It is hard what to make of M. Night Shyamalan, whose film The Sixth Sense showed a unique perspective and imagination, and heralded a great new talent.
His subsequent films have not lived up to the promise and The Last Airbender is probably the emptiest of his post TSS efforts.
The clearly anticipated sequel may never happen, making this truly the last Airbender. But stranger things have happened.
It’s technically weak with special effects that seem primitive and poorly executed, beset with ho-hum performances and an overall lack of meaning.
It’s essentially a story told through vogueing, repositioned as tai-chi, if anyone remembers that. Madonna established the then radical dance of posing, intercut with whirls twenty years ago. It looks extremely stylish but belongs in historic magazines and rock videos. It hasn’t the meat for cinema.
And set against Last Airbender’s whooshing backgrounds brought to you by fire, water, earth, and air, and taking way too much time in the film, it’s a disappointingly limited way to tell a story. And once that formula is cracked there’s no going back. It gets funny, then irritating, and while beautiful at times, it’s just too much and never stops.
The story is incomprehensible because as in so many teen targeted “epic” films, endless explication dulls the experience and tuning out seems the best policy. Adding to the confusion is the muddy visual and audio landscape. Shyamalan distinguishes between the good and bad guys in lazy ways; he might as well have put the good in white cowboy hats and the bad in black.
Basically the four elements are represented in four societies and they use their particular elemental gifts to fight each other. The evil element, fire, is trying to scoop up the whole ballgame and the sweet, peace loving other elements must stand up off their yoga mats and do something about it.
Out and out howlers mar the script; how a reader didn’t catch them in time is mystifying. Again, the misguided need to explaining what’s going on and what’s going to go on if such and such doesn’t happen is an extremely lazy and unfortunate contemporary shortcut to good storytelling. Even Avatar has too much ‘‘splainin’’ but the worst offenders are the Harry Potter and Lord of the Ring series.
The performances are okay, with standouts by the young lead Noah Ringer as Aang who is a fierce voguer but has expressive eyes that melt the heart. The Slumdog Millionaire himself, Dev Patel, is deliciously sinister as a greedy, evil and homicidal prince. Twilight’s Jackson Rathbone looks like he’s just about able to suppress giggles and Nicola Peltz does an okay job. Interesting characters show up – Cliff Collins, Katharine Houghton (Katharine Hepburn’s niece), and Shaun Taub to add a little veteran spice.
Big kudos to Shyamalan for turning the mountains of Pennsylvania and a quick trip to Vietnam, into the fantasy worlds of the four elements societies! The look is more subtle than once might expect but still interesting.
