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UPDATE: Sources tell me that Paramount’s The Last Airbender opened to $16+M Thursday, including the $3 million from its midnight shows. The pic based on the Nickelodeon animated TV series should be on its way to $60M for the 5-day July Fourth Holiday and a shot at 2nd place.
Hard to believe but there’s another movie opening this weekend besides the Twilight Saga’s Eclipse. It’s Paramount’s The Last Airbender 3D from M Night Shyamalan, and I’ve just learned it quietly opened to a solid $3 million in Thursday midnight screenings because of the studio’s counterprogramming strategy. Paramount says that’s the highest midnight gross this summer for a non-sequel. Unfortunately, the studio is stuck with a high price tag of $145M, including the 3D conversion costs of this actioner based on the animated TV series from Nickelodeon called “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, and what rival studios are telling me is at least a $50+M marketing campaign. But the movie has been tracking well with males of all ages and kids and now looks to break M Night’s recent drought at the box office. That’s despite horrid reviews — only 6% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, worse than this summer’s biggest bomb Jonah Hex. It should come in 2nd this weekend neck and neck with Disney’s Toy Story 3 but far behind Summit’s Eclipse with between $50M and $60M for the 5-day July 4th holiday thanks to help from higher 3D ticket prices. Remember that Sunday’s theatrical grosses will be way down because that’s when Independence Day falls this year. But The Last Airbender is expected to make most of its money internationally.
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I’m a huge fan of the tv show, so I saw this at midnight. After reading the terrible reviews I was not expecting much, but what I saw onscreen was unbelievably disappointing. Fans of the cartoon will be appalled at m. Nights inability to comprehend the series– part of it’s warmth was the comedic slapstick of the young characters, something that was completely absent from the movie, unless you count dev patels terrible acting as comedy (the other actors were just as bad if not worse, I just didn’t stick around long enough to watch credits to find out their names). The cartoon was amazing because of the rich deep characters that you got to follow on a episodic basis, something that was completely forgotten in the movie as you rush from event to event with someone narrating and trying to explain it all in between, leaving it feel like you just went on an hour and a half tour through a bad amusement park.
And on the 3d note, this should be required viewing at film schools on how not to film a 3d movie. After being blown away by the trailers before it (the 3d now is getting really remarkable as studios learn to use it better), there was never once a ‘wow’ moment in airbender. Night likes to leave either the foreground or background object out of focus, which looks terrible on 3d.
As a fan, I am mad that night messed up what I thought was going to be a layup movie for him. My friends that had never seen the cartoon are mad that I dragged them out at midnight on a wednesday. This movie misses in so many areas it’s unbelievable. I still hope they make the sequel like they alluded to at the end, but I hope recasted and new director and writer.
I wanted to like it and was rooting for Shyamalan to deliver a comeback. But no. It’s 100 minutes of backstory and exposition that doesn’t add up to ANYTHING. I saw this at midnight and by the time it was over (which felt like three hours later) I literally had NO IDEA what the movie was about. It angers me that such established and respected filmmakers like Frank Marshall (and M. Night) promised something special and delivered garbage. It’s like they had all the ingredients laid out on the table to make this amazing, delicious cake but what they ended up making tasted like sh*t. Shyamalan needs to go away for awhile and come back when he can TELL A STORY again. It looked pretty though.
really so just because rotten tomatoes gave it 6% its gonna tell me not to go see it anymore? are you guys serious? this movie looks like fun and i will for sure go see it this weekend. are you guys like what 40yrs old or something? you act like if EVERYBODY is going to rotten tomatoes to see if the critics gave it good reviews and if it didn’t “OH NO LETS GO SEE IT” you guys are assholes. I don’t take movie advices from from critics because half of them are like 50yrs old …
overall, i thought the movie was good. although some of you wont share feelings but i enjoyed it. it could have been better but overall i enjoyed it
Perhaps the worst movie ever made
I’m not a Twilight fan but Eclipse was way better then Airbender. It was an awful movie one of the worst in a long time.
I don’t understand the hate with Twilight but that movie was at least entertaining and had pretty good acting compared to that trash called Airbender.
Everything about this movie was bad, the cast, director, everything. Anyone who greenlights one more M. Night Shyamalan movie should be killed.
I was going to see it this weekend until I read Roger Ebert’s review. Apparently the 3D conversion is really bad, and the special effects aren’t that special. So I’ll save my money for Inception.
I suspect AIRBENDER will under-perform the tracking and end the 5-days with under $50m. Kids are notoriously hard to track accurately, so perhaps they’ll show up strong and mitigate the awful reviews and word of mouth– but I doubt it.
To quote my seven year old son, who is a HUGE fan of the TV series after seeing the movie – “Dad, this movie sucks! I’m telling all my friends not to see it.”
OMG, what a HORRIBLE movie. I had not seen reviews, & am not familiar with the TV show… All I can say is the acting was worse than anything I have seen in decades. There were multiple voice-overs to explain the confusing jumps from one scene to another (usually voiced by the female lead) who also had only ONE look (urgently-concerned) plastered on her face the entire movie).
