The Last Airbender was released on June 30, 2010. It was directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starred Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, and Jackson Rathbone. It is a live-action adaptation based Avatar: The Last Airbender, the animated show that ran on Nickelodeon which ran from 2005 to 2008.
While The Last Airbender universe lives on through an upcoming animated movie, an ongoing Netflix live-action show, and a new animated series, this movie has been nearly completely excised from the public consciousness. What are current opinions on this movie, and did it get anything correct? Has it gained in estimation in the intervening 15 years?
The short answer to this question is that The Last Airbender is a quintessential mis-fire from a movie studio trying to adapt a beloved and successful animated show. They took all of the elements people liked and removed them while trying to replicate everything from the show in a hollow and unfulfilling manner. While the movie made money, the sequel never moved forward because people simply didn’t enjoy the experience. Throwing more money into a quickly diminishing venture was and will forever be a bad plan.
It’s been 15 years since I went with my friends to the midnight showing of The Last Airbender. We were all fans of the Nickelodeon show and this was a time where online streaming was allowing us to catch up and binge full seasons of the show. Re-runs on Nickelodeon were frequent. The show weaved themes of responsibility and power together with youthful fun and humor. It had deep characters with their own motivations and goals. The protagonists were relatable and dealt with setbacks and success. The world was compelling and fascinating. After three seasons and 61 episodes, it was over, but it finished with a satisfying conclusion that paid off the Avatar's quest for peace and balance.
Although the people in my friend group weren't movie fanatics, we decided to go to the midnight premiere of The Last Airbender. Unfortunately for us and the audience at large, we left disappointed. I remember leaving the theater at 2:00 a.m. and dissecting our reactions. I have not revisited it since driving away that morning, disappointed and confused.
Now, over a decade later, I think I am ready to watch The Last Airbender again. What I experienced was a brutal reminder of the emotions I felt on that first watch.
The Last Airbender reprise, 15 years later
Right off from the credits, the voiceover narration throws me for a loop. The show has an iconic opening that sets the scene for new viewers and veteran fans alike, succinctly laying out the world and the story elements: Four nations, each with their own bending powers, live in harmony. But the Fire Nation upended that harmony by attacking the other nations (conflict!). Only the Avatar (the only person who can bend all four elements) can stop the conflict. But the Avatar went missing (tension!). 100 years pass (rising conflict!) and the Avatar is found. But he’s a young boy who has a lot to learn (premise!). But I believe Aang can save the world (excitement!).
The viewer has a handle on the world, learns that young Aang is the new Avatar, the bending styles, and what to expect in 45 seconds. Tight, exciting narration. Why even attempt to change that? The decision to change this typifies what the movie really misunderstood about the original show. They understand the words but completely lose the meaning and purpose. Here's the movie opening narration:
"A hundred years ago all was right with our world. Prosperity and peace filled our days. The Four Nations: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air Nomads lived amongst each other in harmony. Great respect was afforded to all those who could bend their natural element. The Avatar was the only person born amongst all the nations who could master all four elements. He was the only one who could communicate with the Spirit World. With the Spirits’ guidance the Avatar kept balance in the world.
And then 100 years ago, he just disappeared."
This intro throws both the first-time watcher and avid fan into confusion. Instead of the very active, exciting, and plot-driven intro of the show, the movie has a very passive tone that doesn’t set up the viewer for what to expect. An amorphous info dump of Avatar information isn’t very helpful if it doesn’t tell us how or why they keep harmony. Instead of placing the Avatar in opposition to an Imperialistic and war-mongering Fire Nation, the movie sets up the Avatar as a communicator with Spirits to unknown ends. We learn that he disappeared, but that doesn’t tell us why that was bad or how the nations are in disharmony. It also plays mostly over a black background without introducing us to any of the imagery of the world or the people in it.
Narration rightfully gets a bad reputation in movies for telling the audience what they're supposed to know instead of showing them in the context of the world. It can be a crutch and short cut for movies that do not or cannot visually explain the concepts they want to impart. This movie not only has the problem of telling and not showing, but also fails to set up the world in a meaningful way.
I’m not sure why they decided to completely change an iconic and effective intro. Their decision encapsulates all that went wrong with this movie: consuming and erratic deviation from the source material, a much darker tone with absolutely no levity, characters who say their motivation but basically don’t have any depth, effects that take away from the experience rather than add to it, and a strange commitment to include plot points from nearly every episode of the first season of the show.
The movie is undercut at every turn by these problems I listed above. It tries to explore the meaning of the Avatar's role as a spiritual leader and his partnership with the spirit world. Aang also has to follow the heroes’ journey from Refusal of the Call all the way to Accepting the New Role. Before he was frozen in ice, people believed in him but he didn’t believe in himself. By the end of the film, once he saves the Northern Water Tribe, people believe in him again and he finally believes in himself. He overcomes his self-doubt, determined to continue and push back against the Fire Nation.
A lot of the characters are on transformative arcs. Prince Zuko feels shame and self-doubt after being exiled by his own father and losing his birthright. He turns to anger and is focused on finding the Avatar to restore it. Siblings Katara and Sokka have lost both of their parents and have to overcome their fears to travel with the Avatar and support his journey. The Earth Nation has lost its confidence and power because they’ve been conquered by the Fire Nation. Aang helps them find their will to fight back and break their own chains to become independent again.
I think these are worthy themes and are interesting to explore. In abstract, they hold the promise of an interesting movie for both new viewers and avid fans who can experience the narrative through a different lens, and the live-action format means the story can be told in a way that's more expressive and dramatic. However, this is not that movie. This is the movie that decided from the opening crawl that it was going to be different from the original in ways that undercut the spirit of the show and didn’t trust or believe in its sensibilities.
