A Travesty of Monumental Proportions
By RYAN
The Last Airbender is the worst movie I have ever seen in my life.
You know how most bad films have a few redeeming scenes in them? Even Funny People, another movie I hated, made me laugh a few times. Sometimes there’s a character that shines above the rest – I’m not a huge fan of the Harry Potter movies*, but Alan Rickman’s performance is consistently worth the price of admission. Often, a movie will suck, but its action scenes redeem it somewhat (I’m looking at you, Attack of the Clones).
Well, The Last Airbender has exactly none of that. Everything, and I mean absolutely everything, about this movie sucks. Its dialogue is wooden and weird. Its characters never have time to develop into people we care about. Its plot, by virtue of trying to condense 20 episodes worth of source material into a mere two hours, is confusing and scatterbrained. Its action scenes, though faithful to the source material, are slow, ponderous affairs that are more reminiscent of a dance than a battle to the death.
The worst part is that the anime upon which the movie was based, Avatar: The Last Airbender, is an absolutely amazing example of the visual power of its medium. Its story, characters, and action were all top-notch** and I highly recommend everyone check it out. It is nothing like its theatrical counterpart.
Setting the Stage
The movie follows the basic plot outlined in the television series, except that it doesn’t explain what’s going on as well. For those of you like Seb, my co-author on this blog, who were utterly confused during the whole thing, here’s what was going on in the movie.
In the world of Avatar, there are four nations: the Air Nomads, the Water Tribes, the Fire Nation, and the Earth Kingdoms. Some within each nation have an ability called bending, which allows them to manipulate their element – so the Fire Nation has firebenders, who can manipulate fire, whereas the Earth Kingdoms have earthbenders, who can manipulate earth. Each type of bending is visually based upon a different martial art, and it forms the basis for most of the combat in the series.
Of these four, the Fire Nation was the first to industrialize, and has embarked on a campaign of imperial expansion. There was only one hope of stopping them: the Avatar, the only person alive capable of bending all four elements. However, by the time the series began, the Avatar had mysteriously disappeared and had not been seen for a hundred years. The series opens with the discovery of the Avatar, named Aang, and the series follows Aang and his friends as he tries to master all four types of bending in time to stop the Fire Nation from conquering the entire world.
This premises is explained succinctly at the start of every episode of the television series, as seen below. Why the movie didn’t simply copy the opening wholesale remains a mystery. It would have done much to alleviate the confusion as to what the hell is going on.
Characterization & Plot
When adapting a television or book to the big screen, it helps to not get lazy with your script. By this I mean you can’t just take whatever was written in the source material and toss it up on screen, or you’ll end up with a jumbled mess that doesn’t have time to cover anything. You actually have to sit down and write a movie. Admittedly one inspired by its source, but still its own distinct, separate creature. Sadly, The Last Airbender is a jumbled mess that doesn’t have time to cover anything, so we know which path M. Night Shyamalan decided to take.
Fans of the series will recognize elements from the series that will be completely missed by non-fans, because the movie has no time to explain anything. The relationship between Yue and Sokka (that’s pony-tail-guy & white-haired-chick) gets about a paragraph’s worth of dialogue to show its beginning, development, and tragic end. The rivalry between Zhao and Zuko (that’s the evil guy in black armour who looks like Russell Peters and the guy from Slumdog Millionaire) gets about the same amount of dialogue. The growing friendship between Aang, Sokka, and Katara (that’s the bald kid, pony-tail-guy, & the girl dressed all in blue) isn’t touched on at all because the only opportunity they have to talk to one another is during tedious plot dumps.
Instead of focusing on the key characters and their stories that made them great, we get a bunch of useless junk, including:
- A long, boring explanation from Sokka & Katara’s grandmother as to why the avatar is such a big deal.
- Aang’s trip to the sourthern air temple. In the series, this was an emotional moment, as we got to see Aang’s relationship with his teacher in some detail, so it meant something when Aang discovered his teacher was dead and proceeded to freak out with his avatar powers. Here, there’s no time to do the scene justice – it should have been cut.
- A useless explanation of who Avatar Kyoshi was, even though she has nothing to do with the plot.
