Dvd
The Last Airbender
M. Night Shyamalan's (The Sixth Sense, The Village) adaptation of the hit cartoon show Avatar: The Last Airbender (see more on the show here). The story follows the adventures of Aang, a ten-year-old successor to a long line of Avatars who must put his childhood ways aside and fight the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations!
Includes Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as the villainous Zuko and our own Cliff Curtis as Firelord Ozai.
Starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Jackson Rathbone, Cliff Curtis, Nicola Peltz, Jessica Andres
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan ('The Sixth Sense', 'Unbreakable', 'Signs', 'The Village', 'The Happening')
Written by Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, M. Night Shyamalan
Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie ('The Lord of the Rings', 'King Kong', 'The Lovely Bones')
Music by James Newton Howard
Fantasy, Family, Adventure, Adaptation | 1hr 44mins | Rated (PG) | Contains Low Level Violence | Origin: USA | Official Site »
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Flicks review
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2
M. Night Shyamalan is back and this time he doesn’t have a big twist to cap off the movie. This is not the world I grew up in. Instead he’s adapting the children’s animated TV series Avatar (no, not that one). The kids will like it – I saw some recreating the big fight scenes after the screening – but there’s not much to enthuse the adults who take them along.
The story itself is a fairly generic fantasy outing and is played without much subtlety or depth. There’s a voiceover that narrates the onscreen action most of the time and some blunt dialogue delivered by wooden actors. Kids will enjoy the supernatural battles but older viewers will pick out the flaws pretty easily. For example, why do the water tribe have so much difficulty defeating their fire opponents when the battle takes place on the ocean?
Ah well, the special effects during these scenes are impressive enough and go some way to making up for the uninspiring production design – bog standard, Oriental influenced. Even if further adaptations are made, this already feels like a poor man’s Lord of the Rings.
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The people's reviews
41 reviews
Press Reviews
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Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert)
The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.
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Christchurch Press (Charlie Gates)
2
CHARLIE GATES is unimpressed by a career nosedive from director M Night Shyamalan.
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Empire (UK)
2
Far from the catastrophe the US bewailed, but still disappointingly clunky. Notch it between Eragon (below) and Dragonslayer (above) on a sliding scale of fantasy filmmaking.
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Hollywood Reporter
Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules.
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Los Angeles Times
Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind.
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New York Times
The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.
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Total Film (UK)
1
Half a star for James Newton Howard’s imperious score and another for Andrew Lesnie’s lensing. But even that’s marred by muddy 3D in a film lacking any sort of dimension.
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Variety (USA)
This is all enormously disappointing, of course, since the best we could hope for from a live-action "Avatar" adaptation is the mind-blowing equivalent of our first encounters with wire-fu, rather than this cartoony nonsense.
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