Last Airbender Review

What we have is a cliff notes version of the first season of the well regarded Avatar the Last Airbender animated series on Nickelodeon, and not a very good one.

For the story, it would take several paragraphs to even explain the entire premise, but essentially the movie takes place in an alternate reality asian inspired world where people have the ability to magically manipulate one of the four elements depending on which country they belong to, either water, earth, fire or air. The Avatar is the spiritual guide to this world and is the only one who can manipulate, or bend, all four elements to keep the world in balance. In this world the Fire nation has started a war so the Avatar, currently a twelve year old boy, and his friends go on a journey to save the world.

In the animated series, this is a great funny epic action adventure, so who do they get to direct it? Dark mood piece director M Night Shyamalan. Who thought this was a good idea? I don't even care that M Night Shyamalan's past three movies were basically disappointments, it is that he hasn't done anything in this genre before. And his style of direction is clearly a bad match with this movie.

The movie is supposed to be a summary of the first season of the series, so needless to say to do a whole series in one movie length is tough, but the movie doesn't even seem like it is trying. The initial story and the fantasy world it takes place in has the potential for an epic on the level of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but what we get is a jumble of half formed scenes pieced together with rather irritating voice over narration. So even though the art direction is impressive, the cinematography is nice and the music is great, everything in the story and script is rushed and fragmented and nothing is given time to develop. Which also gives rise to a question, if everything had to be rushed, why was this film only 90 minutes? When was there a fantasy film that lasted only 90 minutes?

The CGI of the magic element fung fu fighting, aka the only reason this movie was made to be live action in the first place, is less impressive then it should be for this budget, but it is ok enough to be regarded, as again, the only reason only reason this movie was made in live action. Yes, watching CGI elements is impressive for about 30 seconds, but it is not synchronized well enough to the actors kung fu-esque actions movies to make exciting action. The actors just look like they are making a bunch a silly gestures and then when they're done, the elements just fly out of nowhere, and not very quickly or smoothly either. While I am against reviewing movies by comparing them to their source material, it was something that works well when your medium is animation, and seems like a good concept for cool CGI for a live action movie in theory, but just doesn't work.

Leading up to this movie there was a great deal of controversy about the casting of the main characters. For an obviously Asian inspired world, people believe it was inappropriate that M Night Shyamalan cast Caucasian actors for title roles. I initially was not sure how I felt about this, but I did feel uncomfortable that the actors picked had barely been in any movies before with the exception of the villian characters. Now having actually watched the movie, I agree with this. The white actors look very out of place in their Asian style robes while all the background characters themselves are in fact Asian, and while it may not have been the directors intent, it does make the film feel whitewashed. But even more out of place is the acting itself. I can hardly blame the actors for their performances considering the script and directing they had to work with, but the acting is fairly disappointing because M Night Shyamalan picked very inexperienced actors.

A criticism of the fans of the original series is that for some reason they chose to pronounce all the names with the Japanese phonetics, so none of the names sound like what they sound like in the series. It is a rather unimportant decision, but it is curious why this decision was made at all.

But where is it that the movie truly fails is the decision to make this movie in the first place. Making a live action version of Avatar never needed to be done. I resent Hollywood's attitude that every cartoon needs to be made into a live action version to verify it. (Yes Yes, they make it because people will pay for it, yes lets all be completely pessimistic about our fellow man) To fit a season's worth of information from an animated show into a 90 minute movie, directing an action fantasy with a director who has only done dark low action dramas with amateur actors, none of these were the proper tools to start with. You need a better reason to make a movie then "Gee that will look cool with CGI." Maybe this could have worked with a different director, a cohesive story with developement and better actors, but now we will never know.

Though I have had to come to grips that those who have never seen the animated series tend to like the movie. Though it really just bothers me more because everything that they like is everything that originally came from the series, except that the series did it better. I plead that at least for those who liked the movie to watch the series. Not just because the series is better, but hey, you'll get to find out what comes next without waiting!