I'm really not sure why I kept giving M Night Shyamalan more chances to disappoint me over the years, but seriously, The Last Airbender is the end of the line. Shyamalan has written, produced, and directed the ugliest dog of a movie to come along since Battlefield Earth.
Is it really that bad? You better believe it! Shyamalan has odd ideas of casting, worse feel for direction, scripting that makes Lucas look competent, sub-par effects, shoddy camera work, and no feel for putting together his own movie. The end result is a mess, more comedic and sad than enjoyable.
To try to give credit where none is really due, I haven't seen the cartoon the movie was supposed to be based on. Judging by how incomprehensible the plot line to the average Dragonball Z episode is, Shyamalan may have been a little challenged to explain to us about his world of spirits and elementalists. Watching Akira, Princess Mononoke, or Ghost In The Machine can be a little difficult for the unfamiliar, but a dedicated viewer can pick up the story pretty quickly, even if the theme isn't what we're used to seeing. Mononoke and Final Fantasy go on interminably about spirits and spirit worlds, but at least at the end of it all, it makes some sort of sense. I'm not sure Airbender made much at all, and I am sure that I didn't care.
Story (such as it is) goes like this - a hundred years in the past, the world was balanced and at peace, and special people in the world could harness the power of the elements. There were fire people, earth people, water people, and air people. Among all the people of the planet, there was one avatar, who could wield the power of all the four elements together (though he inexplicably was born and raised amongst the air people every time he reincarnated) and he kept the balance of the world together. The air people had found their new avatar in young Aang (pronounced Ug?) and were very excited, but Aang didn't want responsibility and all that nonsense so he runs away and gets frozen in a block of ice for a century.
Flash forward to what can only be called the present day in strange world - a girl and her useless older brother stumble across Popsicle boy frozen in the ice with a giant flying beaver/dragon/thing about a hundred feet from their eskimo village. Girl and useless boy bring him back to their village where they are accosted by the beginning of a long line of horribly miscast characters, Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire as confused villain Prince Zuko. Zuko kidnaps him for no particular reason, discovers his avatar nature, and then promptly loses him again.
What follows is a mish-mash of a bunch of inept villains chasing girl, useless boy, and the avatar as they dance-fu across the world. We learn that Aang needs to master the other elements to really come into his power, but by the time the film ends he's only master of air and water. Aasif Mandvi takes villainy to new lows; not only is he horribly miscast (I spent the entire time watching him on screen thinking of The Daily Show) but his prime act as a villain was - wait for it - stabbing a fish!
Your dance-fu is not strong!
So we have a hopelessly confused plot line, bad script, hapless villains and hopeless heroes. But at least we have great effects, right? Right? Nyet! Bad green screen effects abound from the movie's outset, and it seems the lighting crew really couldn't get together with the CGI guys to figure out where the sun was going to be in any scene. The elemental effects are cleaner, but still pretty pedestrian for the $280 million this film cost to make. Sadly, for all that cash, most of what we see is Aang and friends assume dance-fu positions as the camera pans around them. At least they weren't talking.
Even the choreography was disgraceful. The fight scenes were repetitive and unimaginative. As the fire people attack the water city Shyamalan has a golden opportunity to live up to Roland Emmerich and Micheal Bay and at least create some interesting destruction. In this, he fails as well. Water and fire masters apparently don't work as teams or do anything really interesting together. It doesn't really matter I suppose, because the standard warriors aren't really into the whole fighting thing either. During the heat of the battle, warriors of both sides drop everything to stare up at various events at least three different times.
Why have people been giving Shyamalan work for all these years? The only film of his that I can recall even remotely enjoying was The Sixth Sense, which incidentally was his only film that he didn't produce. The Village was bad on a historic level. I remember being outright angry at the end of that film. I managed to resist watching Signs, The Happening, and Lady In The Water, with the help of being warned off by friends who weren't as lucky. The Last Airbender should be the clinching proof that Shyamalan should be kept away from film studios at all costs.
I am still confused about how he was able to make The Sixth Sense good. It was good wasn't it? Maybe on re-watch it wouldn't be that good at all..hmmm??
ReplyDeleteUnbreakable was mildly entertaining, provided you didn't pay full ticket price to watch it. But it had Samuel L. Jackson in it, and I'd happily watch Samuel L. Jackson just stand in front of a blank backdrop and scream "motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane" for ninety minutes.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to put together a sliding scale of badness to goodness, movie-wise. How would you rank, for instance, Battlefield Earth against 3000 Miles to Graceland or The Musketeer?
Rotten Tomatoes has a Tomatometer to gauge films. Personally, I would rank Battlefield Earth over just about anything out there.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we can come up with a unit of measurement, not entirely unlike the Creed. The immediate problem with that measurement is, I think it sits way too low on the chart, so everything is .25 Creeds - So the scale is automatically weighted at the worst of all possible options from the beginning.
And to your point, that does nothing to compare and contrast different genres of suckitude.
Jasmin, Sixth Sense was a decent, tolerable film. I can't think of too many people who would demand their money back from M. Night for Sixth Sense. Of course, I haven't watched it in years, and now I'm afraid to go back and look at it again.