The Last Airbender

16/08/2010

Harry Wilding went to see The Last Airbender and was not impressed...

Noah Ringer in The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender, to my knowledge, is the first film released at the cinema in which the 3D option is compulsory. My low expectations of the format were again met, as there is only one occasion in the entire movie where there was anything particularly 3D (a leaf, falling on a child’s forehead...) so I was, in effect, wearing the glasses just so the images were not blurry – something created by the 3D technology anyway. But what about the actual film, you ask? Well...

The film is based on season one of the successful animated Nickelodeon TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender; a name they must have shortened for obvious reasons. Set in a world divided into four nations – Fire, Water, Earth and Air - the Avatar is able to harness all of the elements so, in turn, keeps the peace. However, he inconveniently disappears and in the one hundred years he is gone the Fire Nation become dominant and rather mean, wiping out the Avatar’s people – the Air Nomads - before conquering the Water and Earth nations.

Aang is the Avatar, played by the impressive Noah Ringer in his first movie. Dev Patel – of Skins and Slumdog Millionaire fame – also impresses, as the exiled Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation who somehow manages to fall out with the goodies and the baddies; he will no doubt lean over to the light side in the sequels, though. Other characters, such as Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), who find Aang, are very underdeveloped as characters and their below average acting skills do not help.

Dev Patal in The Last Airbender

Of course, squeezing a full season of TV episodes into a film less than two hours in length will have such an effect. Perhaps the series was just as underdeveloped but judging by its awards, critical acclaim and general popularity, I doubt it. This is definitely not M.Night Shyamalan as we know it. Fair play to him for trying something different, but why this? It is aimed at kids, it seems, but I doubt it will be that popular with them either. His last film, The Happening, was a disappointment but at least it was very Shyamalan-like and was a fantastic idea and had Zooey Deschanel in.

Worst of all, if the two sequels are made (adaptions of season two and three) Shyamalan’s time will be wasted on them for the next four of five years. There is, of course, the hope that this first one doesn’t make enough money for the sequels to be worth making. Bless the greed of Hollywood.

The Last Airbender official website