The Last Airbender

Not to be confused with James Cameron's Avatar, The Last Airbender is the film adaptation of the first season of the kids' television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, from Nickelodeon.  Despite being an American children's series, Avatar: The Last Airbender has garnered attention from kids and adults alike, especially appealing to fans of Anime.  It was extremely well directed with artwork and writing well above average, excellent voice talent, and a story compelling enough to keep anyone's attention.  It is with good reason that fans of the show were nervous about M. Night Shyamalan directing the film version as his track record has, for the most part, gone steadily down hill.

The story tells of the Avatar, a reincarnated being who can control the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water.  In this case, he is a young boy, Aang (Noah Ringer), an Air Nomad, the last of his kind.  Hence the title.  Having been lost, frozen, for the past 100 years, he awakens to find the Fire Nation has declared war on the rest of the world and things are no longer well for anyone else.  With some new found friends, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), a brother and sister from the Southern Water Tribe, Aang sets out to defeat the Fire Lord (Cliff Curtis).  Along the way he faces the Fire Lord's banished son Zuko (Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire, and the only actor here who acts like he cares he is in a movie) and a Fire Nation General, Zhao (Aasif Mandvi), both of whom have personal reasons for capturing the Avatar.

I went into this film knowing it was bad and still was disappointed.  I am not going to go into detail about all the changes from the source material that were made for seemingly no good reason, but there is a rather comprehensive list here to look at.  I will say this - how the **** do you pronounce half the main characters' names wrong when you can simply look at an entire television series to hear them?

If I had half stars I would add one onto the score because if you have no knowledge of the series going in to it, as a movie in and of itself it is almost passable if you have low standards.  The plot is rushed and often makes little sense, the battles - something the show was known for - are at times tedious, the actors either seem like they don't care or don't know what they are doing.  If there is something opposite of character development, this movie features it prominently.  There are really so many things wrong with it - basically the whole construction is shaky at best and the only thing that saves it at all are some decent special effects at times.  Though, from what I've heard, those are lost in some muddy cinematography if you watch it in post converted 3D as it was marketed.

For fans of the series, this movie feels like a crime against something that had so much potential to be good, and should not have been hard to make as such.  For the average movie goer, this is a forgettable/bad experience that will probably prevent them from ever giving the series the chance it deserves.

*(1/5 stars)