Raspberry Picking: The Last Airbender (2010)

So what happened, exactly? Well, if I could tell you that, I’d be rich, because I’d probably also have solved climate change or won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yes, Shyamalan had made several overwrought duds in a row at this point in his tumultuous career, but even in the ironic laugh factory The Happening, there was no indication that he had simply forgotten what a movie was. The cast and crew have been annoyingly mum on the matter, universally preferring to keep it tightly closed in the old shame dumpster. Our main (unverified) source of insider information on the film’s production is a post on an Avatar fan forum by someone claiming to have worked on it, which paints Shyamalan largely as a victim of producers who didn’t understand the project. On the other hand, Konietzko and DiMartino have gone on record saying that Shyamalan had plenty of control over the final product, and that many of his decisions led directly to the film’s disastrous reception.

So let us be the final judge here: who’s right, if anyone? And is the movie really all that bad in the first place?

THE STORY

I’m going to actively resist turning this into yet another Ninety-five Theses listing all the ways in which The Last Airbender is laughably inferior to its source material. We don’t need more of those. You can read those all over the Internet if you want. For our purposes, The Last Airbender exists in a vacuum and must sink or swim on its own. And rest assured, sink it shall.

So let’s get started: why don’t I let Katara (Nicola Peltz)’s opening narrative crawl do this for me?

A hundred years ago all was right with our world. Peace and prosperity filled our days. The Four Nations: Water, Earth, Fire and Air Nomads lived amongst each other in harmony. Great respect was afforded to all those who could bend their natural element. The Avatar was the only person amongst all the nations who could bend all four elements. He was the only one who could communicate with the Spirit World. With the Spirits’ guidance the Avatar kept balance in the world.  And then, a hundred years ago…he just disappeared!

What is “our world”? What does it mean to “bend” your “natural element”? What is the Spirit World? Why does it matter that the Avatar “just” disappeared? What the hell is going on with the punctuation in that third sentence? Don’t you worry your pretty heads about it. I’m sure all will be made clear in good time.

We then meet our point of view characters, siblings Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) of the Southern Water Tribe, “which was once a big city.” They “often go hunting for food, but unfortunately, my brother isn’t the best hunter,” Katara helpfully informs us, because if we didn’t have her, the movie might have to show something other than the two kids wandering through snow. She will continue throughout the movie to explain the many, many, many, many parts of the story they have chosen not to show us. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another movie so dependent on momentum-killing voiceovers as this one, and for no clear reason.

Oh, also, Katara is one of the aforementioned “benders.” She can manipulate water. Sort of.

Water. Or maybe gelatin. Or Kevin Bacon from Hollow Man.

Anyway, while they’re out hunting or whatever, Katara and Sokka discover a strange presence under the ice: a preteen boy (Noah Ringer) and a Where the Wild Things Are reject frozen inside an iceberg.

Less horrifying once I realized those are humans holding onto its feet, and not its misshapen toes.

Because Katara and Sokka are socially awkward jerks, they whack the kid with their spears a few times until he wakes up, then take him back to their village. But when they broke him out of the iceberg, they set off a magical light plume that also attracted the attention of Fire Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), who is hunting for the Avatar (which everyone keeps pronouncing “Ah-vatar” to make it more serious), a spirit-human hybrid who is born repeatedly into each of the four nations in a cycle and is capable of bending all four elements. Zuko is doing this in order to prove to his father, Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis) that he is honorable and worthy of one day ascending to the throne. Please note that I am barely fifteen minutes into the movie at this point, and that quite a lot of this I only know because of the show.

Hey, his tattoos look pretty neat! I’m trying over here!

Zuko and his uncle, Fire Nation General Iroh (Shaun Toub) capture the kid and determine that he is both an airbender and the Ah-vatar, but he escapes and joins up with Katara and Sokka to go explore the world and figure out what’s been going on since he got frozen in that ice ball. A visit to his old hangout at the Southern Air Temple reveals that he’s been frozen for a hundred years and that the Fire Nation exterminated his people, so he resolves to make up for lost time by joining the war. But in order to do that, he needs to find bending masters who can teach him to bend the other non-air elements elements, starting with water. BUT ALSO, the wicked Commander Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) of the Fire Nation also has his sights set on the Northern Water Tribe, for mysterious wicked reasons that he narrates to us within moments of his clunky introduction.

