Image courtesy of moviemania.io
Hello, everyone. Rather than reviewing another movie that has similarities to what’s going on right now, I felt like doing something a little different. As it turns out, I’ll be doing that in more ways than one with this review. Since it happened to drop on Netflix a few weeks ago, I figured now would be the perfect time to start doing this. This review marks the first time I’ll be covering a movie that I outright despise.
It takes a lot for a movie to completely infuriate me, which is why I haven’t really done any reviews for movies that people generally hate that I seem to find some things to give credit for.* Aside from maybe King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which was heavily criticized by others while I thought it was okay, the movies I’ve reviewed up to now have at worst been polarizing. However, I still found some level of enjoyment in them.
That is far from the case this time. This movie was also heavily criticized, but unlike King Arthur, I only thought it was okay initially. Over time, though, I came to realize, “No, this really is awful.”
Last year, I covered a trilogy of movies from the director that I liked, the Eastrail 177 Trilogy. This trilogy consisted of Unbreakable (his best movie), Split (which I really liked), and Glass (which, despite its flaws, I also really liked). In fact, I actually foreshadowed this review in the side note of my Unbreakable review, so this one was a long time coming. This year marks 10 years since one of the worst movies ever was released. Last year, I covered the director’s best movie… and now this year, I cover his worst.
Folks, the time has come for me to review…
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender.
Even though I usually never do this, I have to for the purpose of this review. There will be some minor spoilers for both the show and the movie here. However, I will only go over the details in the show that are necessary to bring up in order to give a proper context as to why the movie fails hard to live up to the high standard set by the show. For those who want to hold off, the show comes on Netflix next weekend, so wait for that, watch it, and then come back. Only watch the movie if you feel like you must. You really shouldn’t, but if you insist, then go right ahead.
All I can tell you is you’ve been warned.
As for the rest of you, stick around, and fasten your seatbelts for the bumpy ride we’re about to endure… because I have a lot to say about this one, folks.
Based on the beloved Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, the story is set in a world where people of a particular nation can manipulate, or “bend,” each of the four natural elements: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. Long ago, they lived together in peace. Everything went south when the Fire Nation started a war. There was only one person who could stop them, known as the Avatar, who was also the only one capable of bending all four elements. Unfortunately, he disappeared when everyone needed him most.
A hundred years later, two siblings from the Southern Water Tribe, named Katara and Sokka, come across a giant iceberg containing a young boy named Aang. The boy is said to be the new Avatar, this time an Airbender. He has to learn the remaining elements in order to stop the Fire Nation and end the war, starting with Water. While searching for a Waterbending teacher, however, they are being hunted by a Fire Nation Prince who will stop at nothing to regain his honor by capturing the Avatar.
Now, before I go over everything this movie did wrong, there are some things I’m willing to give a little bit of credit, but they’re still not enough to elevate it above my stance on the movie itself. Some of the effects were okay to decent, and the production design was also okay, but the only real positive I can give is that James Newton Howard’s score is really good. However, none of these things can save it, and it’s especially a shame in regards to the score because of how good it is, but it’s too good for this movie. It felt like it was made for what could have been a much better movie.** Besides, a score is meant to enhance a movie, not carry it, which it feels like it’s trying to do here. It’s particularly evident in the music towards the end when they use the same music from the teaser trailer, which is the best part of the movie, and yet the music is the only thing that carries over from it. None of the footage you see there is in the movie.
The only thing that this movie even comes close to getting right is the intro. It does look like the very beginning of the intro for the show.
The most accurate thing this movie has in regards to adapting the first season is the plot summary on Wikipedia.
There are two more things I’d like to touch on before we dive in. No, the casting and the title being shortened to The Last Airbender are not among the problems I have with the movie. The main reason they took the “Avatar” portion of the original title out was to avoid confusion with James Cameron’s movie, which came out a few months prior. It was a wise, yet obvious choice, but here’s the problem: You’ll wish you were watching that instead anyway. Regardless of whether you like it or not, it is much better than this.
