The Last Airbender
Today I saw a movie at the Grosvenor cinema in Ashton Lane. They have large, comfy leather seats and I ate cherry Twizzlers and pretzel M&M's while drinking Mountain Dew Code Red. There were a grand total of four other people in the room. If I had been watching something like Predators or Inception then it would have most likely been the greatest cinema experience of my life. Unfortunately though I was watching...
The Last Airbender is closely based on a wonderful and very popular animated series called Avatar: The Last Airbender (or Avatar: The Legend of Aang as it's known in the UK). So far it's recieved terrible reviews and at the time of writing it's sitting at just a pitiful 7% of positive reviews on rottentomatoes.com. I'd read many of these reviews and I felt a lot of the negativity comes from people comparing it too closely with the source material. Normally when such an overwhelming majority warn me off a movie I'll avoid wasting money on seeing it but as a huge fan of the animated series I felt that at the very least, I'd have to see it as a labour of love. In the interest of fairness I'm going to try and aim this review at those that have no prior knowledge of the series.
The Last Airbender is set in a world where there are four nations consisting of the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads and the Fire Nation. Within each nation there are regular people but there are also members of the population that are gifted with the ability to control the element their nation is named after. There is always one single person though that has the ability to command all the elements and they are known as the Avatar.
The movie starts out with a scrolling prologue narrated by one of the lead characters, Katara of the water tribe. She introduces us to the concept of element bending while bad attempts at silhouetted members of each nation give us a brief demonstration of their abilities in sequence. She then informs us how peace had ruled the world for centuries until The Avatar disappeared and the Fire Nation used this opportunity to wage war on the other nations.
We're then introduced properly to Katara (played by Nicola Peltz who, at just fifteen years old, already looks as though she's been experimenting with collagen a bit too much) and her brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone). The siblings are hunting for food when they notice a strange blue glow under the ice. When they try to uncover it they see a bright energy beam shoot into the sky and find a young boy (Noah Ringer) with strange tattoos inside a glowing blue sphere along with a large bison-like creature. They release him and take him back to their small Southern Water Tribe village.
Shortly afterwards a Fire Nation fleet, led by Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) and his uncle Iroh (Shaun Toub), attack the village and seize the tattooed boy as they suspect he may be the Avatar. While recovering (rather quickly) from the violent attack on their village Katara and Sokka's grandmother explains that she believes the child in the ice to be the Avatar and that for some reason it's their destiny to help him save the world from the Fire Nation. She also reveals some relevant yet dull information about the world being inhabited by spirit creatures.
Katara and Sokka then discover that the Avatar's bison can fly and seem very underwhelmed by this so they set off to rescue the Avatar, by which I mean pick him up as he's already escaped quite effortlessly from Zuko's ship on his own. They then all fly off together to help the Avatar master all four elements while encouraging small villages to rebel against the Fire Nation on the way. This is where the main story kicks in.
The narrative of the movie seems a little off. It starts out with Katara narrating what's happening during the beginning right up until the Avatar escapes from Prince Zuko's ship. At this point she mentions that 'Aang' is taking them to the Southern Air Temple where his people resided and then immediately afterwards 'Aang' actually reveals his name to them for the first time. After this though the movie just seems to forget that Katara is narrating and lets the action speak for itself. There are movies out there that deliberately employ a mixed narrative style and this can work well when utilised correctly but the way The Last Airbender plays out suggests it just doesn't know what's going itself a lot of the time.
The acting for the most part is quite horrendous. Nicola Peltz is completely wooden all throughout and constantly over-pronounces other characters names. Aang becomes 'Ong', Sokka becomes 'So ka' and Avatar becomes 'Aw vatar'. Other characters do this as well though, suggesting this was a directors decision rather than the fault of the actors. The worse case by far though is when characters refer to Iroh as 'Ee roh'.
Noah Ringer's dialogue makes him seem like he needs to spend more time with other kids in the playground building up confidence before attempting to act. It also doesn't help that he looks completely out of place as Aang and comes across looking more like a luekemia victim than the saviour of humanity. Jackson Rothbone is for the most part unremarkable although there is one decent scene between Sokka, Princess Yue of the Northern Water Tribe (played by Seychelle Gabriel who probably provides the best acting in the entire movie) and Iroh.
Dev Patel seems like he could do angst well as Prince Zuko although there are several occassions during his conversations with Iroh where he pauses unnecessarily making it look like he's forgotten his lines, even during scenes where he has no next line. Shaun Toub plays Iroh quite consistently through out although Aasif Mandvi isn't intimidating at all as the most active antagonist, Commander Zhao and seems like he'd be more suited to comedy roles instead due to his unthreatening voice.
The pacing and direction of the movie is all over the place. Some scenes that you would think are really important for character backstory and development are just skimmed right over, such as the scenes showing why Price Zuko was banished from the Fire Nation and why Aang ran away from his people. Other scenes that are more drawn out work quite well sometimes, especially during the conclusion.
I noticed that there are a lot of things that have either happened or are about to happen, which are important to the main plot yet they are simply explained verbally and in a very brief manner. Katara mentions Aang should learn water bending at the Northern Water Tribe and the next thing you know they're there entering their territory without anyone batting an eyelid. Zhao mentions that he's discovered a way to defeat the Northern Water Tribe through information he read in a sacred hidden library yet we never see anything showing how he did this or what happened there. There are other instances of this as well all through out. It makes you wonder why Aang doesn't just say 'There! I defeated the Fire Nation and restored peace to the world' and then have it actually happen without actually explaining how or why.
The effects in the movie are also very inconsistent especially during the bending scenes. In one scene an earthbender will go through an elaborate five or six step dance routine in order to simply launch a tiny rock at someone and in the next scene a different earthbender will raise a whole wall from the ground to block an attack with just the flick of his wrist. I suppose one could argue that this is down to the different skill and ability levels of the individual characters but the lead characters all do it as well. One minute Zuko is doing a jolly little three or four step dance and sending out a small firey blast and the next minute he's kicking his leg once and sending out a large wave of fire. Aang is by far the worst though and looks more like he's performing moves from Riverdance than actually fighting during his bending scenes. There are some moments where you can't help but wonder why the enemies don't just run over and punch him while he's taking forever to do some airbending.
This is a movie that has clearly been made for kids and as such, I'm sure they will be a lot more willing to forgive all the faults mentioned above. That's assuming they even notice them at all. From that point of view I can see why The Last Airbender has done quite well at the box office despite all the bad reviews. I feel I should also mention that even though the movie definitely has a very kid-friendly tone, there is one scene near the end involving Commander Zhao that I found to be quite dark and although very well done in my opinion, it also seemed very out of place.
Over-all I wasn't nearly as disappointed with The Last Airbender as I had expected to be. It's definitely nowhere near as good as I'd hoped when I first heard it was getting made and it had the potential to do so much more. If I were to compare this to how bad the movies I loved as a kid seem now though then I can't really judge it too harshly. I do feel however that it was perhaps a bit over-ambitious of director M. Night Shymalan to announce the movie at the beginning as Book One: Water with intent to making it a trilogy. Seeing as the first movie was so poorly received by the critics I think it's highly unlikely that the remaining two movies will be green-lit.
Oh well!