I’m out of breath just trying to explain all that. Are you beginning to understand why the film might have had a few issues with its storytelling? Oh, we also learn that his name is Aang. Considerably after we learn that he’s the Ah-vatar.

 

THE BAD

Yikes. Just…yikes. Sometimes, as with The Love Guru, listing the ways that I was personally harmed by a movie feels therapeutic and purifying, a cathartic purge of digital toxins infecting my life energy. With The Last Airbender, it feels more like watching a bunch of people repeatedly walk into lampposts and step on rakes. It’s not hurting you, but it’s confusing and uncomfortable, and you feel bad for everyone taking part until it goes on for so long that you have to conclude that they must enjoy self-afflicted head wounds. Trying too hard to figure out why they’re doing it will only lead to you finding yourself in the brigade of rake-steppers.

Dev just setting himself on fire would not be out of place here.

Let us begin with the structure of the thing. In condensing an entire season of TV into a 100-minute movie, stripping the story down to the essentials was going to be necessary, but Shyamalan and whoever the hell doctored his script have gone way past the essentials. We are fifteen minutes into the movie, complete with multiple standoffs, before we learn that the Fire Nation is trying to conquer the world. We are nearly twenty minutes into the movie before we learn Aang’s name. We are more than halfway done with the movie before we get a coherent explanation of how being the Ah-vatar is even supposed to work. But in the meantime, we have plenty of time for three or four “as you know” exposition dumps about Commander Zhao’s expeditions to some unexplained Great Library.

Speaking of “as you know” exposition dumps: as a writer, M. Night Shyamalan has never exactly been known for the naturalism of his dialogue. Even his celebrated movies contain some clunkers that seasoned actors like Samuel L. Jackson had to climb over rather than deliver (“You know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you’re here… That’s… That’s just an awful feeling.”). The Last Airbender contains howlers that rival the most famous lines from Troll 2, a movie written by people who only sort of spoke English. Take a look at just this exchange, the first lines delivered by Aang and Katara to each other, and convince me Bette Davis or Laurence Olivier could have rescued them:

KATARA: How’d you get all the way out here?

AANG: I ran away from home. We got in a storm. We were forced under the water of the ocean.

KATARA: Oh, I see.

AANG: It wasn’t very smart. I was just upset. Thanks for saving me.

KATARA: Lucky.

AANG: I probably should get home. They’ll all be worried.

KATARA: You’re not still upset?

AANG: Not as much as I was.

Talk about a conversation that conveys no feeling, no character, no relationship, and barely any coherent information (“I was just upset” about what, Mr. Exposition Fairy?), and even that pales in comparison to Northern Water Tribe Princess Yue (Seychelle Gabriel)’s tear-choked declaration that “it is time to show the Fire Nation that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs!” Shyamalan took a few lessons at the John Derek School of Passing as an Earthling and didn’t even have the decency to make it needlessly sexual.

But we could tolerate all of this if the movie delivered on its action, right? Nobody has ever watched Speed or Die Hard or Top Gun for their dense characters or nuanced dialogue. I have bad news for you on that front too. The action scenes are much, much worse than the conversations. For the key example of this, look no further than the infamous “Pebble Dance” in the Earth Kingdom prison camp.

My favorite part is the dude in the front right, doing this kata with intensity appropriate for D-Day.

Other analyses of this movie have already obsessively documented how little sense this scene makes – why would you put a bunch of people who can use dirt and rocks as magical weapons in a prison made of dirt and rocks? – but even more important is just how boring and slow the bending is. It takes a minimum of five seconds, and sometimes as many as ten, for a bender to “build up the chi” necessary for one simple move. The water and fire both look awful, especially the fire, which neither illuminates nor burns anything around it. You wonder why they don’t just use fists or swords to fight; so, clearly, do the filmmakers, because eventually the fighters start using mostly fists and swords. But the worst part of the action scenes is how full of people standing around doing nothing they always are. It’s Crazy Samurai Musashi but without the gimmick that makes that movie sort of compelling. There is no point to talking about “choreography” here. Shyamalan might as well have led a few actors into the middle of a campground in the Poconos and yelled “action!”

