The Last Airbender (Paramount, Nickelodeon, Blinding Edge, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched two movies on disc, a Blu-Ray of the 2010 film The Last Airbender, a movie we’d been curious about which was based on a series of “graphic novels” (the term of art for book-length comic books, usually if not always of somewhat more serious content than the magazine-style comics we grew up with) and a Nickelodeon TV series called Avatar: The Last Airbender created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. It tells the tale of a quasi-primitive world ruled by the classic four elements – air, water, earth and fire – where for centuries peace, love and harmony reigned under the wise guidance of an “Avatar,” the only person who could “bend” (i.e., physically manipulate by waving his hands in the air) all the elements. Only 100 years before the action of the film, the 12-year-old boy Aang (Noah Ringer), who was supposed to be the next Avatar, disappeared and ended up frozen in ice, something like Captain America between the 1940’s and 1960’s, while the Fire Benders took advantage of his absence to develop technology and use it to try to conquer the realms still controlled by the other “benders.” They massacred Aang’s entire tribe and laid waste to the earth-benders’ community, but the water-benders were able to hold out against them because, at least if given half a chance, water puts out fire. Aung is liberated from suspended animation by a brother-and-sister team, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), who discover that he’s the world’s last remaining air-bender (hence the title) and decide they need to protect him from capture by the fire people, who travel around the earth’s ocean in a quite spectacular-looking steamship and eventually turn out to have a whole fleet of them while everybody else still seems to be living in primitive villages of huts. (I asked Charles if that meant The Last Airbender qualified as steampunk, and he said, “No, this is magic.”)

Meanwhile various representatives of the Fire People are trying to capture Aung because they’re worried that the emergence of a living, functioning Avatar will undo their plans for world domination and genocide against the other people. The most interesting character in the story is Prince Zuko (Dev Patel, the only cast member I’d heard of before), son of the ruler of the Fire People, who’s been disowned by his father and won’t be admitted back to the family until he captures the Avatar. What the Fire People plan to do with the Avatar – either enslave him and turn his powers to evil or just kill him – isn’t clear, but what is clear is that the Avatar Aung has powers of his own, which like all the other demonstrations of power in this movie are represented by martial-arts gestures and moves. The Last Airbender was originally filmed with the “A”-word in the title, but Paramount dropped it at the last minute after the smash success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) essentially used up the word as the basis for a fiction film. Also, Paramount was obviously hoping to build a Last Airbender franchise – and they had plenty of story material with which to do it: the last time I was in a Barnes & Noble virtually an entire shelf of their graphic-novel section was taken up by Avatar: The Last Airbender comic books, in large format and elaborately hard-bound. Unfortunately, the film didn’t do well enough at the box office – according to imdb.com, the production cost was $150 million and it grossed $40 million on its opening weekend (the Fourth of July weekend in 2010), not a mega-flop but not the kind of numbers that would have encouraged the “suits” at Paramount to green-light the sequelae.

Part of the problem with this film is its director, M. Night Shaymalan, who also wrote the script based on the comic books/graphic novels/TV scripts, and while they deserve credit for putting a potential popcorn franchise in the hands of a visionary director with a reputation for sophisticated films (though quite frankly I know little about Shaymalan; the only other film of his I’ve seen is The Sixth Sense, so I’ve seen his dead people). The Last Airbender is one of those frustrating fantasy stories in which, because in a fantasy literally anything can happen, the writers make anything happen regardless of whether it makes sense or is consistent with the assumptions behind the story as they’ve been explained to us earlier. In the middle of the film, once the three main characters have made it from the Southern Water Kingdom to the Northern Water Kingdom, we’re introduced to two new characters, or at least entities, Moon Spirit and Ocean Spirit. They’re represented by medium-sized fish with translucent bellies, and in the film’s most shocking scene one of the Fire People’s leaders captures the Moon Spirit fish and pulls it out of the water in a bag, which he then stabs with a sword. The significance of this is that the only way the Water People can defeat the Fire People and their steam technology is if they fight them at night when the moon comes out, and if the Moon Spirit is dead they can’t harness the moon’s power for their side. So the Northern Water Girl that Sokka has fallen in love with (and who looks so much like the ice princess in Disney’s Frozen I had to remind myself that The Last Airbender was actually made two years before Frozen) has to drown herself to restore the Moon Spirit to life – which she does, much to Sokka’s understandable upset, in the one scene in the movie that actually touches some level of human emotion. Another wrinkle is that, while Aung is supposed to be the Avatar and the Avatar is supposed to be able to control all elements, at the start he can only “bend” air. From the people in the Northern Water Kingdom he learns how to bend water, but at the end of this movie he still doesn’t know how to “bend” earth or fire, and the last scene before the credits indicates that that would have been one of the subjects of the sequels that never materialized.

The Last Airbender has the usual virtue and the usual fault of a movie actually based on comic books – as opposed to a film that simply uses characters that originated in comics. The usual virtue of such movies is sheer visual splendor; since the original comic-book artists have already created the visual design, all the director, cinematographer and set designers have to do is copy the original and they are virtually guaranteed to come up with a visually splendid film. The down side is that movies based on comic books tend to be wretchedly episodic, a series of visually stunning but dramatically ambiguous episodes that don’t add up to a coherent plot. Charles also complained that scenes that seemed moving kept getting undercut by other, rather childish bits, reflecting the property’s origins as an animated TV series for kids and the involvement of Nickelodeon, Viacom’s kids’ channel, in its production. The Last Airbender was utterly gorgeous to look at but didn’t work for me as a movie; the pathos of Dev Patel’s character (the only person in this movie who’s morally ambiguous instead of all-good or all-bad), who at one point his dad suspects of being the beneficent Blue Spirit in bad-guy disguise, might have worked dramatically if Shaymalan and the original writers he was adapting had been more interested in developing him, but as it stands he’s just a mess of a character and Patel, the film’s finest actor, is at sea trying to figure out how to play him. I can see why this film flopped while the Cameron Avatar, with more fully fleshed out characters and a plot that made sense (and was science fiction rather than fantasy), was a smash hit and revived the market for 3-D movies – The Last Airbender was also shot in 3-D and, while we weren’t watching it that way (and since 2009 my eyesight, especially in my right eye, has deteriorated enough it would be hard for me to watch a 3-D movie) it would have been nice to see it that way at the time even though the task of making it look like Noah Ringer could do martial-arts moves in mid-air was probably one of the components that pushed the budget to $150 million, but it’s not a franchise I’m particularly interested in exploring again.