So M. “Fail” Shmylanalanan has eeked out his final works. It lays like a half aborted 150 million dollar fetus upon the steps of a post-apocalyptic hollywood, as this may herald the death of cinema.
In case you can’t tell, this movie isn’t just bad, it’s like an A list director got lots of money to make a shiny B Movie that is an insult to B-Movies. The fact that this is adapted from a cartoon is no excuse to stop trying altogether.
Shymlademlan has only done me one favor, I won’t have to keep misspelling his name because he will never work again. My god, the director that gave us 6th Sense and the Village has just shown that he’s completely lost it. This movie is like watching him die and I found myself frantically looking around for someone to help him. Dev Patal from slumdog millionaire is about the ONLY person in the cast to justify the title “Actor” and his performance was just indifferently apathetic at best. Every other list of never-up-and-coming pseudo-pretty faces who aspire to someday reach High-School level acting will fade justifiably into the ether.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the effects people, the editors, the actors, were all brilliant and M. Shymalox is simply burying them in shit and no-talent writing. If English is NOT your first language, do NOT helm the writing for a movie with english dialogue. If you are adapting from a cartoon that’s charming and funny, do not make your life’s mission to remove both charm and funny from the movie. These seem like easy to understand concepts… but no… they do not cross the foreign border that is M. Shadooxmleys failing brain stem.
I haven’t even tackled the movie yet, because honestly, I have no fucking clue what happened. There were some ice people, who found a kid, who is capable of wielding all four elements, but can’t. So the fire people are hindustani dickheads and want to kill/enslave everyone, most everyone has let this happen until the arrival of a bald kid who can’t do anything but sort of fly and knock people over. When they make a piss-poor rebellion and end up BACK at the water people who are all white people dressed as asians and live far away but have the exact same environments.
Meanwhile the worst rendered CG Dragon in history spouts oblique fortune cookie advice during confusing meditation sequences by said useless bald kid, who seems to gleam some inner strength from it. In what I can only describe as dialogue written by re-translating japanese dialogue written by a dyslexic Scotsman. With such dialogue-ish gems as
“We have to show them we believe our beliefs as much they believe theirs.”
What???
Continuity in this movie may have been provided by David Lynch if it wasn’t so obviously, accidentally shitty, where as the lynch meister would at least confuse with an artistic flair.
If this sounds like the horrible scribblings of a 6 year old and I’ve given you no idea what the movie is about, it’s because I simply DO NOT know. There’s a kid and he gets some powers and another kid who’s dad is evil and a bunch of people fighting with fire and water but not suffering terribly from it because it’s a nickelodean movie and people just keep getting knocked aside (to die offscreen I assume)
At the end, (which I have no fear of spoiling) the bald kid who appears to be reading from cue cards the whole movie, summons a tidal wave, which then fades back into the ocean, doing NO damage to simply scare the bad guys away. Also a fish, who is the moon(?) gets killed, and some chick gets her hair color back and dies, after a 9 second love affair with one of the blandest main characters ever, who might be someone’s brother, I just don’t care.
You leave this movie with a sense of dumbfounded wonder, that you literally just spent money to see this and you HAVE to justify that somehow, but you just can’t. I felt stupid for several hours after watching this movie, because if you watch retarded people do retarded things long enough, you start to feel a little retarded. I can safely say that this movie made me dumber, I have suffered true intelligence damage from watching it. There is literally nothing memorable or redeeming about this movie. I could watch it 3 more times and give you NO more information as to what it is we’re supposed to care about or accomplish.
With every bad movie comes an opportunity to be “So bad” that it’s good, that you can laugh or poke fun at it and flip its intent on its end. Unfortunately, no amount of spinning can alter this pile of shit from being a pile of shit. M. Evening Shmallaleeon can go blissfully into the afterlife of directing and manage a 7-11, knowing that he has fucked his career so far into the ground that he’s punched through to china, where they will hate this even more for the racist re-casting.
Fuck you, Fuck this movie, Fuck M. Night, and if you get tempted to see this to see if it’s really “just that bad” – Don’t. It’s even worse.
Gosh darn it! I was really looking forward to this one, too.
Here’s a snippet of an article from HollyWood.com regarding this movie –
Well, “watched” isn’t even the right word. You don’t simply “watch” The Last Airbender, after all; it’s so damned lifeless that you exhume its corpse for 103 minutes. After walking out of my local megaplex-turned-mausoleum, my initial reaction was that Shyamalan’s latest movie was worthless. Absolutely worthless. Utterly devoid of any net-positive contributions to the world.