M Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender is a failure that sometimes offers glimpses of what it could have been. For fans of the popular cartoon series upon which this is based, it is sure to be a frustrating experience. There are the buried hints of potential in the picture’s presentation of an Eastern-influenced fantasy landscape, but what ends up on screen is little more than a flurry of images, half-baked genre tropes, and stilted, embarrassing dialogue.
I enjoyed the overall aesthetic of Airbender, but was consistently distracted by the amateurish directing and film tech credits. Shyamalan, who once compared himself to Hitchcock and Spielberg, has recently proven that his very specific bag of cinematic tricks has finally come up empty; he botches what could have been a compelling new franchise.
An opening scroll informs us that the elements of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth have manifested themselves as nations of people, survivors of a world torn apart by war. Whether this is a post-apocalyptic landscape or a separate universe altogether is never made entirely clear. All that is known is that the Fire Nation, fearing a prophecy that predicted a God figure known as the Avatar would rise from the line of airbenders, sent their weapons against the Air Nation. At the start of this film, the Airbenders have been destroyed and scattered to the wind, and the Water and Earth Nations are under the tyranny of the militaristic Firebenders, who command monolithic sailing vessels that look like Nemo’s Nautilus on steroids. The world is in despair and ruin, and then the last, lost member of the Airbenders resurfaces in the frozen tundra of the Water Nation.
If the film’s set-up sounds silly, that’s because ostensibly it is. However, in the hands of a gifted set of animators and writers, Avatar: The Last Airbender told a good and nuanced story on the small screen. It had an eye for small details and made it’s protagonist, Aang, a likable but conflicted hero.
In Shyamalan’s hands the nuance disappears in favor of dialogue that feels completely improvised and a broad, messy adventure that uses the effects well enough but can’t muster much passion about the sights it wants to show us. Also, for a film that wants to be a franchise, Airbender is terribly choppy and truncated. It’s as if the editors kept taking away pieces until they had ensured they had enough left over for a sequel.
Using a narrator to fill in the bits we need explained, Shyamalan tries to give us the cliff notes version of the story, but with his own laconic pace added in. Events happen in an order that occasionally defies logic, and the narrative progression is that of a tale told by a child. You know the kind, the ones that use ‘and then’ as a transition. In a particularly bewildering example, the love affair between two central characters is summed up in a few lines, and we the audience, are left to infer the rest. There is a late-in-the game sacrifice that has zero impact because the film has failed to properly introduce that character or their impact on the rest of the story.
It’s hard to decipher Shyamalan’s stylistic devices enough to comment accurately on the acting. Noah Ringer is Aang, the titular airbender who shows up frozen in the ice with his giant flying pet buffalo, Appa. Aang is essentially just a child, and Ringer has an expressive face that works well for suggesting world weariness and innocent trepidation. Unfortunately Shyamalan requires him to speak some of the most unutterable garbage this side of a George Lucas movie, and the young Ringer often looks like a deer caught in the headlights in these scenes. During the action bits he can convince as a diminutive but fearsome warrior, but in close-ups he comes off like a lost child shouting at the screen.
Twilight’s Jackson Rathbone is completely wasted as Sokka, and the same goes for Nicola Peltz as his sister Katara. They stand around at the edges of almost every scene, but outside of finding Aang and deciding too try and protect him, their roles are mostly filler. The romance between Rathbone and a Waterbender is not convincing in the least. Cliff Curtis, Shaun Toub, and the Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi are all miscast as the villainous members of the Fire Nation. Dev Patel is Prince Zuko, and he begins to suggest a layered character in the banished aristocrat but ultimately it’s just too much for him to pull off. Most of this is because the film is afraid to let him progress beyond the confines of the first installment, so that there’s something left over for next time.
Between you and me, I don’t think there will be a next time. Visually, Airbender can be kind of fun and goofy, with the frames arranged like a comic book or video game, and there are a few set pieces like the climactic battle of the elements that includes a tidal wave that would make Roland Emmerich envious. There are a few interesting creatures, some impressive steampunk machines, and some genuinely awesome fantasy backdrops.
However, none of these pieces make a cohesive whole, and what’s worse is that Shyamalan doesn’t even seem to be interested in making the picture complete. Widely know for building twists into his films, M Night delivers one of his most insidious yet by merely refusing to end the movie. Tricking all of us into thinking we were watching a self-contained story, he yanks out the rung and shows us that Airbender is not the last at all, but only the tip of a cinematic iceberg that will likely never be revealed once the movie going audience lays eyes on this one.
Rating: 
