Things I Learned From Movie X: The Last Airbender
By Edwin Davies
February 18, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I'm not going to lie to you; The Last Airbender is a truly terrible film. It's so bad that you can't even really mock it; it's too flat and boring and pointless for that. More than anything, my one (and I hope only) viewing of it left me feeling sad. Sad that Shyamalan, to put it delicately, is treading water so poorly that he should have drowned long ago. (To put it indelicately; he is allowing his engorged ego to suffocate his once prodigious talent in order to turn out work that is abhorrent and passionless.) Sad that he could even ruin a wonderful TV series like Avatar: The Last Airbender; turns out that whilst you can't polish a turd, you can rub shit all over a diamond. Most of all, I was sad that the film existed and that I was watching it.
Still, let's brace ourselves, down a fistful of Prozac, and try to find anything of value in, urgh, The Last Airbender.
Pronouncing names correctly isn't *that* important
Now, I can understand getting pronunciation wrong when adapting a work that was not originally in the English language. Sometimes names that are perfectly natural in one tongue sound awkward in another, so have to be adapted or changed entirely. That makes sense. Why, then, does no one in The Last Airbender pronounce their characters' names correctly, even though it was based on an American TV series? Names like Aang and Sokka, which sound exactly like they are spelt, are butchered, becoming "Ung" and "Soak a". That's like staging a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the title characters pronounce their names Rome-oh and Jewel-eye-ate; it sound ridiculous and takes the audience out of the film, even people unfamiliar with the source material because the chosen pronunciation is so counter-intuitive to the way that names are spelled and how human beings actually talk.
If they needed lessons pronouncing the names, they could have just turned on a TV and changed the channel to Nickelodeon to get a taste of how they should speak. Apparently they were kept away from televisions and, judging by the way that Noah Ringer, who plays Ung, the "uhvatar" and Last "Airbender" (okay, they at least got that right) destined to unite the four warring lands and elements, stares vacantly into the distance every time he has to emote, any and all forms of entertainment, the better to get the most stilted, joyless performances possible.
White people are awesome!
If the Nickelodeon TV show is known for anything, besides its great animation, intelligent writing and engaging characters, it's for its depiction of a multi-cultural world comprised of people from many different races and creeds. A lot of of the major characters, both good and bad, are non-white, reflecting the varied influences of the show and allowing the writers to touch on weighty themes like racism with a deft, subtle touch that can teach its audience without alienating them.
Shyamalan almost gets this concept right in the film version by casting Asian actors, including Dev Patel and Aasif Mandvi, as the villainous Prince Zuko and Commander Zhao, but by recasting Katara and Sokka, best friends of Aang and two of the most important characters in the film, as white characters he radically alters the relationship that the characters have to the world around them. Perhaps that decision might not have been so bad if he had recast all the characters in the film as white*, but instead he turns a story about people of different races coming together to save the world into one in which a bunch of white people beat the crap out of a bunch of brown people. It couldn't miss the point more if it was called the White Power Adventure Hour.
Are we going to see more instances of characters' races being reversed to no good effect? Are we just a few years away from an all-white remake of Do The Right Thing? How about a version of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man starring Michael Cera? A biopic about Martin Luther King with Tom Hanks in the title role? Actually, those last two sound good in an insane, career-killing kind of way.
*Come to think of it, it probably would be worse if all the characters were white, for much the same reason that Pixar's Cars is a deeply unsettling film; if the world is populated only by white people/cars, where did all the non-white people/humans go?
There's got to be one hell of a twist coming
About ten minutes into the film, after I had already endured a painfully slow pre-credits consisting of scrolling text that was also flatly read aloud by one of the cast (I'm not sure about you, but I've never found audiobooks to make for compelling cinema. Seriously, anything would have made that opening more exciting; having the narration over images of the war that had devastated the world, just images of the war, or even just the text over James Newton Howard's quite nice score) I found myself thinking, "Wow, The Sixth Sense seems like a lifetime ago now." By the end, I was thinking, "Wow, The Happening seems like a lifetime ago now." It really staggers me how quickly the phrase "An M. Night Shyamalan film" went from being a reason to look forward to something to being the most terrifying phrase in cinema outside of "watching this film will most likely give you syphilis", and even then the gap is closing.
So it is with a glad heart and swelling pride that I can reveal just why Shyamalan has spent much of the last half-decade sucking more than a hooker with rent to pay.
HE WAS DEAD ALL ALONG!
Well, that isn't exactly true, but it would make a pretty nifty twist. No, Shyamalan is almost certainly alive, but he is being held captive somewhere in Hollywood, and has been for some time. When he was kidnapped remains up for debate. He was almost certainly free when he directed The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, because those are all really fun, well-made movies. And he was probably still breathing the sweet air of freedom during much of the writing of The Village, but was probably taken just before he thought of a decent ending. But from Lady In The Water onwards he has most assuredly been missing, and his abductor is none other than...Steven Spielberg!
Bear with me a second, and cast your mind back, through the ether of time, to the heady days of the late '90s/early '00s. After The Sixth Sense came out, Shyamalan was anointed as the new Spielberg, a creator of compelling entertainments that tapped into something primal in each of us. Yet, like Herod before him, Spielberg could not abide the existence of one who could pose a threat to his reign (yes, in this metaphor Shyamalan is Jesus. I don't like it any more than you do), so he dispatched Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, his chief ghouls and enforcers, to take care of business. Flying into the night on their leathery wings, or driving into the night in their leather-interior Porsches, they stole Shyamalan away to a location still unknown.
Since then, the three have worked hard to maintained the ruse that Shyamalan is working, possibly through the use of a doppelganger, Kagemusha-style. The doppelganger shouts action, but Spielberg, Marshall and Kennedy make all the creative decisions on his pictures. Most importantly, they make all the wrong creative decisions, ensuring that the films can't possibly be good. As each one cheapens his legacy, it brings them closer to their eventual endgame in which they leave Shyamalan on Sunset Boulevard, his reputation in tatters, and leave him to a life of obscurity, the once great prodigy unable to share his gift with the world.
Now, you can discount this as nothing but hearsay and scaremongering, but I'm telling you that once they get away with it once, what's to stop Spielberg and his crew from doing it again to preserve his dominance? Because, if they aren't stopped, they will strike again, and when J.J. Abrams shows up in a ditch somewhere, the DreamWorks logo burned into his arm with some kind of specially designed cattle prod, don't go saying that there were no warning signs.