Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 103mins, US, 2010
Cast: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Beginning with some gobbledegook scrolling text, it's clear to see that a director once labeled “the new Spielberg” is aiming for his own galaxy far, far away by adapting the brilliant Nickelodeon cartoon saga, Avatar (a certain” biggest film of all time©” high-jacked that prefix): The Last Airbender .
Initially it looked like M. Night had achieved this on the evidence of a trailer, which featured the requisite amount of elemental CGI trickery and young lead, Noah Ringer, who is an exact ringer for the source material's mystical hero Aang.
If however it indeed was Star Wars to which the director was aspiring, then the closest comparison that can be drawn is with that saga's unquestionable low-point, The Phantom Menace , in that both suffer from too much exposition and a lead moppet with all of the vacant charisma of Jake Lloyd. This however is even worse than that turgid origin odyssey. So much so that you might even start to appreciate Jar Jar Binks. Might.
In a ridiculous attempt to squeeze 22 episodes worth of story into one ninety minute mess, The Last Airbender is the story of Aang, last of an ancient breed of warriors destined to master the four elements; earth, fire, water, and wind. He is reawakened from one hundred years of slumber by brother and sister team, Katara (Peltz) and Sokka (Rathbone) - though why he was slumbering in the first place is never clearly explained, a recurring fault in the film, in that a lot of the plot is lazily left for the initiated to fill in the blanks, with no regard at all for those who wouldn't know a Moon Spirit from their Momo. Together Katara and Sokka must help Aang fulfill his destiny and defeat the evil Prince Zuko (Patel), deposed prince of the Fire Nation.
The Last Airbender is a soulless exercise in exposition, orchestrated by a director whose auteur ambitions have clearly gone to his head, and performed by a cast ranging from Dev Patel – credible as the less-than-bad guy – to terrible. For a film about the elements nothing at all seems natural.
Shyamalan give us the odd flourish – some of the set-pieces are pretty, though never thrilling – but he edits everything to the point of incomprehension and confounds the problem with some of the worst dialogue outside of an Ed Wood film. Characters will literally tell you what they are going to do before doing it; it's a miracle that they don't then go on to proclaim “exit swiftly screen left”. If you thought the stagey acting in Shyamalan's last movie The Happening was lamentable, just wait until you've seen this potentially Razzie snaffling ensemble.
Respect for the source material is negligible, not only because characters' names are pronounced in a completely pretentious and incorrect fashion but because they differ so much from their cartoon counterparts. Aang is no longer a cheeky, naïve, potential pain-in-the-ass but a humorless bore, who offers no weight to the risk his destiny generates. Even his giant flying Bison, Appa, is afforded no introduction - we are just asked to accept that he exists.
You may find some solace in the childish sniggering elicited each time a “bender” is mentioned by the dead eyed cast, but everything else about this joyless epic suggests that the M.Night loyalty card has well and truly expired. The Last Airbender is just full of wind
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