The Last Airbender

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

When a director makes a remake of a cartoon series, he, mostly, has two choices: to forget it was ever a cartoon, leave nothing childish in it and simply try to make a good action movie out of it, or try to make a colorful fairytale, which will suit both – adults and children’s tastes. Unfortunately, in “The Last Airbender” M. Night Shyamalan managed to do neither. Although, in his defense it must be said, that the movie was planned as the first part of a Trilogy, and Shyamalan is still planning to release a sequel around the year 2012, so maybe all the best scenes are yet to come. Nevertheless, that doesn’t change the fact that the movie he made now leaves much to be desired.

Since the original Cartoon series had 3 seasons (61 episodes) in it, and M. Night Shyamalan was planning on making only 3 movies, each – approximately 2 hours long, he tried to squeeze as much information as possible into the first movie, making several scenes look completely unconnected, and the dialogues sound illogical and unfinished.
Some of the viewers might say that people don’t usually see action movies to hear clever thoughts and I would agree, but it would still be nice to have a full understanding of what is happening on the screen, and properly written dialogues would be a great help in that.

What is of concern is that the most important part of this particular movie – the special effects...well, it must be said, that they are much less impressive, than announced. Of course, there are a couple of  battle scenes that do really look great (especially in 3D) and the scene with the main character making a giant water wall (that, unfortunately, was shown in the teaser) is epic, but, at the end of the day, that is really all the movie can offer. And there is a perfectly good explanation for that. Not a long time ago (less than 8 years) M. Night Shyamalan claimed that movies should have as little special effects as possible, so why did he direct a movie, whose core is special effects, is a riddle for everybody.

So, “The Last Airbender” turns out to be a movie a twelve year old would probably enjoy,  and that an adult will forget after walking out of the cinema.

Now showing in all three countries.