The Last Airbender – Review

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16 comments Jul 5, 2010  |   Posted by in Domestic Film Reviews

Home  \  The Last Airbender – Review

So The Last Airbender has been out for a few days now and if you are no stranger to the internet you should know this movie is getting destroyed in the ratings. Director M. Night Shyamalan has actually gone on record regarding these negative reviews saying “I don’t know what to say to that stuff.” Well I do. Perhaps it time for M.Night Shyamalan, and any remaining steadfast fans, to accept he’s a one hit wonder. Getting back to the orignial source material though, Airbender was a tremendous animated effort that ran for a few years on Nickelodeon. The story almost mirrors the cartoon which is based on the four nations, which rules the world and the members of each nation have the control of one of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. But, without Avatar the world seems to be unbalanced. Avatar has the ability to control the four elements and act as an intermediate between the physical world and the spirit world. When Avatar disappeared, the fire nation wants to command the remaining nations and reign terror.

Say what you want about M. Night but he knows how to assemble an action scene. I’ll admit there are one or two very minor things that this movie improved on over the show. For one, Zhao’s death scene in the film is comparably better than the way he went out in the show. When T.V producers try to tackle a comic book or animated character, I try to give them a bit of room for error, because they have limited budgets and the character is likely owned by four different companies, so there is not much you can do with the character. On a technical level, the film is pretty much perfect. The sets, costume designs, and visual effects are all commendable. That’s about as much good as I can say about this film.

Quite frankly, the story just never really takes off, which is why it stayed so flat. It had no touches in there that were M. Night magic touches, which basically means it could have been directed by some random person and I would have never known any different. As a director who prides himself on good script writing I felt the plotholes were unacceptable. For example, Aang flies off to the temple and gets himself captured. Once again we have no idea where Appa is or what happened to him. Was he captured too? Did he escape? Did he once again fall into the Fire Nation soldier’s buffalo blind spot? So many questions. After Aang escapes he manages to find his bison and his friends. Somehow. It is a shame that despite the bad reviews, Last Airbender is performing well in theaters.

There is no character development because no scene lasts more than a minute or two. Ironically, I was so ready to rip apart Jaden Smith in Karate Kid last week but ended up loving the film, yet with Airbender, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen child acting this poor. It seems as though everyone is reading the dialogue for the first time. I’m left to wonder if Shyamalan actually watched an episode of the series or just read the Wikipedia page and went to work. All in all, avoid this film and if you were a fan of the show this is blatant disrespect to the fans. The Last Airbender is a tragedy, pure and simple. Avoid at all costs.



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  • http://welcome2nerdsville.blogspot.com/ Troy (トロイ）

    Oh dear that is not good news. I was looking forward to this although the casting decisions did put me off slightly. good to hear the actions okay though… at least they got that right!!

  • http://heroofsuburbia.blogspot.com Cid

    Hey Japan Cinema long time reader here probably remember me from my now dead site Anivention >.< . Anyways I was planning on seeing this movie but was kind of waiting for a review from you guys because I knew you surely would be honest unlike many critics who just love tearing down big name director names down for the sake of bringing them down. A D+ I think this is the lowest grade I seen from you guys with a grade that low I think i'm gonna wait for it to come on dvd how disappointing…

  • http://notouchi.wordpress.com/ notouchi

    So true I totally agree with you…The story didn’t run smoothly at all. Theres so much in the anime that M night took out which makes true fans cringe while watching… But I had a feeling it would be this bad…

  • Ryan

    its a kids movie. i think the critics have been way too harsh. you have to see it in the context that it was created. its not perfect, but it’s not worse than the star wars prequels and the acting is not worse than the god awful acting in any of the Twilight movies. Ten year old’s love it. My nephew and his friends loved it and will continue to love it. they want to see it again. Most everyone in the theatre i was in clapped at the end. Yes, the dialogue is clunky and Night has interpreted this sacred cartoon in a way that die hard fans are unhappy with. However if you just take it for it is, it’s actually quite enjoyable. My prediction is it will be a timeless classic that children will adore for years to come while all the critics who hated it (mostly because they are angry at Shyamalan for his past films) will stand around scratching their heads.

  • http://www.reelwhore.com Reel Whore

    This was such a letdown. I knew they wouldn’t be able to translate the story exactly, but this movie was a highlights reel at best. Totally agree with you about the poor acting and choppy storytelling.

    But I also have to agree with Ryan. I went with a friend, her niece and nephew. The youngest, the niece loved it, was very excited by the scenes. The older nephew, who knew the show, liked the action, but didn’t like that some of his favorite characters were left out. My friend liked the action, but the story made little sense to her, whereas the story made sense to me, but only because I could fill in the gaps from the show.

    I still want this to be a franchise, I just want M. Night out of future installments.

