The Last Airbender (2010)

Well guys, its going to be a short review tonight on The Last Airbender.  The film had its ups and its downs, but the downs outweighed the ups.  The Last Airbender had a cast that I was mostly unfamiliar with, and as you should know by now I end up liking that most of the time.  This is one of those exceptions.


There was not a bad performance shelled out by any of the cast members, but I did not think that the acting overall was as good as it should have been.  Combine this with a not entirely stable script and we get the result of not being as happy as we could have been.  I have never seen the series, but I can tell just from this film that it butchered the building blocks set down before it, and it is leaving a lot of fans with a bad taste in their mouths.  If M. Night Shyamalan directs any further books of the series, I believe it would be a mistake on Nickelodeons part.

This film had a lot of hype about it, and the storyline with the filming and special effects had it on track to be a great easy 5 star movie as with some great ones that have come out in the last few years like Avatar and Tron:Legacy.  Fans of the series were excited to see it, until the previews came out that is.  This film was a complete and utter let down for the books.

One of my biggest complaints about this film is it came off holy.  I was very much not a fan of how people would either attack or defend.  Most of the fighters were not able (or just not scripted perhaps?) to fight and defend at the same time.  The second holy feature of the film in my opinion was the fact that most of the beginning of the film felt too pushed.  Scene transitions felt jumpy and premature.  Character development was lacking, and I felt as if too much description was forced into the film instead.  I did not know this from experience, but I have read that it did not do justice to the books.  Characters were off, names were not pronounced correctly, age and race were not portrayed correctly and much more.

Another big complaint of this film is where did the action scenes go?  The set up and building of some of the sequences could have erupted some intense fight action sequences, but alas we are let down again.

What did I like?  Well the concept of the film was incredible.  I do think theoretically something like this could be possible.  With what we as humans are potentially capable of if we could use 100% of our brains could encompass something such as this.  The visual effects were also very well done.  I did not think that anything in the film looked completely unrealistic.  Some of the water effects defiantly looked fake, but they did not look horrible.

The Last Airbender gets a 2 star rating from me.  However I am pretty sure that if I were a fan of the books or tv series it would be getting a 1 or 0 star rating.  Are you a fan of either of the latter?  Please leave your comments and let me know what you thought of this film.  Ciao for now and see you for the next review!