As for the casting, despite how controversial it was, I understood what M. Night was trying to do by having a diverse cast. The show somewhat had that as well with its characters, so I get that. The difference is that in the show, it wasn’t so much of a focal point of the characters and their development. It was just among their character traits and that was it. It just showed you what they looked like and went from there. Here, it rubbed so many people the wrong way that it became a major point of criticism well before the movie was even released, and to some extent it carried over to its release. This is not the first time there’s been casting controversy, but it is one of the more prominent ones.
That’s basically what it boils down to, so I didn’t need to go into more detail on this one. There will be other times where I have to touch on controversies. However, they usually end up being around when those respective movies came out, and they’re brought up to make a point; most of the time, they’re blown out of proportion to where they’re ultimately unwarranted. Besides, there are so many other issues here already that addressing it is enough.
Now let’s get into this, shall we? Let’s go over all the things this movie did wrong, both as a movie and as an adaptation of a beloved show.
Here’s how it’ll go for movies like this. I’m mainly doing this so it’s easier to follow, because as previously stated, there’s so much to go over that this format is really the only way I can do it.
It’s fitting here, then, because the movie, along with the first season, is called Book One: Water. They thought they were going to make a trilogy out of this. Anyway, each season was named for each of the other three elements that Aang had to learn in order to fulfill his destiny as the Avatar. Book One was Water, Book Two was Earth, and Book Three was Fire. Thus, each episode was called a Chapter.
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CHAPTER ONE: THE OPENING
The first thing this movie gets wrong is how it opens, which has so many problems on its own. It’s a text crawl, like the ones you see in Star Wars, except it’s accompanied by unnecessary narration. It can’t make up its mind on how to do world building. Even if they did try one or the other, the movie still would have failed.
In saying that, there’s a difference between how the show did it and how this movie does it. The reason it worked in the show was because the text in the crawl was used as the narration in the intro. As the intro played, you heard this narration, and it was brilliant.
There’s one thing that this movie mentions in the text crawl that the show’s opening narration does not: The mention that the Avatar could communicate with the Spirit World. It’s pointless here because while it was a crucial detail in the show, it was only shown to us, which allowed for buildup to it. Here, it’s like that investment in said buildup was just swept under the rug.
However, following this, it closes with mentioning the hundred-year absence of the Avatar. It was part of the narration in the show as well, except this one was important to mention because it was vital in establishing the story that so many people loved.
Here’s another reason why the intro of the show works so well. Yes, it has two methods of doing world building, too, but they accompany each other perfectly rather than conflict with one another. There, it is both mentioned and shown that Katara and Sokka discovered the new Avatar. It’s only mentioned to help with the world building and character development, and up until they show it to us, a mere mention was enough to inform us that it was part of the story.
Not only that, but also when they discover Aang, we first learn his name in that same scene when he wakes up in front of them and tells them himself.
The worst thing about this narration is that it’s throughout the rest of the movie, so once you’re past the opening, be prepared for a lot of it. You’ll be subjected to a lot of over-exposition in this, with 90-95% Telling, and the remaining 5-10% Showing. It causes the whole movie to fall apart by breaking the #1 rule of bringing your story to life with a movie, or even a TV series: Show, Don’t Tell.
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CHAPTER TWO: THE NAMES
The one thing this movie is perhaps most notorious for also occurs throughout the movie. Some of the names are pronounced differently compared to the versions in the show. M. Night wanted to honor the source material and use the Asian pronunciations. Not only is that very statement contradictory, but also the definitive pronunciations were pretty much already established in the show.
Here, they pronounce “Avatar” “AH-VATAR”. This one in particular actually goes back and forth, so even the biggest insult in regards to this is more consistent. This one is not. There are some scenes where it seems it’s pronounced right, and then they go back to pronouncing it wrong.