  • Marina

    Even though everyone has criticized this movie, I’m still going to watch it.
    I understand that M. Night has done a horrible job, however, i believe that i will enjoy it simply because I enjoyed the show.
    It might be a good thing that I’ll be walking into the movie theater with low expectations, so hopefully it will be better than I might expect.
    However, there is a new film that I stumbled upon, and it is really cool.
    It’s called the Incubus and it’s about a different kind of vampire that instead of sucking your blood, it sucks your soul. Sounds cool right?
    Check it out!

    http://bit.ly/ahKeh7

  • http://www.moviemobsters.com Heather

    Frustrating. My oldest son and hubby LOVE the show, and I’ve watched enough episodes to imagine it could have been a really exciting film if done well. M. Nightmare has been disappointing me for years and I’ve been holding out hoping for something good since Signs. I feel like he’s made two good movies, one great movie, and the rest is a mess of great ideas and pragmatic execution. A shame, really a shame, especially sine I promised my son I’d take him. Maybe I’ll go see Predators and let the hubby and him go alone. :)

  • http://yahoo.com susie sullivan

    I feel this director is the wrong director for this theme of a movie.
    Spielberg or Jackson could handle taking a cartoon series and making it into a live action movie. I do not blame the actors. If you have a director that does not know the real story involved, and a bad script, then it doesn’t matter how good or bad an actor you are, it is still going to bomb. The actors are guided by the director and script.

    This director had no idea what he was getting into. The anime fans are so evolved, that they are your harshest critics. When a person who does not even know the storyline, but is going by the trailers, knows something is badly wrong, then the director has a responsibility to the anime fans for the next movie, or the anime fans can anniliate the movie, along with everyone else if he does not rise to the caliber he did in Sixth Sense.

    Animated movies can be a scary territory, especially when you have an audience with a preconceived idea or worse it is an animated series that the director has to measure and compare.

    The actor for airbender. It is not his fault. You do what the director says you do. He had the looks for it. The expressions were there. But if the script is bad, and you do what the director tells you to do, then, throw the blame at the director and the scriptwriter.

    Look at Clash of the Titans. They had two best actor academy award winners, in the movie. The actors did what they could do with the bad script they had, and bad directing. But it did not save the movie.which proves my point. Bad script, bad director, ends up bad movie, no matter how talented the actors are.

    Jackson was smart. His scriptwriters knew there were millions of fans of Lord of the Rings. They knew they were going to have to change some drastic scenes, and characters. So this is what they did. They puposely gave out information on the internet of what they were changing, and the reason why. Then they waited to see the response. And they got it!!!!The fans were included in the decision making of the script, and they did not know it. There reaction helped the scriptwriters to find alternatives to please the fans. Many of the fans, thought the changes were excellent, because they saw the reasoning behind it. They got adjusted to that way of thought. Other ideas, simply put them into a revolt, if it was changed, and the scriptwriters did not add, or change that scene or character. This was a perfect way of getting the fans adjusted to the changes before the movie came out. Even though jackson has not done an animated film, I have no doubt he would be able to make a movie that would be a animated series into a live action movie.

  • http://hagiblog.wordpress.com The Film Reel

    I can imagine that my kids would love it. They don’t watch the show and they couldn’t care less how bad someone is acting or if there’s no character development. I’m sure the bulk of the films cash is rolling in from the kiddies.

  • redpill

    hi all… im new here but i would like to say that im a movie person first and foremost so im not even going to pretend to compare it to the original. A lot of people tend to compare the movies to the original media but the fault in that is that the movie has little or no chance at all to par up to whatever they’re being compared to. it doesnt make any sense and quite frankly a little unfair. Now having said that and looking at myself as a person who gives a fair amount of slack to movies that have been said to have sucked compare to their originals, I for one, however, will tell you that this movie SUCKED SO BAD it actually out-sucked Van Helsing! And i compared it to a movie-not a book, people! as a movie, this film simply aint worth even your energy to pick up your money from your wallet. The acting was so BAD, the script was SO CORNY [they used far too little pronouns] and there was this one scene where the earthbenders were fighting the firebenders and they sort of went into formation and danced around silly just to make ONE PIECE of rock float. and im not even sure if that rock floated because of those particular earthbenders coz the camera angles were so weird… but not in a cool dark way! A lot of people complained about the obvious racial issues about the casting but hey, im asian too and i say just let it go. The problem wasnt so much of the racial confusions in this movie… the problem i think is that the whole movie was so WRONG!!

  • mopcambm

    My kids loved the movie. My 11 year old thought it was the best he had ever seen. I am the one in our family that is the cartoon fan, and even after hearing from the critics, I still enjoyed it. The only real things that I thought could be improved was that it was a bit choppy and I really was expecting more humor from Sokka. It was a beautiful movie to watch and had great action effects. I do wish that the scene with the kyoshi warriors was included because it looked cool in the interviews. We will certainly buy this when it comes out on DVD.

  • Ander Brece

    Ryan: it’s a “kids movie” where we see a man being killed by drowing quite explicitly.
    “It’s for kids” stopped being a good excuse back when Episode III.

    The movie is so bad it looks like Uwe Boll directed it. Seriously.

