Movie review: M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender"
I've read some terrible, terrible reviews of this movie. I'd like to thank those reviewers for preparing me for the absolute worst. I believe that it was through their pessimistic help that I was able to thoroughly enjoy myself.
Let's get a couple of things out of the way. If you go in expecting a live-action Avatar cartoon, you will be extremely disappointed. From the first mispronunciation of a character's name, the creators make it clear that they are not being faithful to the source material. This is, in my opinion, an acceptable decision. The source material is about ten hours of footage; expecting a movie to be condensed out of that corpus in a faithful fashion is as fair as expecting Hollywood to distill the essence of a book with fidelity. I never expect that from Hollywood. Indeed; what bothered me most was the movie's apparent insistence on retaining the trappings of the series that didn't move the story forward. Shyamalan seems at his best when he is telling one story; here, he seemed to be telling three, and only one is told to completion. I'm hoping the other two are expanded upon in subsequent movies.
Once I got past the desire to see the TV series writ large, I found myself enjoying much of the material that was actually there. This is a thoroughly Shyamalan movie, for better or worse. I don't know why Shyamalan tends to go in the left-brain, declarative direction, but it reminds me of the acting in Signs; I don't think I've ever seen a Shyamalan movie with an abundance of powerful emotion, and with a few rare exceptions, that pattern is repeated here. The movie also includes a few blatant expository segments; I couldn't figure out why they made it to the final cut, until I remembered Nickelodeon's branding on the movie. Nickelodeon's work has often been extremely scattershot; they appeal to older audiences, but I get the distinct sense that parts of their creative enterprise don't trust the intelligence level of their viewers enough. I think the expository segments come from that fear, and I'd have left them on the cutting-room floor. Someone on the production staff didn't understand their target audience well enough (or I'm overestimating the audience myself).
So why go see this movie? Because when you strip away the baggage, it turns out you're left with a pretty fun core. The action sequences are pure eye-candy, and while it isn't anything that viewers of the TV show haven't seen before in concept, it's exactly as exciting as I expected to see them in full-CG, live action, on the silver screen. I also, to be honest, enjoyed the narrative. For all of his faults, Shyamalan is a decent storyteller, and he manages to take the raw elements of the Book of Water and bend them into something that I hadn't seen before. This core is the one story in the movie that he tells well, and I wish he'd had the freedom or courage to cut away everything that didn't support it. In contrast to this, I've seen movies (a recent Persian escapade comes to mind) that tell one story, but it's a story so bland and lifeless that I simply didn't care. In addition, while Shyamalan's wooden, subdued style can be grating, it plays well into the later portions of the movie, in which the characters wrestle with powerful emotions but (due to the Buddhist undertones of the "bender" spirituality) those emotions would be inappropriate to show.
Avatar is an extremely adequate martial arts movie with a bit of (possibly fake, over-Europeanized) Eastern spirituality thrown in. It's not Great American Art, and it's not as entertaining or as thoughtful as the television series that spawned it. It is, however, worth the price of admission. It's I, Robot-fun. That's all I ask of Hollywood summer fair.
Let's get a couple of things out of the way. If you go in expecting a live-action Avatar cartoon, you will be extremely disappointed. From the first mispronunciation of a character's name, the creators make it clear that they are not being faithful to the source material. This is, in my opinion, an acceptable decision. The source material is about ten hours of footage; expecting a movie to be condensed out of that corpus in a faithful fashion is as fair as expecting Hollywood to distill the essence of a book with fidelity. I never expect that from Hollywood. Indeed; what bothered me most was the movie's apparent insistence on retaining the trappings of the series that didn't move the story forward. Shyamalan seems at his best when he is telling one story; here, he seemed to be telling three, and only one is told to completion. I'm hoping the other two are expanded upon in subsequent movies.
Once I got past the desire to see the TV series writ large, I found myself enjoying much of the material that was actually there. This is a thoroughly Shyamalan movie, for better or worse. I don't know why Shyamalan tends to go in the left-brain, declarative direction, but it reminds me of the acting in Signs; I don't think I've ever seen a Shyamalan movie with an abundance of powerful emotion, and with a few rare exceptions, that pattern is repeated here. The movie also includes a few blatant expository segments; I couldn't figure out why they made it to the final cut, until I remembered Nickelodeon's branding on the movie. Nickelodeon's work has often been extremely scattershot; they appeal to older audiences, but I get the distinct sense that parts of their creative enterprise don't trust the intelligence level of their viewers enough. I think the expository segments come from that fear, and I'd have left them on the cutting-room floor. Someone on the production staff didn't understand their target audience well enough (or I'm overestimating the audience myself).
So why go see this movie? Because when you strip away the baggage, it turns out you're left with a pretty fun core. The action sequences are pure eye-candy, and while it isn't anything that viewers of the TV show haven't seen before in concept, it's exactly as exciting as I expected to see them in full-CG, live action, on the silver screen. I also, to be honest, enjoyed the narrative. For all of his faults, Shyamalan is a decent storyteller, and he manages to take the raw elements of the Book of Water and bend them into something that I hadn't seen before. This core is the one story in the movie that he tells well, and I wish he'd had the freedom or courage to cut away everything that didn't support it. In contrast to this, I've seen movies (a recent Persian escapade comes to mind) that tell one story, but it's a story so bland and lifeless that I simply didn't care. In addition, while Shyamalan's wooden, subdued style can be grating, it plays well into the later portions of the movie, in which the characters wrestle with powerful emotions but (due to the Buddhist undertones of the "bender" spirituality) those emotions would be inappropriate to show.
Avatar is an extremely adequate martial arts movie with a bit of (possibly fake, over-Europeanized) Eastern spirituality thrown in. It's not Great American Art, and it's not as entertaining or as thoughtful as the television series that spawned it. It is, however, worth the price of admission. It's I, Robot-fun. That's all I ask of Hollywood summer fair.