Going into The Last Airbender, I wasn't expecting an exact reenactment of the nearly perfect animated television show. Adaptations from one medium to another can be tricky. Where a television show has months to develop a story and character relations, a movie only has two to three hours. Really, all I expect from an adaptation is the same basic story and the same spirit as the source material. With Avatar: The Last Airbender, that should have been more than doable. It should have been paint by numbers easy. Yet M. Night Shyamalan managed to fail. Sure, the movie has the same basic story, but the spirit of the original is completely missing. After watching the movie, I wondered if Shyamalan had ever even watched the show before making this movie or if someone had just told him about it over drinks.
In the world of The Last Airbender, there are four nations- Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Some people have the ability to manipulate or "bend" the element of their nation. One person is born into every generation who can bend all four elements. This person is known as the Avatar and he or she keeps balance amongst the four nations. Aang (Noah Ringer) is an airbender destined to be the next Avatar. Unfortunately, he finds himself trapped in an iceberg for 100 years. In that time, the Fire Nation exterminates all airbenders knowing that the next Avatar would be among them and declares war on the world. Siblings Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz) of the Southern Water Tribe find Aang in the iceberg. He mysteriously hasn't aged since he was trapped and so is still a 12-year old boy. Together the trio go out to try and stop the war. At the same time several people of the Fire Nation are hunting the Avatar including the Prince in exile, Zuko (Dev Patel), who needs to capture the Avatar in order to go back home.
I didn't see The Last Airbender in 3D because I hate shelling out money for movies that use 3D technology as an afterthought just to get on the 3D bandwagon. I understand that 3D movies are all the craze with filmmakers these days, but too often, it ends up being superfluous and distracting. Still, even in 2D, the film seemed dark and some of the action scenes were oddly blurred. I will say that I enjoyed watching the bending. The action scenes were all very interesting, but there were a lot of action scenes. And I mean a lot. I love action sequences as much as the next red-blooded American girl, but in this case, I think action scenes and over-exposition replaced any actual storytelling.
My heart sank in the first moments as words crawled up the screen to give us an introduction and Katara read them out loud. If we needed to have the world explained in this manner, could we not have had a nice visual to accompany as opposed to the exact words being said presented on the screen? This kind of set the theme for the rest of the movie. There is very little interaction between the characters. Heck, they barely speak to each other at all. The only dialogue that does exist is purely expository. The enormous gaps in character and story development are sadly replaced by narration. Two characters apparently fall in love, but we only know this because Katara, our narrator tells us so. Isn't that sort of cheating. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a movie? One of my biggest pet peeves in movies is over-narration. When watching a movie, we should be shown a story unfold on screen- not told about what we missed in between action sequences. How are we supposed to care about a story if we don't care about the characters? How are we supposed to care about the characters if we don't get to know them in a genuine way? Character must earn our emotional investment and it cannot be earned with narration alone.
Fans of the television show should be warned that this is not a faithful adaptation. As I mentioned earlier, it's unfaithful with the spirit of the original, not the story. What I loved about the television show is that the young heroes acted like the children that they were. They handled deep and difficult situation with humor and playfulness. Aang was an especially fun-loving kid. He wasn't raised in a war-torn world like the rest and while things were hard, he didn't mind taking a break from his journey to ride the mail chutes of Omashu as if they were big slides. Shyamalan's Aang in contrast is guilt-ridden and brooding. I don't think he ever smiled. Interestingly, Jackson Rathbone was in both wide release movies this weekend. He was also Jasper in Eclipse. Actually, he played stoic, slightly unstable Jasper in The Last Airbender as well, he just went by the name Sokka instead. No silly, food-loving Sokka here.
I really do wonder if Shyamalan ever watched the source material of his movie. Why else would he take such a brilliant story and replace it with special effects? Why else would he take a much loved set of characters, strip them of their personalities, and change the pronunciation of their names? I want to make it clear that I don't feel that The Last Airbender is a bad movie because it's a bad adaptation. The Last Airbender fails as a movie all by itself.