  • Mike

    I am a little tired from hearing from M. Night and his army of apologists that Night makes films that the critics hate, but audiences love. Sadly, that just has not been the case in recent years. I have been going over the numbers since reading some dubious movie sites that have been saying M. Night’s latest films were “successes”, yes I know, despite 98% of the critics in the US have said otherwise. Please feel free to research the validity since I took them off MovieMojo.com.

    Lady in the Water earned a pedestrian $42 million at the domestic box-office. It was the 73rd highest grossing film of 2006. Considering Night is a very well-known director with has a track record of success and a big studio marketing budget behind every movie he makes, which is a terrible showing. 2 years later, The Happening earned just $64 million from US moviegoers. It was the 49th highest grossing film of the year, again a poor showing considering Night’s name and the studio muscle behind the film. Especially troubling was the fact that it made $30 million its opening weekend in theaters and then just tanked to earn a total of only $64 million. Most wide releases earn about a quarter of their box-office the opening weekend. For a film to do half of its total take its opening weekend it is a sign that the people who did see it the first weekend went out and told all their friends how horrible it was. It is a sign of massive negative word-of-mouth. The notion that these films were successes with audiences is a fallacy and a disservice to the readers of this article.

    Finally, the latest of Box office abortions The Last Airbender is another great success story. The production budget for the film was 150 million (Marketing costs were another 130 million, but that’s another story) and so far it has made domestically $129,344,805 and since HALF goes to the theaters that show it, that amount is less than 65 million. Now if you add the the foreign gross (54 million) and we have about 188 million worldwide. However since half has to go to the theaters, the movie has only made less that 95 million so far after a month and a half. Still a failure in both counts.

    I wonder if the authors of these articles had an agenda and wanted to preserve their relationships with Night so they wrote a puff piece that ignores the facts. I will admit that Air bender has been a decent “success” at the box-office, especially when compared to Night’s recent films. However, when you consider that the film had a $150 million budget and a marketing budget of more than $130 million, there seems to be little chance it will be a money-maker for Paramount. I find it amusing that Night says Paramount is waiting to decide on making sequels. The odds of a sequel to a film that lost money are slim and none. Most astute Hollywood observers know that Air bender is going to lose tens of millions.

  • http://www.japancinema.com rei

    Sorry for a little interrupt
    but will this movie continue after receiving many harsh critics
    from many people
    because honestly, according to my oppinion this movie is not so bad
    like most of people comments in this web
    and i was eager to know the next movie

    so WILL THIS MOVIE CONTINUE ?

  • Mickey

    Where to begin. Well I will not rant on the race issue when there is so much else wrong with the film in itself. No one wants to flame a movie although it is very easy to do on the net but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably was a good story idea that M. Night cursed. All of Night’s excuses as well as those excuses stated by his apologists only add fuel to the flame.

    All and all the Cinematography and Special effects were alright, although we have seen that quality of work in every film produced after the Matrix (which was a pioneer in that field and broke the mold) Moving water and pyrotechnics has been done to death since the Abyss and Carrie. As for action and CGI (Ohh the pretty colors!) go watch the Sorcerer’s Apprentice or any of the Ang Bak martial flicks out there. No fast paced movement or fluidity we come to expect from Crouching Tiger or Forbidden Kingdom, only Power Rangers in slow motion. Yes that bad. The real shame was the lackluster detail made to Appa. Can anyone say Falcor reject! Did you like that well those were the kindest words you will hear from me in this review.

    The actions sequences in the movie were already shown in the trailers which leave nothing left to the movie but talk, talk, and yes you guess it more talking. That in itself would not be so bad; however the script is pure garbage. It’s like sitting thru a kindergarten play of the first Thanksgiving. The actors are simply going through the motions with no enthusiasm whatsoever. The transition to audio book will be seamless!
    The Martial Arts (snicker) and Acting were at best mediocre and at worst laughable. Apparently this Noel ringer kid is a talented martial artist, why he held back in this film is anybody’s guess. I saw better fighting in the Rundown (A modest film by the former wrestler The Rock which in my opinion is ten times more fun than this abomination). Really I saw better choreography at karate classes for 5 year-olds. Now the acting, everyone except Uncle Iroh and maybe Zuko was somewhat tolerable. Everyone else made you feel you were watching the second or third day of filming. No passion, humor, or chemistry; you simply do not care for anyone in this film. The girl they picked for Katara had one dimension, worrisome, and ran with it. Ang had a sad puppy dog expression and like the rest of the cast took himself too seriously. The guy who played Sokka looked high as a kite and I was waiting for the other cast mates to find him tapping a vein with his arm tied up with a piece of tube. Why so jittery and bug eyed!

    I will not go over the changes made from the series because the fans will see and hate them on their own, while the rest of the public will find other things to be sick about. The Critics were so on target with this movie and it’s sad that such a great work of art the series was, was reduced to this effigy of laziness and incompetence. In short this movie has no soul at all. No brains or muscle either for that matter

  • Bethany

    This reminds me so much of when “The Golden Compass” came out. I adore the books, and im 17, when i saw the film i just sat there and though, what have you done to an amazing story?
    They could have made it amazing, the same with the last airbender, but instead they seemed to make it for kids.




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