Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Last Airbender Review


Dear M. Night Shymalan, please stop. Just stop doing whatever it is that makes your movies so terrible. Unless you truly are an evil genius, and your goal in life is to bore audiences with films like Lady in the Water. So instead of writing another original turd you decide to take an existing franchise and write a story around that. Or in this case you took the first season of a cartoon and chopped it down to about one hundred minutes, then filled it with your inane dialogue.

So lets get to why Shymalan fails once again at providing an entertaining film. As with most of his movies it all comes down to abysmal performances from nearly every member of the cast. Shymalan has a gift at bringing the absolutely worst out of even seasoned actors, and Airbender fairs the same fate. The actors here are so dull and wooden he might as well have cast the trees from The Happening, they were obviously excellent airbenders to begin with.

I don't know everything there is to about the original series, but I do know these characters are capable of feeling joy and at times playful. None of the humor and emotion that brought the characters to life in the cartoon exists here.

The only hope this movie had was if the action sequences were to turn out well, but even those couldn't save it. Shymalan steals from another director I despise, Zack Snyder, by using his stop and go slow motion technique during nearly every fight. This breaks up the flow of a battle, and only draws attention to the less than stellar visual effects. Adding slow motion to the choreographed movements of the benders only drags out the sequences even further.

If you truly must see this movie for some reason, do not watch it in 3D. There is no reason to throw your money away because the 3D effect does not exist in this movie. This was simply another attempt to cash in on the 3D fad and grab more money at the box office. If it had been filmed intentionally in 3D the visual effects could have been spectacular, but this was forced into the format after the fact.

Final Score: D

1 comment:

  1. Epic Fail Shymalan!! Nice touch with the airbending trees! That's the joke you were talking about, lol

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