THE LAST AIRBENDER (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

When I saw AIRBENDER in the theater, I had no acquaintance with the 2005-08 animated series on which it was based, aside from being loosely aware of its popularity. Thus I had no expectations as to any bar that M. Night Shyamalan's fantasy-film had to meet. My only memory of my original viewing was that the action seemed to rather herky-jerky, even though the idea of a magical system based on using the classical "four elements" was intriguing.

Now that I'm familiar with the series, I have the perspective that some of the problems encountered by writer-director Shyamalan stemmed from the fact that he was trying to adapt a juvenile fantasy-series which was very episodic, despite its use of long story-arcs. In addition, Shyamalan had never done an otherworldly fantasy before, despite having made his rep doing other types of metaphenomenal cinema. In addition, though two of his three leads, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone, were experienced actors despite their youth, AIRBENDER was somewhat undermined by the third lead, Noah Ringer, who made his acting debut here and did not acquit himself well.

AIRBENDER takes place in a world with no ties to Earth, though the cultures were understood to be Asian-adjacent. Magic is real in this medieval-esque setting, though most magicians can only make magic by "bending" naturally occurring elements-- air. fire, earth, or water-- so that a given element does the magician's bidding. Only a legendary type of sorcerer, the Avatar, is born in each age, and he alone can command all four elements.

Siblings Katara (Peltz) and Sokka (Rathbone) live in a tribe that practices water magic, and Katara possesses that particular gift. The two teens come across an iceberg, and they accidentally release from this icy prison a twelve-year-old boy, Aang, and his pet flying bison Appa. Years ago, Aang was being trained to become the new Avatar at a monastery. but for reasons he can't remember, he ended up on ice, and not knowing what befell the monastery-teachers. However, Katara continues Aang's training with respect to the magic of water-bending.

The Avatar, intended to be a force of justice, is long overdue in the world, as the Fire Tribe has become obsessed with conquering all other tribes. Sokka and Katara. having bonded with Aang enough to want to help him achieve his destiny, travel with him, and soon butt heads with the fire-wielders. One detachment of soldiers is led by Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), a youth like Sokka and Katara, who's initially prickly but over time proves to be a reluctant conqueror, seeking mainly to please a tyrannical overlord, also his father. Unfortunately, although in the TV cartoon it worked OK to see this meandering introduction to four main characters for the first season, here Shyamalan tried, without success, to condense the first season's action down into a film of less than two hours. And while the animators knew how to "juice" even pokey episodes with bits of drama or humor, Shyamalan seems preoccupied with just ticking off plot points. 

Some of the "element-bending" FX are pleasant, but there's little passion conveyed. And it's not that AVATAR was some unique conception: it was simply a very good formula-cartoon, modeled strongly on similar adventure-anime. AIRBENDER took a lively three-season cartoon series and made it into a dull live-action flick just under two hours. It's not the worst movie of its kind but it's very underwhelming. It might've worked better to change things around so that Zuko's nasty sister-- a far stronger villain than Zuko-- was part of the opening "chapter" instead of being introduced at the end of the movie. Despite the fact that AIRBENDER made decent box office, it didn't get the further installments Shyamalan had planned.

Negative publicity also may hurt the film, given that some groups wanted all of the actors to be Asian. The best thing about AIRBENDER might be Shyamalan's refutation of this narrow attitude:

"Anime is based on ambiguous facial features. It's meant to be interpretive. It's meant to be inclusive of all races, and you can see yourself in all these characters...This is a multicultural movie and I'm going to make it even more multicultural in my approach to its casting. There's African-Americans in the movie...so it's a source of pride for me. The irony that [protesters] would label this with anything but the greatest pride, that the movie poster has Noah and Dev on it and my name on it. I don't know what else to do."