The three most notable ones are the ones that particularly aggravated the fans:
“Sokka” is pronounced “SOH-KA,” “Iroh” is pronounced “EE-ROH,” and the biggest one in the movie… “Aang” is pronounced “ONG.”
I was going to mention this part last, but I decided to go over it as soon as I could because as a movie in general, that’s actually the least of its problems compared to everything else.
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CHAPTER THREE: THE ACTING & THE SCRIPT
The narration and mispronunciations are made even worse because the acting is terrible. The only actors that I thought were trying were Dev Patel as Zuko, the Fire Nation Prince, and Shaun Toub as his uncle, Iroh. They weren’t necessarily good, but I felt they were giving some effort with what they were given. By comparison, everyone else in the movie felt like they were given nothing to work with. The line delivery is so wooden, the performances are lifeless, and the script itself, even if you push the mispronunciations aside for a second, is still atrocious.
These are some of the lines in the movie:
When Aang is asked how he got trapped in the ice, he responds with this: “I ran away from home. We got in a storm. We were forced under the water of the ocean.”
During an action scene in the middle, Aang says, “This was their practice area.”
Lastly, the biggest one: “It’s time we show the Fire Nation that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs.” That was the point where I realized I owed Anakin and Padmé an apology.
There are even some parts of this movie that are so bad that they’re unintentionally hilarious, so there is something to make you laugh here, but for the wrong reasons.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE CHARACTERS
Not only are the performances lifeless, but also all of the characters themselves.
Sometimes, they even come across as complete morons. There are several occasions where characters ask multiple questions at once without allowing the chance for at least one to be answered first. There are other times where they state the obvious out loud. They make the cheesy dialogue in the Prequels look smart, particularly Episode II.
The biggest example is actually the Fire Nation troops themselves. By the end of the movie, they end up being bigger idiots than the Stormtroopers. I’m not kidding. They’re not threatening or intimidating in the slightest. In the show, they were, like with Commander Zhao, who was practically a rival to Zuko. This allowed for a compelling inner conflict within the Fire Nation itself. He kept getting in Zuko’s way at every turn as he sought to redeem himself for his father. It also benefitted from Jason Isaacs’s performance, because he’s an intimidating presence himself. In the movie, they have Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show (back when Jon Stewart hosted it, anyway), and it’s fitting that he’s more comedic, because you can’t take him seriously at all. When he has a better performance as a minor character with only a couple minutes of screentime in Spider-Man 2 than as the main antagonist in this movie, there’s a problem.
The villains could have been more threatening if their leader also was, but another epic fail is how they translate Fire Lord Ozai, Zuko’s father, to the screen. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both played by great actors, except one is intimidating, and the other is not. In the show, they didn’t unveil him until the last season, because his voice was enough to let you know that he posed a threat. This is mainly because it was Mark Hamill playing him, who has one of those voices that can send chills down anyone’s spine. Plus, he has experience with playing villains, most notably the numerous times he’s voiced The Joker.
A far cry from that is how they do it here. In his first scene they automatically show him, which negates his threat level immediately. Cliff Curtis, as talented as he is, does great with supporting roles, but a villain is not among them. He, like everyone else, has such a stoic and blank faced demeanor in this movie that he comes across as overly dramatic. Showing Ozai right away is like showing James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld right away in From Russia with Love. It takes all the mystery of his appearance and throws it right out the window. There are even scenes where he’s looking away and it feels more like something out of Shakespeare. I kept expecting him to pull out a skull and recite the opening lines of Hamlet.
He’s only the second worst misrepresentation of a character in the movie, though. The worst character assassination in this movie is Sokka. He was made to come across as not very bright in the show, but that’s what made him lovable and such a great character, and a great comic relief as well. He, along with everyone else, had personality and charisma to him. They felt like they had life to them.
