The Last Airbender
(2010)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!... More
Includes Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as the villainous Zuko and our own Cliff Curtis as Firelord Ozai.Hide
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Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Jackson Rathbone, Cliff Curtis, Nicola Peltz, Jessica Andres
Written by Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, M. Night Shyamalan
Cinematographed by Andrew Lesnie ('The Lord of the Rings', 'King Kong', 'The Lovely Bones')
On Demand, DVD & Blu-Ray
Available from 5 providers
Flicks Review
BY Andreas Heinemann Flicks Writer
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.... More
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.Hide
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The Last Airbender
BY Jashezilla superstar
I've never seen the show in my life but this was surprisingly okay.
There are a lot of people out there who are just spoilt rotten with what they see! Far too critical and fried imaginations! Stop watching so much TV! I loved it. Took my 7 year old son, who did point out a few differences, but he totally got invovled in the movie and it brought the cartoon to life for him. He was a big Avatar (the other Avartar) and he still enjoyed this. All those critical moaners need to learn to stop and smell the roses.
BY Heather7 wannabe
This movie was quite good, but I believe it could have been a million times better. The acting was pretty good but got quite over the top in certain scenes, the fight scenes were awesome but all in all the movie was only quite good, I have seen much better.
Showing 5 of 42 reviews. See all reviews
The Press Reviews
6%
of critics recommend.
Rotten Tomatoes Score. More reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. Full Review
CHARLIE GATES is unimpressed by a career nosedive from director M Night Shyamalan. Full Review
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. Full Review
Even during the climax, the film still is struggling to introduce the world of the film and its strange rules. Full Review
Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind. Full Review
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. Full Review
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. Full Review
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. Full Review
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