There’s perhaps nothing more heartbreaking to a filmmaker than knowing that their first major film was considered their masterpiece, and that the rest of their career was a slow progression into frustration, mediocrity, or – worst of all – sheer awfulness. Just ask Orson Welles who created what is considered the greatest film of all time, “Citizen Kane,” when he was just 23 but spent much of the next half-century begging for financing and doing work like voice-overs for an animated “Transformers” movie.
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If he doesn’t watch out, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is heading towards the same fate. His latest film, “The Last Airbender,” continues a string of disappointments that began at least three films ago, with 2004’s “The Village” (a film I admired, but which flopped after a huge opening weekend), the misfired 2006 fairy tale “Lady in the Water” and 2008’s utterly embarrassing and inert “The Happening” (or as I like to call it, “The Nappening.”)
“Airbender” is Shyamalan’s attempt to reverse his fortunes and return to the heady blockbuster days of his early films, 1999’s “The Sixth Sense” and 2002’s “Signs.” After the ridiculously bad “The Happening,” no studio would trust him with an original idea again, so he turned to making an adaptation of a popular children’s cartoon series originally called “Avatar: the Last Airbender.” For obvious reasons, he had to drop the word “Avatar” from the title, but unfortunately there’s little else of interest to be found in the film.
Starring a cast of complete unknowns, including Noah Ringer in the title role of the last Airbender Aang, the film follows the conflicts on a planet with four nations that are each centered around a different element: earth, air, fire or water. Each nation has their own form of bender that can fully control their respective element more thoroughly than anyone else, but historically each nation rotates having one bender become an avatar, which entails having power over all four elements.
That avatar is supposed to maintain peace and order on the planet by preventing any of the nations from becoming too powerful. However, the last avatar appeared to have died a century ago, leaving the sinister leaders of the Fire nation to mount aggressive campaigns to dominate the others. In fact, they appear to have killed off all the Airbenders of the Air nation.
But when the brother and sister duo of Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) in the Water nation discover and break open an icy orb that they discover while hunting, it turns out that young Aang is inside, and that he is actually the last surviving Airbender and better yet, an avatar who has been frozen for a century. The trio set off to fight back against the Fire nation’s leaders and restore peace and order to their world.
Now, if this sounds like a bunch of metaphysical hoo-hah better suited to the Age of Aquarius, that’s because it like is. Those who are unfamiliar with the cartoon will likely be confused from the get-go, while fans of the series – including the friend I saw it with – will be disappointed because, according to him, it simply doesn’t translate well from animation to live-action. In addition, the 103-minute length of the film feels rushed for an $180 million epic and caused many sequences to be left out, further disappointing him and confusing myself.
The biggest problem here is,in fact, elemental. What made Shyamalan’s impressive early trio of films (“Sense,” “Unbreakable,” and “Signs”) – and to an extent, “The Village” – work was that he rooted them in primal human quandaries: What happens after we die? What if you were invincible?, Can faith truly save us? In “Last Airbender,” there are none of these human qualities and nothing compelling to replace them.
By the way, after its impressive opening credits sequence “Airbender” makes little use of its 3D effects. So spare yourself the extra $3 glasses fee and see it in 2D. Better yet, save yourself the entire ticket price and don’t see it all.
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