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| I want to get off M. Night's Wild Ride. |
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by: M. Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, Frank Marshall
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Budget: $150,000,000
Starring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi, Cliff Curtis
This movie is a perfect example of how not to adapt a popular series to the big screen.
I'm a fan of the original Avatar series from Nickelodeon about a world where martial arts and elemental control are combined. It turns from a goofy kids show to a very good hero's journey series, with some great fight scenes and excellent animation.
In 2010, M. Night Shyamalan released The Last Airbender which managed to get pretty much everything wrong as an adaptation. The thing about adapting a series to the big screen is that you are trying to appeal to fans of the original while also offering something easily accessible to new viewers. Sometimes the existing mythology is so extensive that things are inevitably cut for time or simplicity's sake, but often it's enough to get the character's names right.
Not so in this movie.
The Good
This movie was shot in some beautiful locations, with sweeping hills and lots of green forests. The establishing shots are generally very pretty. In addition, some of the costume and set design isn't bad, with lots of eastern-style robes and ornate clothing.
The Airbender tattoos are ornate patterns, which I actually really liked over the blocky blue stripes from the cartoon. That was the best decision in this movie.
If you are a fan of the cartoon and want to see the worst possible adaptation that could have been made, this is the movie for you. It is fascinating to watch this movie knowing that Shyamalan has actually seen the series.
The Bad
Where to begin. It's actually really hard to condense everything that is wrong about this movie into a reasonable post.
As an adaptation this may succeed on the most basic level, but fails pretty much every other criteria imaginable. The character's names are pronounced incorrectly, the choices for the cast is baffling, and the imaginative world the television show created has been reduced to a generic fantasy world. Various characters have been congealed into easily recognizable, yet poorly executed archetypes, and certain scenes carry on in such a way that it actively prevents certain important plots from taking place in potential later films.
The acting in this is hilarious. Ringer, hired because he was already skilled in martial arts, puts forth an Aang (pronounced Ong) with some sort of halting speech impediment, hop-jump attention span, and doofy grin that doesn't convey anything except "I'm acting!" Peltz plays Katara displays some sort of talent by portraying her as both wide-eyed and dazed at the same time, and Rathbone delivers the best deadpan "I'm better than this" I've seen in a long time. Patel plays Zuko as a shouting pouter, and Mandvi camps up his General Zhao so much that I was waiting for the Daily Show reference that always seemed thirty seconds away. The best performance is by Toub as Iroh, but instead of being a paternal uncle he feels like a coddling nanny to baby Zuko.
When the actors aren't reading their lines off the script, they're standing limp in the background. Shyamalan tries to direct this with a lot of long shots which feel like they should work, but the problems immediately become apparent when you actually look at the choreography and what everyone is doing in the background. In the scene of the prisoner revolt the action only happens to a group of three or so actors at once...everyone else is standing completely still in the background, or flailing their weapons around like video game characters in an idle animation.
Speaking of choreography, you would think the martial arts would at least be cool to watch right? Well, it is if you like to watch people flail around for far too long to produce cheap-looking special effects. For a series which absolutely requires a large special effects budget, this movie looks downright cheap at certain points in regards to the elemental control. One of the first shots of the movie focuses on a globe of animated water which would look out of place in a movie from 1999. When the movie lets you catch a glimpse of one of the computer animated animals it's blurry and looks superimposed over the actors. The "spirit world" is a number of film filters imposed on a shot.
This would all be acceptable if the script was at least halfway competent, but Shyamalan didn't seem to understand how people in the real world speak. Conversations are disjointed sentences belched between characters at random intervals and certain writing choices are simply bizarre. For example, we don't learn our main character's name until nearly 20 minutes into the movie. A group of people who can control rock are kept prisoner on blankets in the middle of a canyon. The commander of the Water Tribe says they need to extinguish all fires ASAP, but in the middle of the siege you can clearly see all of the lights are still lit.
It's tough to articulate how little anyone involved in this seemed to care. Shyamalan said in an interview his kids loved the series and he'd seen the entire thing. All three seasons were completed by the time this movie entered production, so he had access to every story decision he could possibly need to keep, and yet this movie feels like an Asylum mockbuster of an actual adaptation we never received.
The Rest
In September of 2015 Shyamalan said he will make a sequel after his next thriller release. I for one am looking forward to his interpretation of Toph Beifong and the rest of the second season.
Should You Watch it?
If you haven't seen the TV series, no.
If you have seen the TV series, I would give it a shot as long as you can gather a group of friends who have also watched it, because despite everything I said above this movie is one beautiful disaster of an adaptation.
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