I can’t type anymore, because then I’ll have to spend MORE of my life thinking about this HORRIBLE movie! Bleah! I love movies, especially fantasy, but I recommend everyone stay away from this atrocity.
OH! Almost forgot… The movie opens with a “chapter card” after rhe main opening sequence, & the card says something like “Chapter 1: Learning Water”. The ENTIRE movie later, there had been no more chapter cards… The movie ended, & I raged “You mean I sat through this pile of crap & it’s only chapter ONE of who knows how many chapters?!?!?!” Somebody shoot me, please!” Or, rather, somebody send M Night away so he can’t hurt us with any more “movies”.
M. Night Shyamalan Finally Made A Comedy
You giggled at The Happening. You snorted at The Village. But now, for the first time ever, former indie auteur M. Night Shyamalan has set out to make a gonzo comedy on purpose, with The Last Airbender. Spoilers ahead!
M. Night Shyamalan has always been fascinated by playing with genre conventions. His famed love of twist endings is really an obsession with tweaking his audience’s expectations, and his best film, Unbreakable, is a superhero movie that comments on the superhero genre. It was inevitable that he would slide into full-on genre pastiche.
And The Last Airbender is a lavish parody of big-budget fantasy epics. It’s got everything: the personality-free hero, the nonsensical plot twists, the CG clutter, the bland romance, the new-age pablum. No expense is spared — Shyamalan even makes sure to make fun of distractingly shitty 3-D, by featuring it in his movie.
This is the part where I would insert a quick plot synopsis of the film, but it’s really unnecessary – Shyamalan has boiled every epic heroic story of the past 20 years down to its most basic, primal soup-y essence, so he can spray it all over the audience, in a kind of Hero’s-Journey bukkake. You will be finding chunks of Joseph Campbell’s calcified spooge behind your ears for three days after watching this film, no matter how many times you bathe.
Shyamalan’s true achievement in this film is that he takes a thrilling cult TV series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and he systematically leaches all the personality and soul out of it — in order to create something generic enough to serve as a universal spoof of every epic, ever. All the story beats from the show’s first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean? We never know, because it’s time for more stuff to happen. You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place. And it’s laughing louder than you are, because it’s got Dolby surround-sound and you’re choking on your suspension of disbelief.
The comic recipe starts with the actors, who manage to recite every line of dialogue as though they’re ordering lunch for the fourth time that day. (Because they were still peckish, or because their lunch order got lost the first three times.) Nicola Peltz, who plays Katara, has one line of dialogue over and over through the movie: “We need to go!” She says this every few minutes, because this is Shyamalan’s way of letting us know that one set piece is over and it’s time for the next set piece to begin. “We need to go!” Depending on how badly the heroes need to go, she may pout, pushing her lips out into a trombone-player’s embouchure, for emphasis. The film is simultaneously frenetic, racing at top speed, and yet totally disaffected, like the monomyth with mononucleosis.
Katara’s the girl sidekick and sorta-love interest to Aang, who’s an 11-year-old monk with a bunch of cool tattoos and elemental powers. We’re told that Aang is struggling with a lot of heavy shit — genocide, man. It sucks, you know? — but mostly he’s just sort of there. The brilliance of Noah Ringer’s performance cannot be understated — he is the first performer ever to convince me utterly that he is standing in front of a greenscreen. Even when Ringer is filmed on location, in front of a real-life mountain, he still manages to create the impression that his surroundings have been keyed in, and he’s actually in a studio somewhere. This is a huge, crucial factor in the way the movie makes fun of its own epic-ness. And I think everybody who has criticized Shyamalan for casting white actors as Asian characters in this film should admit they were wrong. Clearly, Shyamalan tried to cast Asians, but he just couldn’t find any whose performances were lifeless enough.
I haven’t even mentioned the dialog yet, which is where the real comic force of the movie comes in. Like when Aang and his friends are taken prisoner by the Fire Nation and locked up with a bunch of Earth-benders, in a big dirt enclosure. And Aang looks at the Earth-benders and shouts, “EARTH BENDERS! THERE IS DIRT UNDER YOUR FEET! THERE’S DIRT ALL AROUND YOU! WHY DON’T YOU FIGHT?” And everybody’s like, “Whoa.” They notice that there’s a lot of dirt here, all right. How did they miss that? It’s like they’ve got selective dirt-blindness.
Later in the film, Katara says my favorite line ever, “We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs.” It’s as if Shyamalan had a cue card that he was planning to turn into an actual bit of dialog, but he forgot. There’s a lot of cue-card writing in this film, and it feels like Shyamalan is leaving things as sign-posty as possible, in order to make fun of the by-the-numbers storytelling in so many Hollywood epics. The master has come to school us all.
The third member of our main trio is Sokka, who’s played by one of the vampires from Twilight. At one point, he falls in love with a silver-haired girl with insane costume jewelry, who looks like a refugee from the “wink of an eye” people, out of the original Star Trek. We know that he’s got the hots for her, because Katara tells us in a quickie voice-over.
