Fridae

This film is the live action adaptation of a very popular animated series on Nickleodeon and should be a walk in the park for cinema auteur M Night Shyamalan. The original series was a well-written blend of comedy and adventure for children – Shyamalan would have to try very hard to turn this into a stinker. In fact, this should be an easy film choice. As an adult, I’ll most likely bring my favourite niece or nephew to watch this. It shouldn’t matter if I don’t know anything about the series or its fictional universe; I’d leave the explanations to my little tyke. Children love it when they know more than adults, and especially relish it if they can explain complicated things patiently to us.

Something is not quite right if the little tyke you brought reminds you periodically “No! This is not what happened in the cartoon!” at key moments of the film, or at its climax. This actually happened to the nice lady and her very vocal nephew sitting behind me in the cinema hall last night. The two girls beside my nephew constantly grumbled about how the names of their favourite characters were mangled and mispronounced. By the end of this movie, I was confused, the kid was confused – though clearly we were both wowed by the special effects and CGI in the film.

In adapting an existing work, you could choose to make a faithful (but bloodless) adaptation, or you could make it your own vision (but the fans will call for your blood). M Night’s approach takes a middle path between the two – and ends up incurring the negatives of both.

The Last Airbender condenses an entire season of 20 episodes into a little over an hour and half. Shyamalan may have chosen too many stories, resulting in a very rushed feel to the storytelling. The stories he chose from the series cover the “key moments” in its storytelling, but they are not the ones that flesh out the emotions of its characters or their developmental arcs. I’m told the “filler episodes” did that instead. On a screenplay level, the stories Shyamalan chooses to cover in the film do not serve to foreshadow and flesh out the moral quandaries that are dealt with by various key characters in the film’s climax.

It’s no wonder then that The Last Airbender lacks a true emotional core, or that it felt somewhat incoherent and rushed, or that I couldn’t quite care for the struggle of the characters even by the end of the film. What’s surprising is that it lacks the sense of comedy and adventure that was key to the original series.

Visually, the special effects are stunning, the choreography is a little fancy, but the movie was not filmed with 3D cameras. The 3D conversion seems like an afterthought and botched. 3D characters sometimes look like flat pop-outs in a pop-up book when relatively stationary. 3D characters in action scenes are victims of extreme blurring. I recommend the 2D version, if you like to be able to appreciate special effects.

Now; the more important the director, the more his adaptations are meant to stand on their own terms. I am reminded of David Lynch’s Dune. Even though he has disowned the film, it’s still one of the most unique science fiction movies ever made. It was eccentric, it was clearly his artistic vision – but it was coherent. For Shyamalan, one of the few auteurs of modern Hollywood, this was apparently an impossible task. We wish him better luck in the remaining two films in the series, which he has been signed on to make.