Movie Review: “The Last Airbender” (2010)

Let me start off by saying how much I love Nick’s Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon series.  I’ve watched it — mostly with Katherine, usually with Margie — probably three to four times through, and other sections even more often.  It’s charming, witty, silly, profound, well-animated, well-scored, well-written, and, while having some weaknesses, is some of the better storytelling I’ve been pleased to share with Kay during her childhood.

This movie, however, is none of these things.  It is leaden, stilted, overly self-conscious, shallow, poorly scored, abominably written, and will, alas, not sink into the mire of forgotten cinema, but will instead, based on the reviews of this first weekend, serve both as an exemplar of bad adaptations and as a final nail in the coffin of M. Night Shyamalan.

And none of it had to be that way.

The Last Airbender (2010)

Overall		Story
Production		Acting

Adaptations/remakes tend to fail because the creative leader behind them because either (a) doesn’t care about the material and is simply in it for a buck, (b) either cares or doesn’t care for the material, but is out to make his or her new thing on its back.

They succeed when the creative leader really loves the material, respects it, and wants to build from it, taking advantage of the new talent, technology, and medium to make things even better.  And, of course, when the creative leader has the wherewithal to do this sort of thing.

So take Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Almost everyone has something to criticize about it. But nobody question’s Jackson’s desire to do well by the material, to adapt it for the screen (something so many people, brilliant and otherwise, said could not be done), and his ability to actually do so.  The complaints tend to be, mostly, quibbles (coughArwencough), and I think nearly anyone out there (certainly anyone likely to be reading this) will agree it was a remarkable achievement, flaws and all.

M. Night Shyamalan (MNS from here on out) is not Peter Jackson.

There’s no question in my mind that MNS loves the source material.  He’s made that clear in interview after interview — his kids were real fans, and he picked up on that and really wanted to do this movie, a departure from his usual fare.

He loved unwisely and not well.

More details (and spoilerishness) below the cut.

Story:

Okay, let’s start with the basics: just like trying to adopt a novel into a (conventional-length) movie, an attempt to consolidate an entire season of an animated series — especially with one as story / background / character-rich as ATLAB — is going to be difficult.  That’s 20 half-hour episodes — assume an actual run-time sans commercials of 20 minutes, that’s still 400 minutes of story-telling to squeeze into 103 minutes up on the screen.  Beloved plot elements, characters, story lines, will all get the axe.  The adaptor must work with care, seeking to find the key story, cutting away with brutal precision at everything that must go, even making up a few things to explain how the action moves from A to C when B would take up too much precious screen time.

For the most part, MNS does not do too poorly here, no more so than anyone on average trying to make the same decisions would fare.  Anyone could argue whether story X should have been included, or whether plot-line Y or supporting character Z got short shrift, but those are decisions that need to be made, and, from a blue-print standpoint, MNS does okay.

It’s the construction materials that get short shrift.

“Book 1: Water” is characterized by learning about the protagonists, bonding them together, bringing Aang up to facing his past failures, setting the stage for the future struggle.  MNS manages about 30% of this task.

First off, he eliminated the humor.  Snip.  Everything is in deadly earnest.  Everything is serious. There’s a war on.  There’s conflict against the spirit world.  Things are out of balance.  The tide of affairs is desperate.

Deleting that, in theory, makes the story a bit less kid-focused.  But it also cripples some of the characters.  Sokka is all about  humor; robbed of it, he becomes a pushy incompetent.  Iroh is largely about humor (especially in Book 1); robbed of it, he becomes a Zen fortune cookie.  Appa and Momo are the butts off (or keys to) a  lot of humor; robbed of it, they are merely fan service exercises in CGI. Even Aang is, especially to begin with, a light-hearted kid, trying desperately to hang onto that goofy innocence (the whole reason he flees the Air Temple); robbed of that, he becomes much less interesting.

And, essentially, lacking humor, the dire and gritty parts of the scenario (still there in the animated series) lose much of their impact.  When the emotional range is from neutral to dark, shifts in tone and story become that much less dramatic.  Seeing Sokka in the animated series shift from being a goofball to someone clearly, deeply in love, makes his loss at the end that much greater than what we see in the movie.

