The Last Airbender
M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action “The Last Airbender” is the first part of a proposed trilogy, and is it ever obvious. As a result, there is no real conclusion, just a series of set-ups for something grander in the horizon. If, that is, the film proves profitable enough to warrant a sequel or two. Mind you, while this is a very real problem with the film, it’s not the onlyproblem. If you did not know that Shyamalan had been slaving on the project for the last two years, you would be hard-pressed to guess that he not only wrote but also directed the film. This does not feel like a film from the same man who gave us “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable”. Then again, considering his more recent outputs, the egocentric “Lady in the Water” and the unintentionally hilarious “The Happening”, maybe “Airbender” won’t be that hard to associate with Shyamalan after all…
“The Last Airbender”, based on the Nickelodeon cartoon
“Avatar: The Last Airbender” (the “Avatar” part was excised as not to confuse it with James Cameron’s film, though considering the titanic (get it?) box office of Cameron’s “Avatar”, that might not have been a wise move), comes with heavy baggage. The animated series is essentially a children’s action-adventure show with children heroes. Shyamalan has translated the original source as best he can, with newcomer Noah Ringer standing in for Aang, the franchise’s young hero. Aang is the latest in a long line of mythical Avatars, essentially the fictional land’s Beat Cop. When the film’s four individual nations – Earth, Water, Fire, and the Air Nomads – get a little too big for their britches, it’s the Avatar’s job to summon all the four elements at his disposal through the art of “bending” and whup some ass, thus m
aintaining “balance”.
Alas, it’s been 100 years since the last Avatar disappeared, and in that time the Fire Nation, led by the bellicose and (not so much) father of the year candidate Fire Lord Ozai (Cliff Curtis) have been terrorizing its neighbors. The Fire Nation, whose soldiers have the ability to bend fire – that is, control fire through, for lack of a better word, kung fu – have razed the land with their “machines”, a source of much derision among the other Nations. In the naturalistic, fantasy world of “The Last Airbender”, everyone lives in harmony with nature, so the Fire Nation’s clunky war machines are seen as instruments of brute, ugly violence and insults against the nature that everyone cherishes so much. It’s all very obvious and “sledgehammer to the face”, yet something else the film’s script has in common with Cameron’s film.
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