The Last Airbender

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, BLOG!!!

"Gigli".  "Battlefield Earth".  "The Brown Bunny".  "Heaven's Gate".  "Southland Tales".  "From Justin to Kelly".  "Plan 9 From Outer Space".  "Showgirls".  "Troll 2".  "Twilight".  "Twilight 2".  "Twilight 3".  There are many movies to choose from when trying to find the worst film ever made.  It seems that one comes every year.  This year came "The Last Airbender".  Being largely out of my mind, I make sure to see them all.  Sometimes watching every single standard of filmmaking quality and plain old common sense being destroyed can be just as entertaining as watching those standards followed to complete perfection.  "Skyline" was just mediocre.  "The Expendables" was simply inept.  But as for "The Last Airbender"... ah, that is Bad Cinema art.  A triumph of stupidity.  Utterly hilariously terrible.

Before we start, I should make it clear, I was never a huge fan of "Avatar" the American anime cartoon that was on Nickelodeon a few years back.  I have seen a few episodes, and they were not bad.  The animation was decent enough, the action was good, and it was funny.  Sadly, M. Night Shyamalan didn't quite seem to be so interested in adapting any of that stuff for his "The Last Airbender".  I'm not quite sure what he made here.  It was probably faithful to the animated series in that all the details are correct, but in the process of shoving every plotline from the series into an hour and a half it managed to be the least faithful adaptation I've ever seen.  Everything that was good from the original has been made into crap.  This movie is a complete disaster of epic proportions.

If you're like me and always rubberneck, "The Last Airbender" will be the movie for you.  If you love trainwrecks, if you love plane crashes, if you loved the Presidency of George W. Bush, this is your movie.  If you like quality, movies that make sense, good acting, intelligent plots, and hate bad movies, you'll hate this.  But I believe that one man's trash is another man's treasure.  Which is why I have to say I loved "The Last Airbender".

The movie begins with an opening text crawl and narration designed to explain to us exactly what world we're in, the rules of said world, and who the bad guys are.  This text crawl does about half of those things.  We learn that there's some Chosen One dude called the "Avatar" who appears every so often, but disappeared a hundred years ago.  We also learn that there are four nations of people who can control the four Aristotelian elements, so there are Firebenders, Waterbenders, Earthbenders, and of course, Airbenders.  What we don't learn in this opening crawl, curiously enough, is that the Firebenders are evil and out for world domination with their army of death machines.  We also don't learn that all the Airbenders are dead, that the Avatar is an Airbender, and all the other nine billion plot points that this movie has.  If this opening text crawl could ever have done its job, it would have been ten minutes long, and a small book of Key Terms would have been handed out along with the DVD... or at least as a Bonus Feature.

Also, much to my own personal disappointment, there is no directorial commentary from M. Night for me to listen to.  I would have loved to have seen him try to pass off all this crap as brilliant.  Then again, I kinda get the sense that M. Night didn't want to make this movie anyway, he was forced into it after dropping the far more hilarious turd, "The Happening"*.  Oh well, at least he was able to outsource the pretty darn good "Devil" to save his batting average for the 2010 season.

"The Last Airbender"'s main problem without much doubt is how much plot it attempts to cram into ninety minutes.  There's the main plot of the Avatar (who ironically is just a little kid) and his new buddies trying to do.... something (mostly they just get captured a lot), there's the other plot of the main villain, "The Daily Show"'s Aasif Mandvi of all people, trying to conquer some Water Cities with a magic scroll he acquired off-camera sometime, and then there's the evil Prince, played by Dev Patel who seems out to destroy his Hollywood career launched by "Slumdog Millionaire", who is just here movie-wise to be angsty and try to kidnap the Avatar a lot.  What you'll notice here is that the plot is simultaneously overloaded with McGuffins, assorted conflicts, sideplots, and completely unnecessary characters, AND it doesn't really go anywhere.  By the end of the film nothing is really settled at all, the Avatar is a bit more confident, but still, everything is hugely wide open for approximately nine billion sequels... which will never happen.  Not much has been earned, little has been won, and it was all really pointless.

This wouldn't quite be the worst thing in the world if not for the fact that "The Last Airbender" simply cannot stop trying to explain to you what is going on.  And failing every time.  For example, at one scene Aasif Mandvi suddenly mentions that his magic scroll tells him where the Moon and Ocean Spirits live.  Which would be fine if we previously had any clue who the Moon and Ocean Spirits are, what they are, where they live, what they do, and why Aasif or anybody else would care.  Thus the movie now spends about ten minutes explaining what those things are - turns out they give Waterbenders their powers or something, opening up a whole ton of new questions.  Then there's the great fun moment where the Avatar kid suddenly says "I need to talk with the Great Dragon!"  The movie doesn't even try to explain what that is, but everybody just seems to know.  I still don't know what the fucking Great Dragon is, which is very disappointing since it sounds very cool.  Plot points keep coming up, the movie can never stop and find a single story to tell, instead its like trying to tell an entire season's worth of storylines all at once... and ending up with a story more muddled than Richard Kelly's masturbatory piece of nonsensical shit, "Southland Tales".  The thing there, is that Richard Kelly made a movie that was utter nonsense on purpose, here they actually had a real coherent story to tell, and just failed at it.

