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The Good
The Bad
Judgment
Closing
M. Night Shyamalan, a director best known for movies like The Sixth Sense and The Village should stick to what he knows, or at the least to doing what he does best: creating an engrossing plot that strings the audience along until they reach some crucial twist.
Not only is adaptation outside of his wheelhouse, so too are movies where his signature twist is missing. Put the two together, and, somehow, you get the live action adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Last Airbender
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Plot Summary
Based on the idea that each of the “books” referred to in the title cards of the animated series could be turned into a movie, The Last Airbender follows the plot of “Book One: Water.”
For those unfamiliar with the Nickelodeon show about a world where people can bend water, earth, fire, and air to their will, this section of the story introduces Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern water tribe shortly before they discover Aang (Noah Ringer) frozen in a glacier with his sky bison. He winds up freed from the ice, and after a brief encounter with the reviled Fire Nation, the three of them set out to help Aang realize his potential as the Avatar, the one who holds the four elemental forces of the world in check.
Ultimately, Aang, Katara, and Sokka end up at the city of the Northern Water Tribe, so that Aang can master water bending, and also so that they can help to defend it from an upcoming Fire Nation assault. As General Jao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation plots to kill the spirits of the moon and ocean, thus robbing the water tribe of its bending power, defeat looms over the last truly free city in the world and only our three heroes can help to avert it.
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The Good
As you might expect from a movie about a world where people can bend the elements to their will with movements that Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan would be proud of, the choreography in this movie is decent. And the effects are fairly well done. Whatever else may be said about it, it has no shortage of spectacle. Especially when the fire and the water fly in the final battle.
Also, and this was more a surprise than anything else, but Dev Patel does a good job of playing the brooding, exiled Fire Nation prince Zuko. His character is softened, but it's still really obvious that he's absolutely brimming with conflicting hatreds and loyalties and desires.
Aasif Mandvi's appearance was also a very pleasant surprise. He didn't play anything up for laughs, and a movie based on an animated series (other than Avatar: The Last Airbender) might not be expected to offer up the chance to show your dramatic chops, but he definitely hits it out of the park as General Jao.
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Seychelle Gabriel also works well as Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe – she even puts some feeling into her lines.
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The Bad
Cool World is not a very good movie. However, having seen The Last Airbender, it seems as though the quotation used to introduce The Bad in it was used too soon.
The biggest problem with this movie is the absolutely bizarre pronunciations of names and things that are pronounced in entirely different ways in the animated show.
Where the series pronounces Aang as “(r)ANG,” and Sokka as “Sock-ah,” the director of the movie (Mr. M. Night himself) has them changed to “Ah-ng” and “So-ka.” At one point, a character even refers to the "Yang" in "Yin and Yang" as “Yah-ng.” So, first off, why not just follow the pronunciation that fans have become familiar with over the course of three television seasons?
The next biggest problem (a very close contender for the title) is that all of the character arcs that are presented throughout the show's many episodes are almost entirely shaved away to make sure that this movie is feature length. This is an understandable change, but, if The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask teaches one thing about building character, it's that it can be done in a limited space and a limited time.
Rather than trying to pack the movie with all of the side plots and diversions that the show presents so wonderfully, why not just have Aang, Katara, and Sokka interact with people in the Northern Water Tribe city as stand-ins for the characters they meet in the show? It'd even be possible to just move some of those characters into the city so that they could still be interacted with.
To be fair, the movie doesn't try to pack everything in, but it skips over so many key moments for character development that the characters are left to develop through dialog that's not only written so it conveys almost no subtlety but that's often delivered as if it's being read for the first time.
Dev Patel works well as Zuko, and Seychelle Gabriel does an alright job of playing Yue, but the actor that was cast as Sokka just doesn't seem to get it. In the show, Sokka is a goofball of an older brother who's always hatching plans and making schemes that have some hole or other in them. He isn't solely a comic relief character, but he often is the one that audiences are meant to laugh at – at least early in the series.
As the three travel together and their characters develop, Sokka does become more serious, but that seriousness is always undercut with a bad pun or a silly gag. Instead of this nuance, Jackson Rathbone plays Sokka as some kind of straight man who hardly ever smiles. And when he does – especially when Yue is telling him about how she died when she was born and is alive because the Moon Spirit gave her its life – it's really poorly timed.
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Aang and Katara are a little bit better, but again, because we see them in so few situations compared to the show, they aren't as nuanced as they are in the original. Aang's Monkey-King-like energy and playfulness are replaced by a more sullen, “I-don't-wanna-be-the-Avatar-because-then-I-can't-have-a-family” nature, and Katara is, well, just Katara. By the end of the first book in the series, it was already clear that there was some chemistry between these two characters, but in the movie there's practically nothing to suggest this.
Mercifully, Zuko's absolutely mad sister Azula, is only shown briefly in only two scenes. But, these two scenes set her up as more of a giggly little girl than as the scheming, psychologically twisted monster that she is in the series.
And, to end on a minor detail, a running joke in the series is that everywhere Aang, Katara, and Sokka go, they wind up upsetting a man's cabbage cart. Even the new series Avatar: The Legend of Korra, includes a scene where a cabbage man is dispossessed of his cabbages.
It might be fan service, but it would at least show the fans that you care about something that they admire, Mr. M. Night. And, including the scene would also have assured people familiar with the series that you had actually watched it and not just written your script based on some sort of terribly truncated SparkNotes summary.
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Judgment
The Last Airbender is not the movie it could have been.
Now, it's unrealistic to expect any filmmaker to be able to condense 20 episodes of a television show (about 6 hours and 40 minutes) down into something that's less than two hours while retaining things like characters, a coherent story, and a fully realized world. But there are ways that such an adaptation could have been made to work.
The discovery of Aang could have happened during the opening credits. Then a voice over could give the background of the setting and what had happened up to x-point as the characters did something (maybe fly somewhere on Appa, or walk between villages with a group of people trailing them since Aang is, you know, the Avatar and all). From there, most of the movie could be based in the Northern Water Tribe city with flashbacks to fill any gaps, fully realized relationships with the city's inhabitants to develop characters, and simply more dialog that revealed the story in an organic way, rather than lines that even the actors seem to balk at from time to time.
Unfortunately, M. Night Shyamalan's adaptation was not so bold as to make this many changes. Instead, he seems to have taken a more scissor-happy approach, trimming away everything excess until only the bare outline of the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender's plot remains.
Some of the actors were definitely well picked, and the spectacle that the movie offers is quite impressive. But the four elements of Patel, Gabriel, Mandvi, and spectacle alone aren't enough to save the world of water, earth, fire, and air.
Freya, feel free to shed a tear as you fly over this one, but do no more save let it remain.
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Closing
Check back here next week for more creative writing, an editorial on the newest news, and a hunt for the good in, and hopeful redemption of, another generally despised movie.
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