Before I saw The Last Airbender, I read and heard a ton about how this was one of the worst movies ever made. This did not surprise me at all all as I'm not sure that writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has ever been capable of making a good film. Some of his recent works, like The Lady in the Water and The Happening, are some of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. His ineptness when it comes to straightforward direction and camera-placement is shocking to me. His scripts are terrible with laughable dialogue and ridiculous plot twists. How he didn't learn basic filmmaking or screenwriting by now is staggering - and even more stupefying is that he's still given money to make these turds.
Suffice it to say, I was well prepared to loathe this film, but I didn't. It is not a good film, by any means, but it is a decent action/adventure story with a dumb, but easy narrative. Many of the technical aspects of it are a mess and the acting is terrible throughout, but it is not a horrible film.
The story is about how there is a world where there are people who live in tribes based on one of the four elements: fire, earth, water and air. It seems that there are people in each element group who can control their element and use it as a weapon, or "bend" it. The Fire people are trying to control the whole word and do so with help from their firebenders and their big metal machines. None of the other groups can stop them. Oh, and it also seems that the elemental groups are generally different ethnic groups too - so water people are Inuit, Fire people are South-Asian Indian, Earth people are East Asian and Air people are also East Asian, but maybe more Tibetan.
The film opens with two water people (who are curiously white in the middle of their Inuit families - whatever) who discover a big ice ball in the ocean. Out of the ice comes a small white boy who turns out to be an airbender. Legend has it that there is an airbender who is able to control all the elements, he is called the Avatar.
It seems this airbender is the Avatar (how convenient!), and as soon as he is thawed he is hunted an captured by the Fire people. It seems there's a Fire prince Zuko (played by Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire) who was kicked out of the Fireking's house for some reason. He wants to bring the Avatar to his father to regain his name and his status in the court. But the prince has a rival in a cousin (or something) Commander Zhao (played by Daily Show comedian Aasif Mandvi) who sees the Avatar as a chance to gain status himself and end Zuko's chances at reconciliation with his dad. They race around as the Avatar and the two white water kids try to escape.
The story comes from a well-loved animated television show that I have never seen. It is a bit typical of the fantasy genre, but nothing too offensive or difficult once you're in the world. The worst part about the script is not the sequence of the narrative, but the horrible dialogue. Somehow all the people sound like they're speaking words that were written in another language and translated into English - or worse, that they were translated from English to another language and back to English. At any rate, the dialogue is laughable at best and shameful at worst.
Everything technical about the film is really bad (I only saw it in 2D, but I hear it's not better in 3D) from the costumes to the sets to the computer graphics used in some of the bigger shots. The Iceworld fort at the end looks like it is made of foam-core board and never is convincing that its anything other than a back-lot stage.
M. Night's direction is really the worst. He doesn't understand that you need tight shots for some things and medium shots for other things and long shots for other things. It's all mixed up here, so you'll be in the middle of an action fight scene and you'll just get close-ups of the characters faces, not knowing what's going on below their chins. In one of the climactic scenes, we get an overhead shot, rather than a horizontal one, dramatically cutting down the impact of the event.
The acting is a joke throughout from the white water kids and the Avatar to Aasif Mandvi. You'd think one of the actors would do a good job, even just by chance - but no such luck. It's all horrible. That the main kid actors are white and not whatever ethnic people their tribes are is pretty sad. It's not as if these kids are good actors anyhow.
Perhaps the reason I don't hate it more is because the story is fresh enough and I don't have an personal connection to the television show. I can see why people would like the show (I might try to watch it myself now) but I also see how M. Night is still a really terrible director and an even worse writer. Don't get me wrong: this is a bad movie - it's just that I was expecting the worst movie ever and it wasn't that.
Stars: 1 of 4
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I hate it more. The acting reaches a new level of bad in every scene, which is an accomplishment of its own and entirely due to Shymalan, not the actors.
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