Reviews Film / The Last Airbender

Not as bad as I'd heard. Not as good as it could be.

Full disclosure of bias here: I followed the series that this was based on, though I didn't get into it as early as some did and I was never very involved with the fandom.

So... actually, I quite enjoyed this film. It has some major flaws, which I'll talk about in a minute, but it was fun to watch and I certainly don't regret seeing it. I'm not going to talk about the unfortunate implications in the casting here - that's already been covered by people who can explain it better than I - but I agree that there is an undercurrent of racism. The biggest problem with the movie is the pacing. It is trying to cram a 20 episode tv show into 1 and a half hours and it suffers for it. A lot of important information is conveyed via narration and infodumps, which gets grating after a while. I can see why it was necessary, but it made the first half of the film feel incredibly disjointed.

The second half is better. Once they reach the northern water tribe, the pace slows down to something more reasonable, and we've already been told most of the important information so the infodumps disappear. It is also the point where some of the changes made from the TV series - and people who have seen both the movie and the ending of the series know exactly what I'm talking about here - become obvious. Personally, I didn't mind the changes. Aang's difficulty with waterbending fitted the way they were portraying him, and did make sense for a twelve year old boy who had just learned he'd lost everything - though this is probably more in line with the Aang's character arc in the second series than in the first. My point is that while during the second half it became a looser adaptation, it also became a better film. This is something I see a lot with adaptations, and is related to the pacing problem I mentioned earlier.

The acting is reasonable. The actors were clearly struggling with a mediocre script, and some did better than others, but Katara's actress is the only one who did badly enough to irritate me.

In conclusion, it's a decent film if you can stop comparing it to the series, but would have been a lot better with a decent screenwriter and casting director.