The Review That Wasn't

The Last Airbender is a travesty of filmmaking. I saw this cinematic disaster in the theater, to much regret, as a loyal fan of the TV series. I downloaded it recently (I do not normally download things illegally, but I make an exception for special circumstances, such as when something is a piece of shit that deserves no money) with the intention of watching it again because I’ve been on an Avatar kick since The Legend of Korra and I thought it would be fun to re-watch the movie. I thought at worst it would be as bad as I remembered, but fun to laugh at. I thought it would be entertaining on some level.

I was wrong.

I could not watch more than five minutes of this movie without skipping ahead to another part. Most of the time, I watched for less than a minute before being disgusted and scrubbing ahead in VLC.

There are so many things wrong with this film that it is foolish to think I could list them all. Off the top of my head: the plot is muddled, the visuals are dark and muted (and not in an aesthetically pleasing way), the character’s names are pronounced incorrectly, Zuko’s scar is barely visible, it took a minute of movement to bend anything (as opposed to the swift, kinetic martial arts portrayed in the series)…

Then there is the whole “racebending” controversy. I was actually okay with the characters’ races changing, so long as 1.) everyone was not white and 2.) it was consistent in the casting. The problem is that while most of our heroes are now alabaster-skinned, the extras that make up their culture are not. Therefore, it would make more sense for the Katara and Sokka to have Inuit features like the rest of their tribe, but then, as I can imagine some bone-headed executive extolling, “white audiences would not be able to relate.” Only with the Air Nomads, who were supposed to be a multiracial culture in the film, does it make sense to have multiple ethnicities. (The Earth Kingdom, in the cartoon, has a number of ethnic groups, but for simplicity’s sake, I am assuming a movie with such a poor attention to detail would gloss over that.)

There is also no excuse for the bungled plot and character development—the show is set up in three seasons that function like a trilogy of books or movies. It literally writes itself. M. Night Shyamalan was in contact with show runners Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, who probably had some ideas ready on how to condense the story.

I hold Shyamalan accountable for many of these… let us call them oversights. He did a shitty job, plain and simple. I say this as someone who does not automatically hate everything the man touches—The Village may actually be one of my favorite movies (but that warrants its own review).

If you have not witnessed this abomination, do not waste time on it, even ironically. Life is too short for The Last Airbender.