The Last Airbender (2010)
Written and directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Jackson Rathbone

The Last Airbender is a pointless movie. Who remakes a TV series into a film? Plenty of people have used film to extend the stories of canceled shows. And other people use movies to adapt written word to a visual medium. But Avatar: The Last Airbender is already a visual medium, with a finished story that doesn’t benefit from a white kid with leukemia and that Indian guy from The Daily Show.

The Last Airbender is the story of a boy named Aang, who is the fabled Avatar, a reincarnated entity that can control all four elements. He’s also the last of the Airbending Nomads, after the Fire Nation killed them all in an attempt to destroy him. So Aang, with the help of his new friends has to learn the other three elements and use them to bring peace to the world. The film attempts to take the entire first season of the TV show and compress it into an hour and a half. “But that sounds impossible!” you say? That’s because it is impossible. The result is an incomprehensible mess that plays like a bad YouTube montage of the story.

Actually montages would have really helped this stupid movie because at least then there would be some semblance of time passing. The editing in this film is so bad that the multiple weeks of journeying and training look like it happens in three days. One of the characters has to awkwardly jam in a line about “these past few weeks” otherwise you’d have no way of knowing.

Seriously, I’ve seen the fucking show and I had no idea what was going on.

It’s hard to say which is worse: the writing or the acting. They crash against each other, building in power until it’s a perfect storm of shitty movie. Exposition is forced and unnatural, all of the humor falls flat, and the serious moments end up unintentionally funny. People in the theater actually laughed during a scene where someone sacrifices their life to save the kingdom. Every actor is completely wrong for the film. Dev Patel screams and broods a lot. And Aasif Mandvi is supposed to be believable as a god-killing warlord? Even the extras are so mismatched that they stick out like sore thumbs. It literally looks like they hired the background warriors from the attendees at Comic-Con. The only redeeming factor about the casting is that amazingly, M Night Shyamalan didn’t force himself into the movie.

It’s also very apparent that the 3D was tacked on last minute, as nearly ever special effect shot of fireballs and water jets is directed away from the camera.

You want to know the worst part of this stupid movie? It’s the fact that if it does well, there will be two more of them to suffer through.

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