The Dark Tone
The original show is a bright, fun show with lots of levity coming from Sokka and Aang; the stakes are real, but they can also be cornball, slapstick characters who love silly jokes. None of that exists in the movie. The movie decides to make all characters self-serious and struggling with their own inner demons and the enormous weight on their shoulders.
The show carefully and successfully balances the kid’s show aspects with the larger serious narrative. The movie overloads the screen with dark tones, both literal and otherwise. The movie is telling you this isn’t fun and you shouldn’t be having fun and this is serious so take it serious. In the end, it pushes the viewer away rather than inviting them in.
Expensive but unimpressive effects
In the world of Avatar, certain character can bend — control, basically — any of the four elements: earth, water, wind and fire. That's going to require special effects, but the ones in the movie are not a good representation of what we see in the show.
On the original animated show, bending looks exciting and dynamic. It also serves as a story-telling device. Each nation and the way they bend their respective element matches up with their culture. The fighting is action-packed. The way each culture built their nation around their bending style adds depth to the world. The movie underutilizes bending as a story-telling device. Instead, it looks slow and boring. We see scene after scene of lethargic bending with disappointing payoff.
The pinnacle of this happens in the Earth Kingdom when some benders perform what has been dubbed the “pebble dance.” Aang finally motivates the Earthbenders to fight back, and the result is a synchronized dance to throw a small rock. In the movie this is treated like a huge success and an amazing turn of events, but visuals of the bending do not live up to that. The audience knows what they saw was not impressive or entertaining and the sequence loses credibility and authenticity.
Trying to mold a TV show into a movie
The movie confusingly tries to fit many plot points from 20 episodes of the first season of the show into the length of a feature film. This results in a 103-minute movie that rushes from scene to scene with little time to live in the world get to know the people inhabiting it. Voiceover tells us why or how we’ve arrived at the next scene, and before you know it, the Avatar is already done with another adventure. Your eyes could glaze over as each scene passes you by, kind of different from the one before but not any more important.
Avatar: The Last Airbender told the story of Aang over the course of many hours, detailing characters’ lives through their successes and failures and daily struggles. Film cannot and should not try to emulate that same pace. This film would have been much more successful if it picked and chose what to keep from the show and pared everything down to a story that could fit into 90 minutes.
The thinnest of motivations
Avatar: The Last Airbender gives the audience time to come to understand the journey our heroes are on, and some of the forces that shaped them into the people they are. The characters have arcs over the course of the season which pay off their motivations and desires.
On the other hand, The Last Airbender movie has to speed through all of the events of the season and takes no time to understand the characters. Sometimes, they have to just speak their motivation out loud, because there is basically no storytelling reason for them to be making the decisions that we see them making.
As an example, here's a paraphrased version of a scene from the middle of the movie:
"Sokka: "We should travel through the Earth Nation and liberate them because the Fire Nation is bad and is preying on them.""
"Aang: "I need to tell you something.""
"Katara: "What is it, Aang?""
"Aang: "I ran away before they trained me to be the Avatar. I don't know how to bend the other elements.""
"Katara: "Why did you run away?""
"Aang: "It was too much responsibility.""
"Sokka: "To learn you need teachers. We’ll find you a teacher in the Northern Water Tribe. Should we try it?""
"Aang: "Yes, we should.""
"Katara: (sits there)"
Many scenes play out like this. Characters move robotically through lines of dialogue that are so disconnected as to leave the audience in absolute puzzlement. Motivation is not so much explored as it is plainly spoken without any evidence or explanation on the screen. The screenplay is so preoccupied with moving from plot point to plot point that they lose any of the substance that made the show engaging.
Deviation from the source material
In the opening crawl, Katara pronounces the word 'Avatar' starting with a long a sound, much like you would start saying 'Appa.' Why do they change this from the show? Throughout the movie, pronunciation changes are jarring for fans. Aang, Sokka, Avatar, and other words have different pronunciations. Perhaps they changed them for cultural reasons of which I’m unaware, but that means they are trying to map this narrative on real-world cultures instead of the ones from the show.
This movie is littered with strange cultural decisions. Katara, Sokka, and Aang are played by white actors and and often don’t match up with the extras in their own village. It’s confusing to see Katara and Sokka’s grandmother be a very pale old woman among an otherwise diverse Water Tribe. The Fire Nation is portrayed by an ambiguously brown-skinned people; as they are the antagonists of the story, it sends a confusing message.
Finally, the movie's production definitely created issues you can see on the screen. The actor portraying Aang was cast because of his likeness to the animated character and his ability to perform martial arts. The movie leaned into his martial arts prowess, but that doesn’t really ring true for the character. Aang was not a hand-to-hand martial artist. One of his central struggles is balancing his pacifism with his responsibility to bring balance to the world. The production also did not allow the character of Aang to have any levity or childlike happiness. The Aang of the movie is a brooding, burdened character who feels as heavy as a rock when he should be as light as a feather.
We have some indication of what happened during the production of this movie from a blog post purportedly written by a crew member. It details the disastrous decisions that led to this movie's final form. Producers didn’t care for the source material but felt the ever-rising need to make the film commercially viable to wider audiences. Perhaps they didn’t realize the folly of watering down their product. What purpose could it serve to toss away the successful elements that made the show a hit?
In the end, the movie did decent business at the box office. However, the content was such a let down that a sequel was never made.
My viewing was a reminder of all of the criticisms I had 15 years ago. The movie is less than a sum of its parts and there are no redeeming qualities to enjoy about it. I don’t think the movie works as adaptation, it doesn’t work as film, and it doesn’t work as a story. If I were you, dear reader, there is a lot of Avatar content you could be watching, reading, and playing. This movie is not something you should be consuming.
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