- A trip to a village where Aang convinces some earthbenders to rise up against the Fire Nation. In the television series, the earthbenders were actually separated from earth to bend, so their imprisonment made a certain amount of sense. Here, they’re in a rock quarry, so the whole scene just feels stupid. It should have been cut.
- A stupid and boring explanation of how Zhao found the location of the moon spirit.
- A bunch of useless scenes with the Fire Lord (the emperor of the Fire Nation), who by virtue of being thousands of miles away, is also thousands of miles from the action in the plot. He was more effective (and intimidating) as an unseen character in the television series.
- An explanation of how Yue has the moon spirit’s life in her. But since there was no time to show how this happened – unlike in the anime, which had the time – this just feels like cheap, random dues ex machina. Yue should have been cut completely. There was no time in the movie to develop her into a character anyways.
- A completely unnecessary side-plot about how Aang didn’t bow during this So-Now-You’re-the-Avatar ceremony. Aang buckling under the pressures involved with being the avatar, & his fear of being separated from his family because of it are key aspects of his character in the series. But in the movie it would have been better to explore this through his relationship with Sokka & Katara – a relationship that never gets to be developed because of all the wasted time.
The problem with all of the above, and with half the movie really, is that at the end of the day, season one of Avatar was about Aang traveling to the Water Tribe to learn waterbending. Zuko & Zhao would get in his way, and he’d overcome them. Everything else was a side plot. Yes, they were all fantastic side plots, and I wouldn’t cut them from the TV series. In a movie, however, you have a hugely compressed timeline. You have to pick your battles with anything outside of the main plot – about the only side story I’d keep is the Zuko-gets-burned plot, which is integral to his character. Everything else distracts from the core of your story.
Lights, Camera, and… What Was The Third Thing?
Bending did not translate well to the big screen. See, in the series, it felt like the two characters were fighting – they would actually land blows on one another. Bending was simply a way to enhance the quality of your martial arts. Check out the fight scene below for an example:
In the movie, though the moves are faithful to the cartoon series, the actors end up looking like they’re dancing rather than fighting. Worse, they seem to spend an awful amount of time just waiting around – it feels like a fight from the Final Fantasy series of videos games, where everyone politely waits their turn to whack each other with their sword.
The movie also loves to set up crowning moments of awesome and then immediately deflate them. There’s a scene towards the end where Zuko looks like he’s about to fight Zhao – and then turns and walks away. Zhao is then unceremoniously drowned, without putting up much of a fight, by four random nobodies. In the cartoon, we actually got the Zhao/Zuko fight.
Another example is Aang’s giant tidal wave. He spends all this time conjuring this thing, and then lets it fall down limply. No one on the retreating ships seems to think that maybe they should just pummel the walls where the kid is standing with cannon fire, and simply resume the attack once he’s knocked out. Plus, isn’t half your army still inside the city? It’s not like anything’s been done to neutralize them; the Water Tribe has even conveniently left a bunch of lamps out for you to bend with. But it turns out that somehow the firebenders have all been defeated despite the fact that nothing’s been done to change the outcome of the battle inside of the city.
Three-Dee
I hate Avatar. No, not this movie; the science fiction one with all the blue guys from the beginning of the year. Yes, it was a great film. But then it went and ruined every other film I’ve watched this year by forcing them to be 3D, even though it never adds anything to the experience. The 3D is especially bad in The Last Airbender: it looks like 2D most of the time with the dorky glasses. I suspect 3D is also the main reason why the movie is so dark most of the time – the movie looks like it was filmed with sunglasses over the camera lens the entire time.
In Sum
I could go on about the problems in The Last Airbender – I couldn’t bring myself to discuss how bad its dialogue is; though perhaps my co-blogger will tackle that – but one must draw the line somewhere. The bottom line is that the movie managed to get everything wrong: pacing, dialogue, characterization, plot, special effects, 3D, etc. In a way, it’s almost worth watching just to see such an epic train wreck. If you do, however, please wait until it’s out on DVD and just rent this stinker. M. Night Shyamalan has most certainly not earned your, or anyone else’s, $15.
Footnotes
* I don’t actually think that the Harry Potter films are bad, just that they’re too weighed down by the sheer length of the books’ plot to be really good movies. Their pacing never feels right.
** Though I love the television series, I would point out that I think season three was a bit of a letdown. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t live up to the spectacular run of awesome that was season two.