The other key, fundamental flaw is that … well, MNS never seems to have learned the lesson of “show, don’t tell.”  Everything is an infodump.  Every conversation is planting backstory and exposition and plot direction.  Right after  Katara and Sokka find Aang in the ice bubble, she looks at him and says, “He’s exhausted — let’s get him back to the village.”  Except he doesn’t look exhausted — and, if he did, it would remove the need to actually say it.

Katara does a boatload of narration in the film — unevenly, though.  It was not “Hey, this is Kitara telling her story,” but more like, “Hey, this is Katara trying to explain what’s going on.”  Never a good sign.

MNS makes other poor decisions in deciding what to tell and what to merely show.  Commander Zhao tells us not once but three times about his raiding of the Secret Hidden Library to learn about the Ocean and Moon spirits.  Once would have been enough; heck, you could even make it a passing, mysterious mention and it would have worked.  Instead, MNS exposits us to death for no particularly good reason.

And, along that note, it’s a big mistake to show Fire Lord Ozai.  In the animated series he was a dark menace, never fully seen, and all the more dangerous for all that. Here he comes across as Generic Evil King #5, pacing about his palace and being brown-nosed by Zhao. (Minor plus: we get some nice, bits with Azula — probably good because they are so brief.)

Finally — and this goes beyond simple expository problems — MNS just can’t write good dialog, let along profound dialog, in a way that even the best actors in the world could read without sounding like pompous  idiots.  That the acting talent in the movie (see below) is not of the top tier doesn’t help, but to their credit, they are given horrifically Deep and Portentious Lines to Read.

Speaking of Deep and Portentious Lines … why the changes in pronunciation?  Aang — “a” as in “Ann” becomes “a” as in “Auto”.  Iroh — goes from a long “I” to a short “I”.  It’s not like we’re trying to figure out names from a book — we had three seasons of the TV show, and suddenly we’re changing how to pronounce the names?  Really? Would MNS also change it to Captain “Keerk” and Mr. “Spoke”?

By the way, in this particular rendition of TLA, what, exactly, is the point of the Avatar State?  In the animated series, it was tapping deeply into all the elements, and all the previous avatars, becoming something less than human and insanely powerful.  It was scary, both to those who saw it and to Aang, and his mastery of it was part of the overall arc of the series.  Here — it’s just a power-up.  “Hey, Aang’s head and eyes are glowing, time for some special effects.”  No sign of it being  worrisome or dangerous or even all that, “Wow, that was really something to see!”

And I missed the Killer Carp of the Gods at the end.  The driving off of the Fire Nation at the end (as well as Zhao’s demise) were very … anticlimactic (especially since we essentially saw them in the trailers).

Ultimately, the writing suffers from both awkward construction and from MNS trying to turn the story of the Avatar from one of personal responsibilty, honor, and friendship, into a big metaphysical mess of cosmic spirits.  That removes the human element, along with the humor (not surprisingly), and renders it much less of a story, even were it told brilliantly.  Which it is not.

Production:

We intentionally saw this in 2D; early reports of the 3D indicated it turned it into a dark muddle, especially done as an add-on as it was.  I’m glad, not just for the added ticket price savings, but because the 2D was dark and drab to begin with.  Even so, there were some odd digital artifacts in the movie — some quick pans looked more ghostly than blurry.

The backdrops in the movie were gorgeous (I might question whether the Fire Nation capital should be tropical, but that falls within the bounds of creative license).  The CG was also very impressive — ILM had the guts to show water effects coming out of real water, and it worked.  Appa looked very nice (very dirty, but very nice); Momo was far weaker (plotwise and rendering), but acceptable.

The bending magic shown was well done — fire looked fiery, earth was good, water was impressive, even air worked well.  My complaint here is that there was not nearly enough of it — people were winding up (nicely) their bending shots for several seconds before something would happen.  If this was a budget decision, I can understand it, but it did stand out (“So, okay, while Aang is dancing around in his airbending kata through a dozen moves, I run forward and kill him with my spear …”).