This is a bigger mistreatment of a comic relief character than how X-Men Origins: Wolverine handled Deadpool, because at least he was done justice the second time. It doesn’t help that they cast someone like Jackson Rathbone, who was in a franchise full of characters with a sense of personality called Twilight, to play a character like him.*** Speaking of which, there are some shots here that look like something pulled right out of it.
This leads me to my next point.
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CHAPTER FIVE: THE VISUAL PRESENTATION
Another huge failure on this movie’s part is how it looks. I mentioned how the characters had so much life to them. It’s also reflected through the tone, which is very lighthearted for the most part. It has some dark moments, sure, but it’s mostly lighthearted with some humor thrown in for good measure. The only things resembling humor sometimes come from the dialogue, but even more so the things you see the characters do here that their superior animated counterparts would never do.
With the movie, it does have something that’s dark, but it sure isn’t the tone. It’s how it’s shot. Sometimes, you can hardly see what’s going on. M. Night’s direction is the least of its problems here, even though it’s still terrible. It’s also a shame because the cinematographer is the late Andrew Lesnie, who also shot the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
Having just mentioned that, whereas the cinematography complements the visual effects in those movies perfectly, it doesn’t do them any favors here. Some of the effects looked okay to decent. For example, when you see one of the main animal characters, Appa, from a distance, he looks okay, and a shot of him in the water looks decent, but when you get a good look at him, the effects on him are awful. The other main one, Momo, doesn’t look much better. The only thing they did get right was getting the voice actor for them back, but that only goes so far. The worst effects in the movie are early on when Katara and Sokka first appear. When you see Sokka’s coat blowing in the wind, you can’t look away from it because it’s so painfully obvious that they’re standing around a green screen.
Even worse are some of the narrative choices, not counting the numerous plot holes in this movie.
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CHAPTER SIX: THE NARRATIVE CHOICES
The most infamous scene involves an Earthbender “prison.” In the show, they’re on a metal ship, where they can’t bend, which leaves them vulnerable. Here, they’re being held captive on the very element they can manipulate, and they don’t fight back anyway until they’re motivated to when Aang goes so far as to basically say even he knows this idea is stupid. They don’t fight back just because they only say there was nothing they could do once the Fire Nation brought their machines, so metal is actually mentioned here.
What makes this scene so infamous is when they do fight. I’m not making this up: At one point, six Earthbenders take a page out of the Step Up movies and start breakdancing to levitate a rock, and it takes a seventh to throw it.
They also occasionally use montages rather than have the sequences just play out naturally. The worst thing about that goes back to the narration: They use it to gloss over a very crucial subplot, and you’re basically told to care about what happens without really being given a chance to. You’ll know what it is if you just watch the show, and because of how much of a major plot point it is, I won’t spoil it for you. All you need to know is that they completely botched it.
This all leads me to the cardinal narrative sin of this movie. I was going to save this for my review of The Rhythm Section when I get to that, since that movie is a huge example of this, too, but this ended up being even bigger, so I’m mentioning it here.
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CHAPTER SEVEN: THE RUNTIME
My biggest gripe with this movie is actually the runtime. Now, the runtime is something that might easily be taken for granted. However, there’s one thing that should not be when considering the best length for a movie: It should be as long as you need to tell your story. Regardless of how long you intend it to be, whether it's 30 minutes or 3 hours, it should be that exact length; nothing more, nothing less. If it’s even a fraction of a second off either way, you risk everything else suffering for it, so make every second of every moment count. You also need to have enough material to justify it. An example of a movie that accomplished all of that and then some would be what was both my favorite movie of 2019 and my Best Movie of the Decade: a little movie called Avengers: Endgame. That movie is 181 minutes (3 hours and 1 minute) long. It had enough material to justify that monumental runtime, and not one moment of it was wasted.
