I Survived The Last Airbender (And I Didn't Even Get A Stupid T-Shirt)

 No matter how bad it gets, remember, we have this to fall back on.

Apologies, dear readers, I probably should have written this up last week when most all of the critical world was abuzz collectively panning M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but hey, holiday weekend, hot weather and a general sense of malaise after making the effort to hit up a midnight showing all conspired to allow an excuse for procrastination. By now I’m figuring many of you have read or at least heard of the aforementioned scathing editorials concerning the film–especially Roger Ebert, who busted out a special can of whoop ass not seen for a while–and I suppose I’m here to tell you that, yes, for the most part every dirty little rumor is true and they’ve butchered Avatar.

I saw the film with Screened.com‘s very own Alex and Matt Rorie in downtown San Francisco, and while those two immediately had a lot to say following the show I was left in a stupefied torpor that lasted throughout most of the next day. While the animated series is not my all-time favorite (sentimental attachment to Batman: The Animated Series), Avatar is a formidable offering from Nicktoons and a shot across the bow to Japanese studios that I both enjoy watching and respect greatly. The live-action adaptation doesn’t diminish my feelings for the source material, thankfully, but it does leave me wondering if any animated show can ever be transfered to a real-world setting with all the bits that make it exciting still intact. 
 

I don’t intend to deliver a hate-filled screed on the movie here. Plenty of critics have already done it and, at the risk of sounding self-deprecating, probably written it better than I. However, I do want to lay out just where in the Four Nations things went wrong. 
 
Let’s start with the script. Suffice to say, it’s fairly atrocious. Late in the film Katara lets loose with the gem “We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs,” which was more a knee-slapper than anything else. Still, as amused as we all were by that line it’s one among many examples of why Shyamalan probably shouldn’t have penned the script while his attention was split between also being the producer and director. In his defense, though, paring down the entire first season into a 103-page script is a daunting task for any writer. Perhaps the greatest crime the script inflicts upon viewers is that it takes all the humorous interaction of the three main characters we so enjoyed in the animated show and replaces it with faux drama. Does the young audience of Avatar follow that show up with a little after-dinner Law and Order or, perhaps more apt, Legend of the Seeker? Probably not.
 

Going back to compacting the entire first season into a 103-minute film, the sense of journey and discovery is entirely lost here as Aang and pals appear to teleport from one location to another with only a subtitle to give us any indication of where we are now. I guess it’s more accurate to say that things just happen because there’s no time to explain why or how they happen. Nowhere is this more exemplified than after the gang arrives at the Northern Water Tribe’s capital and the budding romance between Sokka and Princess Yue is waved into being by a voice-over from Katara actress Nicola Peltz. Presumably the expository footage for this bonding exists, along with many other scenes that might give us more a sense that the story is moving from South Pole to North Pole, but somehow it all got left on the cutting room floor. 
 
Two things I won’t criticize are the effects and the acting. Concerning the former, yes, the post-production 3D is bad–terrible terrible terrible–but the simple solution is just not to plunk down the extra cash and watch it in the normal format it originally was shot in. The action scenes are well-choreographed and it’s always fun to watch kids beat the snot out of adults (unless the adult is me). As for the acting, even accounting for my lowered expectations for child and teen actors, plus the fact that this is Noah Ringer’s (Aang) first movie appearance, these kids did the best they could with what they were given. Seriously, with a script like this one, it would take the gravitas of a Brando or Welles to convincingly deliver these lines. Cut the actors some slack. 
 

So, yeah, The Last Airbender will probably go down as one of recent history’s great big budget flops and deservedly so. As of today it’s made approximately half of its 0 million dollar budget back, but when one accounts for the extra 0 million in marketing (a ballpark estimate), well, I wouldn’t want to be M. Night Shyamalan’s ego about now. Actually, an autobiographical documentary look inside his mind sounds like the perfect project for the former indie director now that he’s probably blacklisted from supervising anything bigger than Cash 4 Gold commercials. Sheesh, here I am giving away million dollar ideas for free. Knew I should have been a Hollywood producer.
 
Any fans of Avatar have an opinion on the live-action movie? Pleasantly surprised, horribly dismayed or something in the middle?

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