Margie thought the costuming was lumpy and incomplete.  I didn’t get that; I thought it was okay.

The musical score was … bad.  Not in and of itself, but just inappropriate.  The animated series made a point of bringing in exotic Asian instruments and sounds, while still staying approachable.  James Newton Howard drops all of that for an extraordinarily conventional soundtrack — with some very, distracting, over-dramatic, and ill-fitting selections at different times.  Howard has a long resume (including many MNS films), but his choices here actually detracted from the movie.

The movie is just worth seeing (maybe on Netflix or Red Box or something) to see the physical incarnations of the animated series.  But that’s about all.

Acting:

MNS took a lot of heat over his “racebending” casting.  A lot of folks were up in arms that a movie drawing so much on Asian, Inuit, etc. cultures (by artifact and name) could be cast with so many white (or, in the case of the Fire Nation, Indian/Middle Eastern) faces. While it’s noteworthy that there were not a lot of Asian voices in the series, and that the lead characters were not tremendously non-white-looking, I could see the concerns.

But, then, if the acting turned out to be brilliant, individuals capturing and making their own their various roles, then a lot of the criticism would have faded.

That is not the case here.

The key protagonists are all poor to fair at best.  Noah Ringer (Aang) has two expressions, meditative and distressed.  Nicola Peltz (Katara) spends her time, her voice, and her facial expressions being breathless in admiration and concerned over stuff (a far cry from the strong, even pushy character in the show).  Jackson Rathbone (Sokka) is wooden most of the time.

Granted, the material these actors are given to work with is … difficult.  As in, Gielgud and Olivier would have problems with most of those lines.  And we don’t know what sort of direction they received from MNS.  But there’s nothing showing here that makes these three guelos good reasons to have not picked Asian or Inuit or some ethnic actors who could be … well, just as bad. (For example, Dev Patel’s Zukko runs the gamut from vaguely wondrous/scared to furious and back, several times.)

Looking in the background, the Southern Water Tribe seemed mostly Inuit, except for Gran-gran (Katharine Hougton) and, of course Sokka and Katara.  The Northern Water Tribe all looked white (which explains Gran-gran and Sokka and Katara, I suppose).  The Air Nomads look mostly white, except for Monk Gyatsu (Damon Gupton), who looked black.  The Earth Kingdom were all East Asian.  The Fire Nation was all darker — Indian, Polynesian, and Middle Eastern and black, from what I could see).

The “older” actors do a bit better, abeit with lesser roles.  Aasif Mandvi’s Commander Zhao is appropriately arrogant, though his key dramatic scenes come off without much depth.  Shaun Taub’s Uncle Iroh looks like he’s going to fall asleep most of the time, rousing only to offer some sage council or to do some ineffectual fireworks.  Seychelle Gabriel’s Princess Yue is fine, if not terribly impressive (again, dialog not helping).

I’m not sure what tremendous talent could have done here, but I suspect that lack thereof hurt an already dodgy production.

Overall:

There’s a huge amount of unhappiness in this movie out there on the Internet and movie critic pages, laced with massive doses of vitriol.  Everyone, it seems, loves the original and, thus, despises this.  It’s not a matter of an alternative vision, or a commercial sell-out, or a pedestrian production — it’s just very poorly done, and that hurts like the dickens.  (Margie likens it to an Ember Island Players production, and there’s some not-so-funny truth to that.)

This is not the worst movie or adaptation I have ever seen.  That distinguished title remains with Nightfall (1988).  But it is sorely disappointing.  It is not, per se, so bad as it is so not good, and, in contrast to the source material, it’s abysmal.  That it was done by someone who ostensibly loves that material makes it all the more tragic.

At least we have the “real thing” to watch. And isn’t it ironic that a bunch of animation could feel more human and realistic than, well, actual humans up on the screen?

(Many thanks to Margie for going to this with me. It would have been far more sucktastic without her to lean over and make a pithy, barbed comment. And, for what it’s worth, I’m being far easier on the movie than she is.)