Now compare that runtime to this. M. Night is used to his movies being around 90 minutes, but this should not have been one of them. This is actually a little bit over, at 103 minutes. Either way, he chose to condense the first season, which is 20 episodes worth of story, into 1 hour and 43 minutes. In doing so, it wasn’t going to be anything other than a disaster, and sure enough, that’s what happened. If anything, this should have been 2 hours and 15 minutes or so at minimum. Even 2 and a half hours might have been passable. At worst, he could have decided to expand the trilogy plans into 2 trilogies’ worth of movies, because there would have been enough material for them.
As it is, though, he still royally messed up here. I’m not the only one saying that, either. There are plenty of others who will tell you the same thing. Whether it’s critics, fans, or even those involved with the series, chances are they share the same sentiment you do: That this movie is a total dumpster fire.
This movie is so awful that even the creators have stated that they like to pretend it never happened. There are two reasons for this. The first is that they stated the project was greenlit without their approval. The second is that when they tried to provide input, it was ignored. They even went so far as to tell Dante Basco, the original voice actor for Zuko, not to see it; he would later mention that in an interview when asked what his thoughts were on the movie.
Having now just seen this for the first time in years for this review, I can’t blame them one bit.
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CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CONCLUSION
In summary, here’s what I recommend, although it’s pretty obvious at this point: Skip this movie, and watch the show when it arrives on Netflix next weekend. I also suggest you then seek out the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which aired a couple years or so after this movie came out. However, you may have to look elsewhere for that, as I don’t believe they have that on the schedule for this month as well.
I especially advise you not to watch this movie once you’ve seen at least the original series, because you’ll just be infuriated by the time it’s over.
In retrospect, there is actually one thing we can thank this movie for. It allowed two shows to happen to help the fans wash the taste out of their mouths. The first is The Legend of Korra, as mentioned a moment ago, and the second is a live-action adaptation of the whole series. You may be worried that they’re just trying to take this same approach again, and it’ll be even worse. They’re actually not, and there’s potential for it. Here’s why: The creators are more involved with this new version, and they’re just adapting the series for live-action. That’s it. They’re not doing anything else with it, like they did here. They’re doing it as an actual series this time, and they’ve partnered with Netflix for it. Plus, we do have a first look at it (which, at the time of this review, still remains the only look we have at it), which is a photo of Aang with Appa, and it looks really good. Even though you pretty much only see Aang’s silhouette and mainly see Appa, it looks very spot on.
You can say that’s the movie’s version of M. Night’s signature twist, but I have a better one.
For all the criticism I’ve thrown at this movie, this was ultimately not my Worst Movie of the Decade. It was my second Worst. Flash forward to November of 2019, and a movie that proved to be even worse came out of nowhere to take its title.
What would that be, you may ask?
You’ll find out eventually, I’ll put it that way.
*In other words, I may come across as more lenient than most. It is mainly for this reason why I prefer to get my thoughts out there rather than close it out with a rating. I found that over time as I did more of these, it was the style that worked best for me.
**Oh, wait, he did score a much better movie, for which a review can be expected very soon, so look out for that.
***SPOILER ALERT: I’m still not reviewing The Twilight Saga. I’m still not breaking my rule.
UPDATE #1: Since this review’s upload, the original creators have left the Netflix series over creative differences.
Upon hearing that, many of you may have decided to write it off immediately, which I understand. However, I would still say give it a chance. Besides, as long as M. Night is nowhere near it, we should be good.
I just figured I’d take a moment to address that.
And since I suggested checking out the original series on Netflix, I should also mention that a few weeks later, The Legend of Korra did go up on there after all, so you can watch them both on Netflix now.
UPDATE #2: The original creators have now formed their own studio, appropriately named Avatar Studios, where they will focus on creating more stories for the big and small screens set within the universe going forward, meaning the Netflix adaptation has most likely been shelved.
UPDATE #3: The Netflix adaptation is now picking back up, as they have announced the cast for the leads. As for the new animated Avatar projects, they will be using CG animation, which is interesting.