The Last Airbender
“I know you will try.”
by Jonathan McDonald
Does anyone remember when M. Night Shyamalan’s films were truly must-see? After the word-of-mouth sensation of The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan was riding a high wave until 2004, when The Village received very poor reviews and 2006′s Lady in the Water began hemorrhaging viewers like a wounded soldier loses blood. And the analogy might not be entirely inappropriate to the situation, as Shyamalan has suffered an unceasing stream of potshots from the gallery of critics hiding in their foxholes. His first really poor experience with the critics was after Unbreakable (2000), which for him was a very important and meaningful movie, but which most critics responded to with confusion if not outright dismissal. It’s no surprise that Lady in the Water features a scene in which a film critic is violently killed. I bring up Shyamalan’s history as a necessary foundation of knowledge for understanding how The Last Airbender ended up the way it did.
The other body of knowledge necessary is a basic understanding of the cartoon series upon which this film is based, Avatar: The Last Airbender. (The reason behind the name change is probably not difficult to discern.) Always intended as a three-season limited series, Avatar aired from 2005-2008 on Nickelodeon where it built a large base of young viewers. It told the near-epic tale of the young Avatar, a boy who was the reincarnation of those people who could physically master all the four classical elements by an art known as “bending.” People groups that could bend single elements separated into nations, and the Avatar’s mission in every generation was to keep all four nations–and thus all four elements–in balance. But in a moment of weakness, the last Avatar fled his duties as a young child, and hid himself in ice for a hundred years; his absence allowed the Fire Nation to conquer the other three and upset the balance of the world. The cartoon was alternately defined by a deathly seriousness and a ridiculous slap-stick humor, and occasionally punctuated by moments of very real fun.
Shyamalan was apparently drawn to the project because his children were fans, and after watching the show with them, so was he. Perhaps he wanted a break from the kind of movie he had been making, a change from the path that has been resulting in fewer and fewer returns. Unfortunately as of this week, The Last Airbender has made nearly $75 million, which does not even cover half of its production budget; even worse are the critical reviews, which Rotten Tomatoes has averaged to an 8% approval rating, the lowest of his career. Whatever his motivation for helming this project, it hasn’t worked out very well for him.
Concerning the film itself, it fails on a number of levels, many of which are a result of compressing twenty episodes of the cartoon into one movie that runs at less than two hours. Now there are many ways to make this kind of adaptation work, but all of them require a significant reconsideration and rewriting of the source material. Shyamalan’s script compresses a great deal of the first season’s plot into the film, but it does so more by means of exposition and a scene-truncating method of editing rather than by means of collapsing multiple narrative beats into fewer scenes. He should show, but instead he tells. (I should mention that the scene where the Fire Nation proves the identity of the Avatar is a fine example of the needed beat-collapsing that is otherwise absent, and is also apparently Shyamalan’s own invention.) The acting is rather wooden, but that could be a result of the expository dialogue rather than a fault of the actors. The action scenes are clunky, which is not surprising since Shyamalan has always been at his strongest with close, calm, intimate scenes. More disappointing is the lack of fun, which is often the kiss of death for a children’s film. But if I were to point one the primary flaw of the film, it is that things happen without sufficient cause. If you haven’t watched the cartoon, you’ll probably be entirely confused.
How could this adaptation have turned out so badly? After a steadily-decreasing quality of storytelling in his films, many Shyamalan fans were hoping that his career could be helped by working with another storyteller’s world. Being very much an auteur, Shyamalan has always written and filmed his own scripts, a practice which has led to accusations of narcissism and, with the gradual advent of ever-more obscure films, even a lack of social understanding that approaches mild autism. When asked about the negative critical response to The Last Airbender, he replied,
I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible. It must be a language thing, in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don’t know how to think in another language. I think these are exactly the visions that are in my head, so I don’t know how to adjust it without being me. It would be like asking a painter to change to a completely different style. I don’t know.
He doesn’t know, and neither do we. Will Shyamalan ever again reach the heights of The Sixth Sense, where he told a story that was understandable and appreciated by a very wide audience? Those of us who remember how great he can be when he’s working at his best hope so. M. Night Shyamalan has the capacity to become one of our country’s greatest directors if he can pull his act together. He has a vivid imagination that can be powerful when disciplined, but tends to cause disasters when it’s not. Here’s to hoping that he can learn from his mistakes and turn things around. We would all be the better for it.
Rating: Tolerable
Written on July 8, 2010 by Jonathan
Points of Interest: Adventure, Fantasy, In Theatres, M. Night Shyamalan
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