The Last Airbender

I have no prior experience with the TV show. It doesn’t interest me at all. I watched this because my kid wanted to see it. So, all judgments of it are independent of the show. It’s canonicity and faithfulness to the source material don’t matter a damn to me. That being said, this movie is still catastrophically, comprehensively bad. Not the 5% on Rotten Tomatoes bad. I’ve seen worse. This movie doesn’t anger me with its awfulness like others might. It’s just a terribly made movie, in every facet. For starters, the editing and script spend the entire movie at odds. The editing jumps you around from scene to scene with no hint of time passed or the connective tissue between the set pieces. It assumes you have knowledge of the show to fill in the gaps. But the dialogue is one big exposition volcano. Every word — EVERY SINGLE WORD — is a never-ending barrage of plot or character that could be shown instead of told. It’s like reading the Wikipedia entry for the movie. And that extends to everything else. The action has less energy than a nap on a Sunday afternoon. Somehow, they all feel slow and lack any impact, ESPECIALLY the bending scenes, which just look like some kid doing tai-chi. The direction is as dull and lifeless as someone setting up a camcorder on a tripod and hitting the record button. It constantly fails to deliver on the scope of the world, or capture the magnitude of the events unfolding therein. Aang, the lead, is supposed to on a Hero’s Journey, but comes off as a dull and kind of selfish, and the villain is actually sympathetic, which is the opposite of how it should be. And then there’s the acting. HOLY HELL IN A HANDBASKET. Nobody, not a single person in this, is invested in their role. Dialogue is delivered with less energy than a teenager at an Arby’s drive-thru. Actors don’t emote so much as imitate AI interpretations of human emotions. And it’s not even bad enough to be campy fun. Everything feels perfunctory, like a retail clerk’s greeting as you walk into a store 5 minutes before closing. So much will it numb you that you not only won’t feel an emotional connection to what you see, you won’t even feel the passage of time. You’ll only know you’ve lost 100 minutes of your life when you look at the clock, but all you’ll have to show for it is a dead spot in your memory. It is empty incompetence. I imagine for a fan of the show, this movie is the highest insult, and I won’t begrudge those who love the show that feeling. What I see as a total outsider is not one of the worst movies of all time. It is a thorough and complete failure of the movie, but it is so of its own accord. It is monumentally boring and historically inept. It gets nothing right, not even by accident. But it is so hollow and lifeless, I can’t find the anger to put it at half a snowflake. That lowest rung of the ladder is, for me, for movies so overwhelmingly bad as to make me angry, to offend me, to leave me disgusted at its very existence. This doesn’t have enough to it to register on that scale.