Duelling Benders: Two Reviews of The Last Airbender

I’m not promising these two opinions will be opposites, but I think it’s worth your time looking at both. First of all, here’s Melinda Seckington‘s Bleeding Cool review of the film, originally from before its general release; and then, afterwards, my take from a public screening.

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), The Last Airbender is based on the first season of Nickelodeon’s animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was famously renamed to avoid a clash with last year’s other Avatar, from James Cameron.

The movie is set in a world split up in four nations: those of the Air Nomads and the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation. Each nation has “element benders”, people with the ability to control one of the four elements. The Fire Nation has conquered most of the world though, and the only one who can stop them is Aang (Noah Ringer), the last of the Airbenders and the Avatar. But Aang hasn’t mastered his Avatar abilities yet and needs to learn how to control Water, Earth and Fire before he can face the Firelord.

Together with a Waterbender girl Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her warrior brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), Aang needs to travel to the Northern Water Tribe to find a Waterbending master. During their journey they try to help people enslaved by the Fire Nation, but they are pursued by the Firelord’s exiled son, Prince Zuko (Dev Patel).

With The Last Airbender, Shyamalan tries to condense the first season of the TV show into a 2 hour movie, with the option of doing the following two seasons as two movie sequels. Now, I loved the TV show. I had dismissed it as being a kids show until I actually watched a couple of episodes and fell completely in love with the world and the mythology. It’s a cartoon that’s perfectly suitable to translate to the big screen; big epic battles, a great story line and lovable characters. However, it always would be quite a undertaking to cut down those 10 hours worth of story to only 2, and Shyamalan fails miserably.

What we get is a movie lacking in plot and character development with some of the worst dialogue and acting I’ve seen in a while. Most scenes feel disjointed, jumping from one setting to the next with only Katara’s expository voiceover tying it all together.

And then there’s the acting. Noah Ringer looks the part and has the martial arts skills down pat, but he’s not a good actor. His character is at the heart of the story; Aang is a fun and cheerful kid, yet goes through some tremendous stuff (like discovering his entire nation has been massacred, and that he’s the only one left). It all is delivered by Noah Ringer with an uninspiring blandness, and you feel no emotional connection to the character whatsoever. The other actors also don’t fare that well either, but I wonder how much of that can be blamed on Shyamalan’s script and directing.

The visual effects are a bit hit-or-miss; in some scenes they’re done beautifully, in others it feels as if they left it unfinished. Both Appa and Momo (Aang’s flying bison and flying lemur) are nicely CGI-ed, although they lack the character to mean anything to anybody other than fans of the show. The battle scenes featured a lot of element bending; gusts of wind and waves of ice clashing with fire balls and walls. It all looked pretty, but it felt too staged, too slow, too choreographed.

Not everything is bad with the movie, but there’s nothing so good as to redeem the picture. Visually I find Shyamalan got the look right; the set design, the costume design and creature design are mostly spot on. Besides that, James Newton Howard’s score is big and epic and tugs at your heartstrings at all the right moments. If only those moments had on screen momentum.

I hadn’t expected that a big blockbuster movie like this could suck so much, but The Last Airbender is a huge disappointment. This movie had so much potential, and with a better script and a better cast it could have been an amazing summer blockbuster. As it is, The Last Airbender is not a good movie at all, and for any movie goer a waste of time.

My turn, my turn!

I’m not going to make a case for The Last Airbender being a misunderstood masterpiece, though Shyamalan did make one of those before, that being The Village. Instead, I do want to focus a little on what he got right as well discussing, you know… the inevitable.

Contrary to popular conception, the 3D in this film is far from offensive. The images, many say, are completely flat and too dark to be read properly. Neither of those points are true. Some of the shots do very little with their 3D, but a number do apply it to foregrounding and backgrounding elements as relates to how the audience should be thinking and (importantly) feeling about them.

In effect, all I’m doing is complementing the filmmakers on 3D choices that are effectively comparable to the use of depth of field and shallow focus in 2D, something that most filmmakers can do at least as competently as how the 3D is applied here, but my point stands: this is mediocre 3D, not the head-crushing, eye-boiling stuff of nightmares (see: Clash of the Titans).

The casting is very bad, and the kids in particular are saddled with huge, huge lists of expositional facts they have to push out. If they could muster at least some naturalism – just a drop – the dialogue would have felt rather less lumpy. Still lumpy, just less so – freshly made porridge as opposed to… um… freshly made porridge with a small pile of rocks in. The film’s overall lifelessness is pretty much on the kids’ shoulders, I’m afraid. Sorry kids – how cruel Hollywood is to put you in a position where you have to breathe life into a film or, frankly, get virtual abuse hurled at you on the internet.

I wouldn’t like to see any of them ever again, in anything. If I see their names in the promotional materials for a film, it will put me off.

The choreography is actually rather good in principle, but the performers often seem to be waiting for their cues rather robotically and can’t keep in the flow at all. Why Shyamalan accepted any of these takes is something of a mystery, but I fear he could have shot each set-up for months on end and not gotten to anything useable. Again, the blame seems to sit squarely on the performers.

And – yes – the people who hired them. I’m assuming that Shyamalan and Frank Marshall deserve a custard pie each for their bad choices there.

Some set-pieces are not sucked under by torrential exposition storms, and these are easily the best pieces of the picture. When a masked, mysterious individual breaks into a prison in an attempt to get to Aang, the story telling is visual, simple, clean and pleasing. It’s not a long sequence, but it is good.

Other times, the film shows tell tale signs of being cut down, with shots shuffled about and key points not given any breathing space. I suspect the paper draft was at least a little better than what was filmed, and that some kind of salvage works in the edit actually only made matters worse. I can’t imagine how many set-ups Shyamalan and crew were having to get through to make their days, but there’s some ambitious and complex stuff in this film, and I don’t think they spent as long on it as was necessary. Shots that would have seemed perfect on the boards just weren’t nailed in production.

The film is not without visual merit in many regards, with some of the set design being wonderful (some of it… very unwonderful) and the camera more often than not being in a right place at the right time. Had only the cast been as technically ambitious or, indeed, capable.

I’m pretty sure Shyamalan could make a fairly strong Airbender film, but there’s one hurdle he’d have to clear in his mind first: the cartoon series. If he’d smashed that into tiny fragments and just used the useful ones in making a new mosaic, I’m sure he could have made a film that actually worked. Caring – or perhaps more properly, worrying – about the response of the whinging, die-hard fans is probably the source of each big mistake in this movie.

Well… that and working within the perverse casting and scheduling practices of a major studio. Honestly, putting a project like this in development without giving the filmmaker total and utter free reign is like cutting off your nose to spite your face and with Airbender, Paramount just blew a big snot bubble through the hole where its nose used to be.