The Last Airbender review

With "The Last Airbender" M. Night Shyamalan has indeed made his worst film. This is coming from someone who actually does find "The Happening" entertaining on that 50's-60's cheap horror film way. All this said I don't buy this as the worst film of the summer. At the very least I can say TLA is nice to look at and James Newton Howard's score is as good as most of his for M. Night's films. The cinematography is dry, but in a refreshing way for the genre and hell I'll even give Shyamalan some credit for NOT falling into the pits of the genre as far as shots are concerned. There's a lot of issue with what's there (I'll get into that in a second), but after 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'Harry Potter' almost all fantasy films are shot in the same fashion ('The Golden Compass', 'The Chronicles of Narnia', 'Stardust' etc) and that's been killing me while watching them. At least when Night wasn't in extreme fucking close ups for no reason, he could lay down some interesting looking images here and there that wasn't all middle-earthy.

Ok, so why is this such a clusterfuck? First off what Shyamalan screws up is a potentially interesting beginning to what could be his trilogy. Since the money numbers are in, it's in that weird stage where a sequel might or might not happen considering it's budget was ... $280 million dollars and it's at $70 million right now. By the way if any of that money was accidentally sent to your house by mistake please contact someone at Paramount Pictures cause it damn sure was not used on this movie. With that kind of cash this film should've been about two and half hours long. In fact with this source material it would dictate a two and a half hour long movie. Instead we get 103 minutes that speeds along jumping where necessary and using action derivative language the whole time. It also plays the whole we'll talk about, but not show action through the means of weak appearing and disappearing narrations via Nicola Peltz's character Katara, whose voice could make an angel's anus bleed for weeks. The few fights scenes are over in a blink mostly and kind of awkwardly composed. The first one involving some earthbenders defending themselves against firebenders starts to seem impressive before ending about a minute in and doing little more than making a dirt wall and throwing some small rocks. As a mild fan of the series I can also say that is does change many aspects of the first season. Somethings are understandable and aren't that important at this state, while others might need to be addressed... like oh say... figuring out how to say the words 'Avatar' not 'Ovatar' and 'Aang' not 'Ung'.

That brings me to the acting of our three leads. Noah Ringer plays the young Aang who awakes and begins this pretty lackluster adventure. Ringer isn't an actor (and it shows). Shyamalan found him through tapes sent into Paramount looking for kids who could be these characters. He's apparently a martial artist and I'll say that's probably true as his moves and form seem quite on par with that. His acting is... well it ain't good, but compared with the other two characters he might as well be Daniel Day-Lewis. Jackson Rathbone ('Twilight's Jasper aka Willy Wonka) plays Sokka, Katara's older brother. Almost everything thing he says is cringe worthy. Part of it is due to some of the junk Shyamalan has written for him, but even when it's general stuff he performs like he's never acted before. Equally Peltz seems to have the most bizarre fucking reactions to everything. When things are at peace she looks like she's about to faint from frustration, when things are burning around her she's smiling and pleased. So either she's a mental case or she's an action junkie that gets her jollys from drowning people in mid air. I'm more incline to believe the prior though.

On the villain side we have 'Slumdog Millionaire' star Dev Patel as Prince Zuko, who was banished and disgraced by his father played by Cliff Curtis. Zuko can only return to his place in the empire by catching the avatar. Patel is one of the few here that actually works for me. Had the film been the length it should've I could maybe even see him getting a nice monologue to really pump up his villainy as well as the duality of his feelings towards Aang. Shaun Toub plays Zuko's Uncle Iroh who ain't so bad and tries to get Zuko to think that being an outcast isn't a bad thing. But ole' lonely Zuko just can't stop pissing and moaning about how he wants back in and blah, blah, blah. At some point Iroh should've told him to go bitch about it in his diary. Then there's Commander Zhao played by 'The Daily Show' star Aasif Mandvi. Not the role for him. I agree with the rest of the world by saying here's a role for a strong, meaty and actually frightening actor. This is the real bad guy to everybody in the story and Mandvi doesn't cut it.

And after going through all this I still can't say this is this big awful piece of work. It sucks, it sucks on several levels, but I've seen worse. I question HIGHLY how critics actually liked "Macgruber" or how "Grown Ups" gets a critical pass. Honestly the whole bad press over this film got me thinking a few days ago about another director and his out of his element film. David Lynch's "Dune" had a very similar fate as this. Interestingly enough it has now achieved a cult status, but go back and read reviews from 1984 and it was pretty much called the worst film of the year and it was only January when it came out. "Dune" isn't good, but it's not utter shit. "The Last Airbender" isn't good, but it's not utter shit. Perhaps I find it difficult to fully destroy the idea of any film with an interesting concept, but I don't think it's a total wash.

I think with this film Shyamalan got scared while writing and scaled back to such a bogus level as to leave next to nothing for viewers to get wrapped up in. It reminds me of FOX's box office train of 90 minute, PG-13 films that were all cut to ribbons and by the time people saw them, they didn't make any sense, but they made money. If ever he were allowed to make a sequel to this (which I highly doubt) or to do another effects heavy film I offer up these thoughts... 1: if you subscribe to making an action film, don't puss out and NOT make one. 2: films can be and often should be longer than an hour and a half. 3: Fucking pay attention during casting sessions! And furthermore fire the fuck out of Peltz and Rathbone or send them on a weekend with Tom Hardy, Daniel Day-Lewis and Viola Davis. If they don't know how to act after hanging with them, then there's no hope for their careers. 4: Hire a writing buddy or someone to check what you're writing and make sure it doesn't involve people repeating the same lines over and over and over again. 5: I hear there are deleted scenes... GOOD. For the DVD Michael Mann the fuck outta your movie and throw it all in! Got different takes of some of the acting? PERFECT, put that in too. Any thing you can do to fix this is a good call.

So really that's all I have to say on the matter of "The Last Airbender". Admittedly even with a misstep with "Lady in the Water", I found it an interesting one. Honestly I like the guy because he does have a style that's all his own and isn't interested in compromising it in this day and age where a lot of movies look the identical. At the same time maybe it's time he really analyzes that style and figures that there is a way to still utilize it, but in a better way that's more in tune with what people want to watch in general and what people want to watch from him. Regardless of what people say I think he's still got some good stories in him, but God help him if he can't tell them better than this.