The Last Airbender Review

The source is one of the best structured adventure series American television has produced, and this adaptation keeps almost none of what made it work. Twenty episodes are pressed into a hundred minutes, which leaves no room for the show's comedy, its slow building friendships, or the moral argument at its center. Explanation fills the space instead. Characters stop to narrate history to one another, a voiceover covers the gaps, and whole sequences are summarized aloud rather than staged. By the time Aang finally does something extraordinary in the last act, the film has announced it three times.

The performances suffer from that same script. Every actor is handed exposition and asked to deliver it flat, and the young leads in particular never get a scene in which anyone is simply funny or frightened. The casting drew a serious and durable objection, since a world built visibly on Inuit, Chinese and Tibetan sources was led largely by white performers, and Shyamalan's public defense of the choice did not help. Changing the pronunciation of established names read as one more sign the film had not listened to its own source.

The craft is genuinely good and should be said plainly. Andrew Lesnie photographs the water tribe villages and the northern fortress with real grandeur, and James Newton Howard writes a score better than the film around it. The post conversion to 3D darkened all of that in theaters, which is its own small tragedy. A trilogy was planned. None of it was made.