I’ve seen bad adaptations before, but this is just embarrassing. M.Night Shyamalan has proved that his days of making great movies is pretty much over and were left with one of the worst films I’ve ever had to witness. The film is supposed to be based on the popular Nickelodeon series “Avatar: The Last Airbender””, but this film is like listening to a summary of the first season of the show while being half asleep, and then writing a script off the few words that you heard.
The world is made up of four elemental nations: earth, air, water, and fire. Each tribe has people who can use the elements, these people are known as “benders”, but the Avatar is someone who can use all four elements. He vanishes and is found again 100 years later in ice by by a couple of water tribe siblings named Katara and Sokka. The Avatar is a young airbender name Aang who must figure out how to use the other four elements in order to save the world from the fire nation.
This movie annoys me in so many ways and unfortunately I’ve seen the entire TV series which just make this movie so much worse. So, you better sit back and enjoy all the negatives I have because this movie had nothing, and I mean nothing remotely positive about it. First off the stars of the film: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, and Nicola Peltz were all awful actors, reading awful dialogue, written by awful writers; it sounds like a winning combination, I know. The characters have nothing likable about them, they act nothing like the characters they are based on, and they are not developed at all. The movie just tells you the names, what they are, and then tells you to enjoy the sheer confusion it leaves you with.
The special effects were just as bad too. Between the animals and fight scenes this movie ranks up there as one of the biggest wastes of a couple hundred million dollars out there. District 9 used like a tenth of this budget and the creature and effects look great, so whose fault is it? The slow motion/speed-up scenes were way overdone and just looked so boring and uncreative, but what do you expect from a movie that just doesn’t care. I really think they would have been better off making their own movie, because they were terrible with trying to compare to the show.
In the TV series, the characters were well developed, entertaining, and we really got to feel the main thing, which was Aang dealing with having to be a hero when he clearly just wants to be a normal kid. Not to mention there is supposed to be some romantic feeling between the two main characters Aang and Katara, the movie I guess decided to ignore this along with everything else. The Last Airbender was forgettable and lazy, it made a mockery of the source material and also how about you pronounce the characters names right, I mean you couldn’t even say the main character’s name correctly and don’t get me started on the unexplained reason of why none of the characters in the film can say the word “Avatar” correctly.
Overall, this movie is terrible and should have never seen the light of day, and I really hope they don’t continue on with the three sequels that were originally planned. The cartoon should have never been made a live-action film, I can’t blame the actors because I don’t think a young actor like Noah Ringer could even begin to comprehend how much deeper the character he’s portraying actually is. I hope Shyamalan snaps out of it one day, but honestly I don’t like many of his films anyways and no matter what happens he will never give us another “Six Sense”. So please, don’t watch this crap, go watch the TV show and enjoy all of its greatness, but until then let’s have a moment of silence for M. Night’s career………….Thank you.