And then he filmed them in a series of interminable tracking shots. Please note the lack of any “bending” whatsoever.

The cast…ugh. I don’t like beating dead horses, and I like beating dead baby horses even less. M. Night Shyamalan is a famously hands-off director of actors, which can work very well with experienced performers on a movie with strong bones. Here he had neither, and both Ringer and Peltz needed a lot of direction that no one gave them; as a result they’ve both been cruelly left to flounder against greenscreens in shot after shot. Peltz suffers especially because she lacks Ringer’s martial arts training and is not nearly as comfortable with stylized movement as he is, and it’s quite obvious that no one on set gave a shit about helping her with it. I know I’m not supposed to stick up for her because, if the stories are to be believed, she was a nepo baby whose casting led directly to the movie’s infamous whitewashing, but whatever her dad might have done, she was just a kid trying to play an impossible part. That would be bad enough in a high school auditorium, let alone in a wide-release blockbuster. And the less we do to contribute to the Jake Lloyd-ing of Noah Ringer, the better.

The adult actors are mostly victims of terrible decisions made by people not them. Cliff Curtis is horribly cast as a character who could be mostly removed from the film without consequence. Aasif Mandvi is often cited as one of the “good” things about the film because he delivers his lines with some gusto, but the movie’s stakes depend on his being a credible threat to Aang, the Northern Water Tribe, and the world at large. He’s so goofy that he doesn’t even come across as a credible threat to ice, despite having firepower in his fingers.

Recently discovered footage from Mandvi’s Nosferatu screen test?

But even a wretched movie can be elevated by a great score, and many viewers have claimed that James Newton Howard’s score does exactly that. I don’t know what movie those viewers were listening to. Bolero has a great score. Mac and Me has a great score. Robot Monster has a great score. The Last Airbender has a boilerplate fantasy score, plodding and dour, heavy on the mournful strings and nearly as devoid of energy as the action scenes. Since The Last Airbender was supposed to be a summer blockbuster and self-awareness isn’t allowed in those, Howard was never going to manage a great bad movie score, but he could have at least had a little fun from time to time.

Of course, it’s entirely possible Howard wrote such a generic score because he couldn’t tell what was going on in the movie, because, as has become standard industry practice in tentpole moviemaking, no one bothered to purchase lights. The lack of light is passable in the Earth Kingdom, where everything merely looks brown and dingy. It’s worthy of a class-action lawsuit at the Northern Water Tribe, where everything, including fire, is bathed in an impenetrable blue-gray. The big third-act battle scene is so dark that I’m not sure whether the extras are fighting or tripping over each other. I’ve been to high school proms with better lighting.

This is a daytime shot, for Pete’s sake!

I am told that the sloppy, after-the-fact addition of 3D made the lighting problems even worse. I’ve never seen The Last Airbender in 3D, and I intend to keep it that way. Life’s too short.

 

THE GOOD

But of course, the movie’s almost never as bad as everyone says it is. Okay, this one’s pretty close. But occasionally, we get a brief flicker of light and life, indicating that someone, somewhere, may have had a good filmmaking instinct.

For one thing, the performances here are not universally terrible. Others have singled out Dev Patel and Shaun Toub for managing to cobble together the closest thing the film shows to an emotional relationship between two characters, and Toub in particular for appearing to enjoy himself from time to time. I, however, am going to throw some long-withheld and much-deserved sunshine to Jackson Rathbone as Sokka. Everyone hates Movie Sokka because he’s not Show Sokka, the former being grouchy and self-serious where the latter was a clever jokester, but the writing is not Rathbone’s fault, and his performance of the character as written is decent enough. He’s best in his scenes with Sokka’s love interest Princess Yue, where he and Gabriel bask in the awkward-yet-kind-of-adorable posturing familiar to anyone who has been or watched a teenager nurse a crush.

