The American animated series The Last Airbender has beenrunning on the Nickelodeon TV channel for 3 years. It has quite possibly beenthe best 3 years of TV in the past decade. With its complex...
The American animated series The Last Airbender has beenrunning on the Nickelodeon TV channel for 3 years. It has quite possibly beenthe best 3 years of TV in the past decade. With its complex, ingeniousstoryline and exhaustive character development this groundbreaking series hasbuilt a huge worldwide following. In the hands of a director skilled in bigbudget, big story action films (ie; Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings or JamesCameron Avatar) this could have been a masterpiece. All the elements were there.
But M. Night Shyamalan is NOT a director with experience inthese types of movies. Most of his past shows involve drama and suspense. Theystart slow, build slow and end with a twist. Unfortunately his inexperiencecomes across very clear in this picture.
The story of The Last Airbender takes place in a fantasyworld where there are 4 major tribes, or nations. The people of each nationhave the ability to control (or bend) one of the classic 4 basic elements(Earth, Water, Air and Fire). There is supposed to be a balance between thesefour nations so that no one single group can destroy the others. But the FireNation has upset this balance by becoming much stronger than the other 3, andthey are determined to conquer the world.
Only one person, an Avatar, can control all four elementsand bring a peaceful balance back to the world. This Avatar, known as Aang(played by Noah Ringer), was the last known surviving Airbender who wentmissing over 100 years ago when he was frozen in a block of ice. Wishing tostop the Fire Nation from world dominance, 2 people (Katara .. played by NicolaPeltz and her brother Sokka played by Jackson Rathbone) begin a hunt for thelong missing Aang. They eventually find and free him from his icy tomb.
The remainder of the movie deals with Aang and his friendsattempts to bring all the 4 elements under his control and stop the Fire Nationfrom killing everybody.
Now this is a story! And with a massive built-in fan baseall the director and studio had to do was not blow it. But blow it they did.
The first mistake was to try to cram an entire season of theTV series 420 minutes worth into a movie that lasts little more than 90minutes. This results in hours of series storyline being chopped down to 2minutes of film time. Many events that were animated in the series are now justmentioned in the film. And the constraints of fitting the story into 94 minutesmeans that nearly every line of dialog must advance the story. There isvirtually nothing that helps develop the characters. No dialog or back storiesthat make us care about these characters. Suddenly, that envious situation ofhaving a ready-made, built-in audience now becomes a curse as fans who havebeen awaiting this release mock and deride the results.
The second mistake was that the actors hired for the rolesjust arent very good. Yes, I know that they are very young, but you wouldthink that somewhere the director could have found actors who didnt look likethey were reading off cue cards every time they delivered a line.
The CGI and special effects were decent, but not great. Withthe current, advanced state of special effects technology we should have seenscenes of element bending that would have blown us away. What should havebeen a highlight is just another letdown.
Overall, The Last Airbender is a major disappointment. Themovie ends in a manner that suggests at least one sequel is on the way. Theproblem is that no one will go to see it.
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