year-old boy, becomes a brooding loner. Not saying that that’s a bad thing for a movie, but when it ruins the characterization of already well-written characters, it brings a film down. Good characters are the one’s audiences can understand and attach themselves to. But in this film, nothing about these characters makes them likeable or identifiable.

This might be the biggest slap in the face for fans of the show, and I’m not kidding. Greatness was presented on a silver platter. Memorable characters, brilliant writing, mature themes, humor, and action promptly discarded in a boring CGI clusterfuck. Everything about it is wrong. This isn’t Avatar: The Last Airbender, this is what uneducated, rich assholes in tacky business suits believe is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

        It’d be easy to jump on the M. Night Shyamalan hate train and while he’s not blameless, I’d say most of the blame goes to Paramount. According to various sources from people who worked on the film, there were various rewrites that butchered the original script, instances of nepotism in regards to casting, mismanagement of the budget, executives not caring about the source material, and rushed production.

       So many issues that it killed all enthusiasm for the project and I can’t say I blame them.  

Some advice for future adaptations.

1.    Study the source material!

2.    Respect the source material!

3.    Give a shit about the source material!

4.    Respect the creators of the source material!

5.    Respect the fans of the source material!

6.    Fucking listen!

But honestly though, a live action movie wasn’t going to work anyway. An average of twenty episodes per season each at around thirty minutes squeezed into a little under two hours would have to cut a lot of character moments and plot points to fit the run time. For a show that relied on interesting characters and engaging stories, greatness wasn’t going to be in the movie’s element.

This movie was dead on arrival. But then an uncaring studio decided to fuck its corpse. Disgusting!

If you want to enjoy Avatar: The Last Airbender, just go watch the cartoon. It’s everything the movie isn’t and then some.

If you haven’t noticed from my ranting, the movie straight up sucks and everything about it is wrong. It doesn’t work as an adaptation, it doesn’t work as a standalone movie, and it’s certainly not going to bring in new fans, and it’s definitely going to piss off old fans (me included).

So, if I had the power of Sozin’s Comet. I’d burn this abomination to a crisp.