THRILL SCALE 1-10
2
HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?
Never
BEST SEQUENCE
The fight in the Earthbender village
BEST LINE
None worth mentioning
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE
5%
ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS
"The Last Airbender squanders its popular source material with incomprehensible plotting, horrible acting, and detached joyless direction."
IMDB SYNOPSIS
"Aang, a young successor to a long line of Avatars, must master all four elements and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdom."
DIRECTOR
M. Night Shyamalan
MAIN CAST
Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi
THOUGHTS
- This is pretty unanimously considered M. Night Shyamalan's worst movie, and it must have the lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes of any movie that I've reviewed so far. Is it good? Absolutely not. Is it bad? Certainly. HOWEVER...is it the worst movie that I've ever seen? No, it isn't. Believe it or not, this isn't even the lowest score I've given out, an honour that goes to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1.5 on the Thrill Scale), and I stand by that. The Last Airbender is a severely flawed movie, and I'll never watch it again, but it still brought me a modicum of entertainment
- Based on its reputation, I went into this movie so prepared to despise it that it even made me second-guess myself when I just...didn't. It's not good, but if anything I felt apathy more than hatred. This is a good time to mention, however, what might be the real crux of the matter for many people - I have never seen a single episode of the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. If the movie pales in comparison to the beloved TV show (and I understand that it does), then I can also understand the level of scorn it received from fans of the source material
- And an egregious amount of whitewashing when it came to the casting, which is also always worthy of scorn
- Speaking of the cast, the acting is all pretty bad, hammy and overblown, but I've mentioned this a few times already about Shyamalan's movies so I'm inclined to blame it mostly on the script and the directing. Incidentally, this was Dev Patel's immediate follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, so I'm sure he thanks his lucky stars he bounced back from this one
- On the other hand, we have Noah Ringer, who played Aang. His film career lasted a grand total of two movies - after The Last Airbender he was in Cowboys & Aliens, another movie I haven't seen, and literally nothing else since then - no movies, no TV shows, no short films. And I'm not saying he's a great talent who deserved to be in more things, he has pretty awful screen presence and line delivery, but hey, it's not like he cast himself! Someone else made that call, partly because he was a young kid who was pretty accomplished at Taekwondo, and I have to say, in terms of physicality I thought he was pretty good! For the most part he sold the action for me
- Because (again, believe it or not), I actually thought some of the action scenes were pretty decent! Me, of all people, the guy who hates CGI! It's true, though, I thought the element bending special effects were pretty cool at times, and that's what gets this movie a 2/10. The whole climax is a mess, though, and also at the time of release the 3D conversion was decried as ineffectual and awful; this wasn't a factor for me watching it on my TV at home, however
- Ultimately, my main takeaway after watching the movie is that I should maybe give the TV show a chance, knowing how loved it is and having been somewhat intrigued by the lore and the setting. To close out, I'm going to drop one more bombshell on you - there's perhaps an argument to be made that I hated The Village even more than The Last Airbender, at least when taking these viewings into consideration. There's certainly more craft that went into the making of The Village, but I literally yelled at the TV while watching The Village; I didn't for Airbender. Perhaps in some ways apathy is a worse reaction to have to a movie than anger, but I don't know...Airbender didn't have "I'll cry quarts"
Up next: M. Night, it's been a slice, and I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of your movies (but maybe someday I'll polish off the remainders). We shall draw our Shyamalan side quest to a close, however, and head back into the AFI list proper. It's Planet of the Apes, the original from 1968
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