Shyamalan's 'The Last Airbender' Leaves the Biggest Cinematic Stench on 2010

Yes folks, no other movie laid such a stink on the movie going public than M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender." While the director's two previous films "Lady In The Water" and "The Happening" were poorly received, he still seemed like a competent filmmaker whose only real problem was in the scripts he wrote. To watch this adaptation of the well-regarded Nickelodeon animated series is to instantly forget that this is the same person behind "The Sixth Sense" and "Signs" (my favorite movie of his).

First off, the story of "The Last Airbender" is incomprehensible to where describing it is an endurance test. Basically, it starts off with Katara and Sokka discovering this little boy named Aang who, as it turns out, is the one the movie is named after. Aang has the power no one else had: the ability to bend all four elements which include Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. Now the Fire Nation has all the bad guys who want Aang for their own purpose. Then Sokka develops a relationship with the beautiful princess (is there any other kind?) named Yue. Then Aang is captured, then he escapes, then the bad guys go after him, etc. At this point there's so much going on that you have no time to digest it all. You end barely caring about these characters as a result, and that effectively kills whatever interest you could have in them or what they do.

Next you have the cast which (despite some exceptions) is poorly chosen. As much as I want to blame Shyamalan for this and spare the child actors emotional scars that have already endured, they have to share in the blame as well. In fact, the most unforgivable sin of "The Last Airbender" is that he ended up changing the ethnic backgrounds of Sokka and Katara from their original Asian and Native American influences to Caucasian. You don't want to mess with a well respected show that way, and on top of that he picked two of the lamest white people on earth to inhabit these characters which make this mistake in judgment all the more glaring. Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone lack screen presence, they seem more than inappropriate to play the roles they were cast in, and we know from the start watching them that we the audience are doomed.

Then you come to the inescapable conclusion that for an action packed, "The Last Airbender" is seriously BORING. It's not that the effects aren't cool; it's that they are nothing more than effects which fail to draw us emotionally into a plot we have enough trouble trying to understand. Considering that close to $300 million was spent on this film (and that includes marketing costs), this realization seems all the more baffling. All we get out of it is a lifeless spectacle that barely tries to be entertaining. We don't even get a lousy t-shirt out of this either!

The majority of the blame for the catastrophe that is "The Last Airbender" lies solely at the feet of M. Night Shyamalan. Lifeless special effects, abysmal acting, a script with dialogue so atrocious that it makes George Lucas' seem like Pulitzer prize level writing, and retrofitted 3D effects which make an already bad movie seem all the more unwatchable; it fails in every conceivable way a movie can and, considering the talent involved, there's absolutely no excuse for that.