Final Thoughts - The Last Airbender (DVD)

This is how one man can kill a franchise.

The Last Airbender is a horrible film.  Horrible!  The television show, which the film is based on, is a delightful experience.  There is humor, adventure, drama, and interesting characters.  Over the course of three season, the viewer gets to know these characters, see their motivations, and create a bond that draws the viewer in.

The film does none of this.  At all.  Ever.

What's so bad about this film?  For starters, the story, the dialog, and the writing.  The actors in this film aren't great, but from previous work they've been involved in, they're not bad either.  The problem is in the dialog, or the little dialog there actual is.  Most of the story is literally TOLD to the viewer.  The characters narrate events that were shown on the television series.  This takes away the chance the viewer has to connect to the characters and gives you nothing more than a history lesson.  Why am I supposed to care about anything that happens?  Because the movie told me so?  Yeah, that works.

And is doesn't help that the actors give flat performances.  If they at least showed some emotion at times, I MIGHT have been able to looks past the horrible writing.  But instead, we get a cast that looks like they're straight out of a after-school special; complete with awkward looks and a lot of fake crying.  The television series prided itself on it's humor.  The show is made for kids after all, so you would think that humor would be, at least, a part of the film.  The few moments where they attempt to make the audience laugh fail because the bad acting.

Finally, we have M. Night Shyamalan to thank for this film.  Right there should have been my first clue about what I was getting into.  I've said it before, but I think Shyamalan is a great director of photography, but a horrible storyteller.  He thinks too much about the visual impact of the film (which, I will say, is the one good thing about the film) and not enough about engaging the audience.  Pretty pictures don't make a movie.

For all this, at least we still have the television show, which is amazing.  And with any luck, the new series will capture the feel of the original, and make this film nothing more than a footnote in the franchise's history.