The Last Airbender

I want you to picture Stanley Kubrick. A brilliant director, considered by many to be a genius and one of the greatest filmmakers who has ever lived. You picturing him? Right, I now want you to picture Uwe Boll, a man who is heavily thought of as the epitome of bad filmmaking, a man who probably doesn't even have any comprehension as to what a good movie is. Imagine if the late, great Kubrick were to have slowly but surely turned into Boll, with each of his films continually getting worse and worse as his career goes more and more downhill. This, my friends, is what is happening to the once-admired writer, producer and director M. Night Shyamalan.

Remember The Sixth Sense? Remember Unbreakable? Remember Signs? For three years this guy was on fire, making hit after hit, wooing audiences and critics alike with his gifted talents in the art of movie-making. Then he made the bore-fest that was The Village, the self-indulgent Lady in the Water and the unbelievably horrifically atrocious and catastrophic event that was The Happening. Sigh.

He completely lost his way and became a total joke in the world of film, with his fanbase shrinking, the guy unable to get an ounce of respect from anyone, critic or moviegoer. Everyone hated him. However, word came out in 2008 that he was making a live-action film adaptation of the popular Saturday morning anime Avatar: The Last Airbender. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon and I have to say it was pretty damn awesome, funny, well-written and filled with terrific characters, it was great stuff. There's no way Shyamalan can screw this up, right? Right? Wrong.

We start off with four kinda stupid-looking dancing silhouettes, each representing the four elements which rule the fantasy world the film is set in. These are Air, Water, Earth and Fire, and it is explained in the cliched upwards writing (lazy writing, as I like to call it) that there are four nations, each with the ability to manipulate, or "bend" one of these elements. The Air Nomads have all been wiped out by the empowering Fire colony, who are imprisoning everyone with elemental bending powers in order to take over the world. Mwahaha!

Waterbending siblings Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) discover a boy named Aang (Noah Ringer) trapped in the ice near their tribe. Turns out this bald-headed boy is an Avatar, the next in a long line of beings with the ability to bend all four elements and is destined to restore peace to this world. Trouble is that he has only mastered Airbending and needs to learn how to bend the other three elements to fully become the Avatar. And so, he sets out on an adventure to end the conflicts set by the evil Firebenders, evading capture from them and all the while trying to master his bending abilities.

Right, so what's good about this movie? Well, the music by James Newton Howard is something epic and is rather impressive, although I expect nothing less from such a distinguished composer. The special effects are also quite decent, if a little over-used, I would have liked more practical effects rather than continually filling the film up with CGI. And that's it. Now, the bad things.

First off, this film is quite patronising. We have every piece of complicated plot-related information jammed down our throats and re-explained as if we can't figure out things for ourselves. Cos we're thick, right? The entire script consists of exposition after exposition after exposition, and the lines that aren't meant to explain what the hell's going on are considerably shit too. "It is time to show the Fire nation that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs." Seriously? "Let your emotions flow like water." How poetic.

The Last Airbender also seems incredibly rushed and has a very poor pace. 20 half hour episodes have been squashed into 103 minutes of so-called entertainment which had me bored out of my skull within just two fucking scenes. I would ask for the film to be made longer to have a better pace, but actually that would mean more of it, so on second thought, make it shorter. Like, much shorter.

The film garnered a lot of controversy long before its release, receiving complaints about Shyamalan having apparently white-washed the cast unlike the animated series, which had a primarily Asian cast. Shyamalan defended the film's casting by saying that these were the perfect actors to play the roles of the beloved characters. Problem though, the cast is bloody awful. Although they're kids, the acting is just horrid. There's a scene on a Firebender's ship where all Aang has to do is look around him for an escape and Ringer can't even fucking do that. He completely screws it up, looking like a confused actor unaware of what he's supposed to be doing. Damn it Shyamalan, give the kid his fucking motivation!

Peltz and Rathbone are similarly bland, delivering their lines in monotonous tones and giving their characters no personality whatsoever. In fact, the only character in the whole film with a personality is Prince Zuko, an exiled Firebender played by Dev Patel. He's the only cast member I didn't dislike, he plays the character well, although his role is simply to be angry, cold-hearted and ambitious. Like me.

I've always said that Shyamalan is a talented director, but not a talented writer. And yet here, he's neither. His direction is not exactly what I'd call impressive in this movie, there's some crappy camera-work in some scenes. What takes the cake though is the stupid decision of having extreme close-ups on some of the character's faces when they speak. Jesus Christ, I could practically see the bland boogers up the bland nose of Aang's bland face as the bland words came out of his bland mouth. Shyamalan did this as well in The Happening with Mark Wahlberg's stupid "think, think, what to do, what to do" scene, which just goes to show that this director can't take a fucking hint.

Some of the fighting choreography is alright, apart from one particular scene which contains what I can only call one of the lamest attempts at an action scene I have ever had the displeasure of watching. Aang jumps and leaps about, turning those around him to ice, looking stupid as hell while making noises which made me think he was heavily constipated. It's just retarded.

This is me being maybe a bit nit-picky, but why in the the hell has Shyamalan decided to tell us the exact locations of where some of the scenes take place? We cut to "The Fire Nation," which, fair enough, appears on-screen, but then we are told "Fire Nation Colony Fifteen." Why do I need to know the precise setting? "The Fire Nation" was good enough, what's with the extra information? Imagine a scene in a movie in Central Park where the words "Bench 12" appear on-screen. It's not necessary. I mean, fuck.

Another thing I can't ignore is the fact that a few times in the movie the narration by Peltz tells us what's going on, yet we don't see these events taking place. "Aang flew us to his home and told us how he blah, blah, blah," we are told, but as this is said we're looking at an image of a mountain for some reason. Did the cameras explode or something and you couldn't shoot the scene for us to watch instead of being told about it? Fucking hell.

Look, this movie is bad. Like, really bad. I don't really expect much from Shyamalan anymore and how the hell he found work after The Happening is beyond me, but this is just terrible. The Last Airbender is mind-numbingly dull, the pacing's shit, the acting is horrendous, the script sucks and there have been some really, really stupid decisions put into the making of this movie. It's not quite as painful as The Happening, but it's a fair competition. And if your kids try and drag you, kicking and screaming to see this, send them to boarding school. Immediately. They deserve it.

3/10