There was a time, not too long ago, when M. Night Shyamalan seemed to be the next great genre filmmaker. With movies like “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” he uncannily borrowed from legendary directors like Steven Spielberg, George Romero and Brian De Palma, to concoct spooky, often emotionally riveting, cinematic funhouse rides. And then that magic started to fade. With the diminishing returns of “The Village,” and the downright abysmal failures of “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening,” his knack for crafting taught, twisty tales of the supernatural sputtered and failed. His magic started to look like a cheap slight-of-hand gag, with the magician recast not as a storyteller but as a charlatan. And on the back of these costly flops, the director is given his ultimate shot at redemption: a $200 million franchise tentpole sponsored by a major studio and based on a preexisting property — a sixty-one episode animated series called “The Last Airbender.”
And what has all that good will gotten? A whole lot of nothing.
“The Last Airbender” is set in a vaguely Asian-influenced fantasy realm that is divided into elemental kingdoms, with different lands devoted to Earth, Air, Water, and the nastiest of the bunch, Fire. There are special people in these different lands that can control the elements, hence the “-bender” suffix. The earthbenders can make great stone columns pop out of the ground, the waterbenders can encase people in floating bubbly blobs, that sort of thing. The lands are all waiting for the arrival of the Avatar (no, not that kind of avatar), a princely, Dalai Lama-type figure that is supposed to unite the lands through his (apparently the Avatar is always a young dude) masterly ability to control all four elements.
Our story begins as we follow two young Water folk, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) on a hunt for food. It’s out on a frozen tundra that they discover a giant frozen orb (echoes of the atrocious “Day the Earth Stood Still” remake) that opens up to reveal Aang (Noah Ringer), the fabled Avatar. Also in that thawed out orb: a giant fluffy flying, six-legged otter that kind of looks like Falkor from “The Neverending Story.” Even though Aang looks like he’s twelve, he’s really a hundred years older than that, having been stuck in that ice bubble for a very long time. Everyone he knows is dead, at the hands of the Fire nation and what’s worse – even though he’s this fabled savior, he only knows how to control one elemental power: air. Water, Land, Fire? He’s clueless. So he’s on a quest to lockdown his Water abilities (the movie has a title screen at the beginning that says “Book One: Water”) and try to bring some semblance of peace to the lands. Katara is a waterbender, and offers to help, but Aang has to get in touch with the spiritual center of waterbending, at some faraway Water palace.
So the journey is on! But wait, there’s more intrigue: the disgraced son of the Fire kingdom’s leader, Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), wants to kidnap the Avatar and bring him to his father (Cliff Curtis), to clear his name. And there are various other nefarious Fire people who want the Avatar for even nastier reasons.
Things boil down to a predictably busy climax, with the Fire nation storming the ancient Water stronghold, complete with giant fiery balls and warriors riding what appear to be giant Komodo dragons. It’s in these later sequences that the stunning virtuosity of Shyamalan’s shows itself. His movies, no matter the quality of their storytelling, are always beautiful to watch, with “Unbreakable’s” series of long takes (unbroken, if you will) and “The Sixth Sense’s” stately old world austerity. In the climactic battles, Shyamalan again indulges in long takes, this time assisted with some computer trickery, choosing smaller moments in the larger battle to both slow down and zoom in on, before pulling back and having the action resume at normal speed. It’s in these moments that the large scale magic of the movie weaves itself over you and you become, for a few fleeting moments, a kid again, rooting for the Avatar to succeed and for those nifty ILM-produced atmospheric effects (rendered in 3D in some theaters) to swallow you whole.
The excitement of these later sequences, with their heady mix of blockbuster thrills and a kind of restrained spirituality, make much of the movie even harder to stomach. There are long sequences of talky exposition, the kind you’d expect in the latter “Matrix” movies or the “Star Wars” prequels, a lot of talk about destiny and succession, but very little in terms of realistic, emotionally engaging characters. As cool as the flying otter is, the decided impact of flying balls of fire, it doesn’t matter all that much when you’re bogged down by clunky political infighting and laborious “training” sequences which amount to little more than a yoga class for ethnically ambiguous tots.
But when thinking about “The Last Airbender,” you’ve also got to look at the audience it’s aimed at: one younger than for something like “Iron Man 2” but wanting something a bit more sophisticated, at least narrative-wise, than “Toy Story 3.” Even though it’s based on a cartoon, it is, in the very least, a more original conceit than some blatant cashgrab like Fox’s live action “Marmaduke.” And if we were a ten-year-old boy, then “The Last Airbender” would probably be the tits (remember the part about the giant Komodo dragons?) But we aren’t, so it’s not. It’s a handsomely produced, big screen spectacle, for sure, but one that ultimately will leave the non-ten-year-old-boy viewers feeling cold and disoriented. Even the pre-closing credits kicker, a moment that Shyamalan has perfected to an almost scientific degree, is bungled, symptomatic of Shyamalan entrusting large emotional beats to inexperienced (and not very good) young actors. It was a bold move for Paramount to entrust Shyamalan with a property this huge, but it didn’t exactly deliver. In the end, it’s just a lot of hot air. [C]