The Last Airbender
“The Last Airbender” plays like the most expensive instructional tai chi video ever made. The heroes can move air, water and earth with their minds, and before they do, they often gesticulate like the congregants in a Beijing park at sunrise. Since the acting is so poor, the story so incoherent and the dialogue so wooden, they might as well turn to the camera and explain earnestly how the ancient martial art enhances their physical and mental well-being. Instead, they just do their tai chi and are surrounded by elaborate and costly digital effects. It’s not clear what the practice has to do with telekinesis. Mostly I think it’s thrown in to add some Asian flavor to this inexplicable production. “The Last Airbender” was adapted from an anime-style Nickelodeon series, but it’s about as Asian as P.F. Chang’s. The art direction, the costumes and the mythology carry Eastern influences, but the heroes are white, the villains are mostly Indian and other ethnicities get thrown in only when convenient. Paramount Pictures must be desperate for a new tentpole to throw 150 million dollars at this ragged material and entrust it to the faded filmmaking prodigy M. Night Shyamalan. His name doesn’t sell tickets anymore, and the actors are mostly unknown, so the 2D production was retrofitted for 3D, which means you wear the uncomfortable glasses but rarely notice any stereoscopic effect. It doesn’t help that the term “avatar” is crucial to the plot. “The Last Airbender” was intended as the first chapter of a trilogy, but like “The Golden Compass,” it may endure as an embarrassing standalone.
Too funny! I said to the friend I saw it with, “This is PF Chang’s the movie”. Some of the worst child acting ever seen, woefully fake looking CGI, the most boring fight scenes known to man, and an impossibly complicated yet meaningless plot that seemed left over from one of the hideous Star Wars prequels. I did also love how all the heroes were white, and all the villains or savages were brown. Shayamalan has issues almost as big as his former costar Mel Gibson to deal with.
I actually went to see it specifically because of the apocalyptic reviews, and was duly entertained, especially by the appalling 3D that I saw it in, where only one shot every five minutes seemed to be converted. I left the stupid glasses off most of the time, since the film wasn’t massively overlit, which 3D requires, rendering most of the running time a gray, soupy mess.
James
9 Jul 10 at 12:50 am
I didn’t comment on the murky, muddy images, as so many critics did, because I assumed it was a projection problem. It appeared to be out of focus on top of the much-discussed loss of resolution from the conversion to 3D. But it seems the conversion may have been to blame for the fact that everything was blurry and incomprehensible outside the foreground at my screening, which is truly appalling.
Ben
12 Jul 10 at 4:31 pm