Review: 'The Last Airbender'



How a movie based off of a cartoon can be hazardous to your health.

Hey everyone and welcome to my first review for this lovely website and what a better way to start this by reviewing The Last Airbender.  The movie is based off of a Nickelodeon cartoon series called Avatar: The Last Airbender and this movie should have been called that but instead some rich beyond rich filmmaker named James Cameron had to name his movie called Avatar.  (I'm sure you heard of it)  Anyway, if you didn't hear about the news before the movie was being made that a known filmmaker named M. Night ShyShy (yeah that's what I'm going to call him from now on cause I can't remember how to spell his last name right now [Shyamalan]) was going to write and direct the movie.  Now that was mistake number one.  The last few movies he did (The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Village) didn't do crap at the box office and they all got terrible reviews.  A shame because he made some great movies too like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.  Now mistake number two was that the two guys who created the cartoon, Michael Dante DiMartino and Brian Konietzko (who both worked on Family Guy) let M. Night ShyShy destroy their masterpiece.  To be quite honest, I think if the film was PG-13 instead of the PG rated it has, I think the movie would have been better.  The violence in the cartoon can get pretty intense and I believe the filmmakers were trying to dumb down the violence a bit.

Another thing that M. Night ShyShy destroyed was the casting.  If you watch the movie, you notice that ALL the Water Nation are White people, ALL the Fire Nation are Indian people and ALL the Earth Nation are Asian People.  Yeah, the filmmakers kept trying to say that cartoons are universal characters but remember a movie called Dragonball: Evolution? ( I don't blame you if you don't. The movie was HORRIBLE!)  Justin Chatwin as Goku was not the best choice. (Hell, he shouldn't have even been in consideration) Another thing is that pacing of the movie is so terrible.  Things just happen out of thin air and what took many episodes to develop in the series takes like 4.8 seconds in the movie. 

The movie should have been another ten or 20 minutes long but I guess little kids don't have enough attention spans to sit their little asses on the couch or theatre seat to watch a two hour movie. If they can do it for the Harry Potter films then why can't they do it for this?

The acting (if you can call it that) was terrible.  The scar on Zuko's face was barely noticeable.  In the cartoon it was his most noticeable physical feature.  Oh and I don't need to mention the fact that the character's names are pronounced differently (as in AHang not Ang... get it?)  I can get over that and the fact that the action was filmed quite well but when the acting is terrible, the pacing is horrible and the CGI is something off of a Playstation 1 game, it's pretty bad.  

M. Night isn't all at fault here though. I wonder if at any time during the writing process, Michael and Brian thought to themselves, "This guy is destroying our work!"  I mean, have they even seen the movie?  I can't believe they didn't get headaches so bad that their heads exploded.  I almost felt that way after about 20 minutes into the film and I had another 80 minutes to go. (Thank GOD!)

The so-called comedy falls flat on it's face and it tr
ies too hard.  I didn't laugh one time. (well, maybe except the things my brother was saying while watching this piece of crap movie)  Sokka is supposed to be the comic relief in the movie but I can't remember one thing he says that was remotely funny.  Momo, the winged lemur, was actually the funniest thing in the movie and Momo is barely in the movie.  That's pretty sad my friends.

So, in conclusion, This whole movie is a mistake. The acting was terrible, the CGI was terrible and the pacing was just bad.  The well filmed action sequences could not save this movie one bit which is a shame because I really liked the action.  I know that it's like a law in Hollywood to change stuff from the source material to film but did M. Night really have to change literally almost every aspect of the film?  I am going to have to rate this film a 1 out of 5.  Now, I could have given this a zero but I figured that because the action was filmed well I couldn't give it a score that low.  I want to take this movie and throw it out the window. I want my hundred minutes back!!!!!  ( Did I mention that I want my hundred minutes back??)  Do yourself a favor and DON'T watch this film.  Even if it's the last movie on earth, you will have much more fun eating dirt than sitting through this "movie".


Update:  This is a rant I did of the film in 2011 -- I do repeat some of the stuff I said in the written review but check it out!