Wanna go see me in Twilight after this?

He also refuses to allow his character to be sapped of all his previous good humor; his delivery of “(o)kay, everyone can help us now!” after Aang and Katara pick a fight in the Earthbender prison might be my favorite line reading in the movie.

The Last Airbender also has a couple of individual scenes that work. For whatever reason – coincidence, maybe – the only two scenes that rise to the level of “kinda good actually” both take place at Air Temples. For one thing, they’re the only two sets where the “screw it, just use the sun” approach to lighting isn’t a total liability: the cold emptiness of the abandoned temples contrasts nicely with Aang’s warm-toned flashbacks of his cloistered childhood in the care of Monk Gyatso (Damon Gupton).

Home of the colorbenders, tragically exterminated by the time of the rest of the movie.

A scene at the Northern Air Temple in which a seemingly kindly Earth Kingdom villager (Randall Duk Kim) helps Commander Zhao ambush Aang is the best thing in the movie. The backdrop, a rotunda containing statues of all the previous Ah-vatars looking quite imposing compared to the pre-pubescent, chubby-cheeked Aang, is the film’s best illustration of how much pressure and expectation come baked into this role forced upon unwitting children. They’re also serving as useful covers for Fire Nation soldiers lurking in the shadow with bows and arrows. And in what I actually consider an improvement over the Northern Air Temple episode storyline in the show, the old man is helping the Fire Nation because he has an actual personal beef with the Ah-vatar: Aang’s failure to accept his role and help keep the Fire Nation in check led to his losing his family and village, and damn it all, he wants to see the little shit face some consequences for that. It’s a tense, human moment in a film largely lacking tension or humanity, and I think it’s very telling that it was not lifted straight from the source material.

Here’s my not-very-exciting attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of The Last Airbender: it was made by two distinct camps of people with two completely incompatible visions. Vision 1 was of a faithful adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender by and for fans of the show. Vision 2 was of a massive, technologically impressive moneymaker that would draw in people who hadn’t already seen the show. And the thing is, no matter which one of those visions won out, the movie was going to suck. It was going to suck for the same reason almost all live-action adaptations of animated fantasy suck: you can do things in animation with bodies, faces, places, and emotions that you simply cannot do in the real world, and when you try to replicate those things, you will inevitably shoot yourself in the ass. The fact that no one could agree on how they were going to approach the movie meant that the ass-shooting was also angry and adversarial. The fact that they were also doing this with a 12-hour season of TV meant that they didn’t even have a half-decent structure to lean against once everyone’s ass was bleeding. Trying harder only made it worse. The only possible way this could have worked is if they had created an original story set in the Avatar universe, and they’re not nearly brave enough to either make or market that.

Might have also been better if they’d saved more budget for Greenland.

That’s a crap deal for everyone who worked on the movie. But it does not have to be a crap deal for you, the viewer. If you can go into The Last Airbender divorced from any attachment you have to the parent material and with the full understanding that this was a doomed project from the start, you can have a good ironic time at everyone’s expense. There’s plenty of unintentional hilarity scattered throughout that trash aficionados should really experience firsthand. And if you can’t manage any of that, you can at least appreciate the sadder but wiser post-Last Airbender world, in which everyone has learned a lasting and valuable lesson about the limitations of different storytelling mediums and the uniquely precious qualities of 2D animation.

Well. Some of us, anyway.

Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. Greenland’s really pretty. Maybe I’ll go someday.

Quality of Experience: 3 / 5. Probably a 1 if you’re a diehard of the show, and possibly up to a 3.5 or 4 if you’re not.

Did the Razzies Get it Right? Probably, but while The Last Airbender is surely a worse film than Vampires Suck, it’s a much less hateful film, so I probably would have given Vampires Suck the edge. The Bounty Hunter was a harmless, forgettable romcom nominated because the Razzies don’t like Jennifer Aniston, and Eclipse was only in the conversation because the Razzies don’t like women or things marketed at women in general. I have not seen and will not be seeing Sex and the City 2 for further confirmation of this.

You can read Tim’s review of The Last Airbender here!

Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.