Honestly, there was not a scene in this movie where I did not say "what?" out loud.  It got so bad that I found a sticky note, wrote "WHAT??", and stuck it to the middle of the TV screen.  Then I just pointed to it.  By the way, this is coming from somebody who actually managed to figure out "The End of Evangelion".  I mean, "The Last Airbender"'s story makes sense and can be understood after a while, but its such an unholy mess of storytelling that it becomes unbelievably hilarious.  I cannot believe that a real human being wrote a script like this, read it over and thought it was good enough, then gave it to other people to read over who also thought it was good enough, then gave it to a giant studio who thought it was not only good enough but worth 150 million dollars, and which then hired actors and crew who also thought that script was good enough.. Was nobody supervising this product?  Did none of these thousands of people ever stop and realize that they movie they were making here was not actually a movie, but a "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" episode**?

All this is not helped by the acting or the dialog.  When the characters are giving exposition (and they always are giving exposition - by the end they start retelling stuff that happened at the beginning of the movie that we just saw an hour ago!!!), their dialog is wooden and uncomfortable.  There isn't a single semi-human scene in the entire bunch.  There is a romance, but it lasts some three minutes, involves one character who hasn't had a line for about forty-five minutes, and doesn't have another line for the rest of the movie, and the other character is somebody you just met five minutes ago.  Great work.  The acting is horrible, all around.  Aasif Mandvi can't be taken seriously as a villain because I keep expecting a split-screen to appear and Jon Stewart to start talking to him.  The main hero kid is horrible, he's like the resurrection of Young Anakin Skywalker from "The Phantom Menace".  Dev Patel just screams a lot the whole movie.  And everybody else ranges from bad to worse.  Their parts are just too small, too one-dimensional for me to ever care.  Its wretched.

Amazing that people still think that M. Night is a good director.

The fight scenes aren't very good either.  Most of the time it just involves the characters doing little Tiger Schulmann's Karate dances and then magic takes over.  "I THROW FIRE!"  "I THROW WATER!"  "I THROW AIR!"  One guy at least has a boomerang, never uses it.  The movie's action climax is a great epic siege of the Water City with huge fire battleships firing at the battlements.  It might have been cool... if we got to see any of it.  You never get any understanding of the strategic position, the enemy advances, or anything.  In fact, I don't think anybody dies aside from Aasif... Helm's Deep this isn't.  Heck, Uwe Boll's "Dungeon Siege" had better battles than this.  I've made more epic invasions with little plastic army men on radiators.  M. Night just is not capable of making a movie like this.  Say what you want about George Lucas, but that man can at least direct a fight scene competently.

One more thing, what's up with the races in this movie?  The Airbenders all seem to be East Asain... aside for the hero, who is clearly White.  The Waterbender village that the movie starts in all has Eskimos... aside for the Avatar's friends who are White.  All the villains are Indian for some reason, I don't know what that is supposed to mean.  Its like they were trying to build some kind of racial divide for the four tribes (which did not exist in the cartoon as far as I can tell), but suddenly decided to inexplicably White-Wash their own original idea.  Also, M. Night is Indian, why did he decide that the "evil" race should be his own?  What is this?

Its truly stunning that so much money went into this movie with nothing to show for it.  Just a complete failure of a movie aside from three things:  one is the floating six-legged yak thing - he was awesome, the other good things are... um... huh.... none.  Actually its only one thing, the yak.  The yak should have been the star of the show!  Screw that bald kid or the Benders, get me something called "Flying Yak:  the Movie".  So that's the conclusion, everything is hilariously bad aside for the yak.

Also, penis hair.  The Cinema Snob was right, there is a character with a hairdo in the shape of a penis.  I don't know why.

So ultimately, this is exactly what I asked for.  And I was entertained, for all the wrong reasons.  This was probably the funniest movie I've seen all year.   Thank you, M. Night.  You suck so bad, that you put a smile on my face.  Keep up the bad work.

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* "The Happening" is that once-in-a-lifetime movie where you get to watch the main character try to negotiate with a houseplant, another character ramble semi-coherently about the nutritional value of hot dogs, and see the entire cast run for the hills at the sound of the slightest breeze.  I recommend it, truly.

** There is a Rifftrax for this movie, and I will watch it one day.  I hugely recommend that you watch it too.  Along with the Rifftrax for each and every "Twilight" movie.