Oh yeah – that’s another one of the ways in which this movie pokes fun at the very idea of epic fantasy: the endless confusing voice-over, in which tons of important story developments happen off-camera while we’re looking at a picture of a tree or a CG mountain. Because why do we privilege the story of the hero’s progress over the tree?, Shaymalan asks. Why does the original Star Wars insist on showing us Luke Skywalker training with a lightsaber, instead of telling us that Luke Skywalker trained with a lightsaber while showing us a tracking shot of some rocks? Why pretend that one thing is more important than the other thing? Why pretend that any of it has any meaning? As a wise man once wrote, “A menu is as good as a myth.”
Also, if the original Star Wars had given us a tracking shot of rocks, with a voiceover explaining that Luke was learning to use a lightsaber someplace else, it would have freed up more screen time for Luke to stand around shouting, “JAWAS! THERE IS SAND UNDER YOUR FEET!”
Not to mention the many scenes in which characters rattle off exposition, and it feels as if somebody must have fed the scripts from the TV series into an office shredder, and then glued some of the word stripes together. You can just imagine Shyamalan stopping the actors and demanding a retake, over and over again, because the actors were still stringing the sentences together as if they had a logical sequence. It must have taken hours to get the right level of random, Ketamine-overdose level of dissociation into every scene where somebody explains about importance of the avatar and how you have to feel your feelings, in order to gerbil machete fish dumpling crank handle. At its most sublime and brain-sluicing, the expository scenes approach the level of the opening act of D-War. And that’s high praise.
Recently, at an Asian fusion restaurant, I was offered a thing called an Asiadilla. This was a quesadilla with roast duck and hoisin sauce inside it. Just let that idea sink into your mind and permeate your tastebuds — in essence, it’s Beijing Duck crossed with Tex-Mex. With extra cheese. Watching The Last Airbender is like being force-fed a hundred Asiadillas, washed down with a pitcher of overly sweet Saketinis. The Asian kitsch flies at you, from the yin-yang fish to the army of Samurai who are all South Asian. You want a cheesy foreign backdrop for your fantasy epic? M. Night Shyamalan will smother you in cheese! Because the setting, in this movie, is just another trickster making fun of your desire to believe in it. Airbender’s Asia is a giant pantomime, and you are Puss in Boots.
Through all of this chaos, two actors wander like lost souls, and they’re really the twin poles of this undertaking. On the one side, you have Aasif Mandvi, of The Daily Show fame, who plays Commander Zhao in exactly the same way he handles the most ridiculous crap he has to say to Jon Stewart. Every line he gets, he shouts and arches one eyebrow comically, in case you didn’t already know this was a send-up. (Anyone who’s watched Mandvi in the TV series Jericho knows he’s capable of subtlety and real emotion, so the fact that every one of his lines of dialogue in this film feels like it should be prefaced with an arch, “That’s right, Jon,” feels totally deliberate.)
And then there’s Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He’s an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that’s wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub’s face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who’s playing the uncle of Dev Patel’s tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage. (Patel is pretty good when he’s acting opposite Toub.) It’s a weird dichotomy in this film – the film’s villains are the only Asian people in the movie, but they’re also the only ones who have any personality whatsoever.
The Last Airbender, it must be said, features some incredibly great special effects (despite the aforementioned CG-overload at times) and the fight choreography is often really great. We occasionally glimpse Momo, the flying lemur-bat, and we get a couple nice moments with Appa, the six-legged sky bison, and the landscape of Greenland is used to nice effect in a few scenes. Every now and then, a cool idea or moment from the TV show breaks through the drone of engines grinding forward.
There are plenty of bad movies that know they’re bad — but TLA is the first bad movie that knows that you are bad. You deserve your full share of the blame for this movie’s existence. Airbender doesn’t just poke fun at its entire genre, with its hyperactive mix of randomness and blandness – it actually MST3Ks its audience. Noah Ringer and that Civil War vampire from Twilight may seem at first to be sleepwalking through a rote adventure, but you realize at last that they’re actually delivering a commentary track on your callowness as an audience. It’s deadpan, but unmistakable nonetheless. Aang and Sokka become Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, staring out of the screen and bemusedly riffing on our feeble attempts to invest in this saga.
In the traditional hero’s journey, the hero resists the call to adventure, before finally passing over the threshold into the dangerous but juicy fantasy world where he comes into his power. And this is what happens to you, the audience, as you watch The Last Airbender, only in reverse. You resist following this movie into the dark, scary place where heroes are pieces of furniture and heroism is a Monty Python routine performed by someone who’s never seen the original episodes. But then it’s too late – you’ve passed over the threshold, you are committed, you are on the journey and the story won’t let you go. You have been drawn into a place where you will lose, not only your power as an audience member, but quite possibly your mental faculties altoghether. You are lost in the wilderness, and Shyamalan is your trickster guide on a journey into nothingness, from which only your soul-dead shadow will ever return. Too late, you understand: This is the last logic-bending movie you will ever be able to sit through.
In the middle of a summer of proctologically un-thought-out action movies, The Last Airbender breezes past self-parody into a full-on comedy assault that will have you hearing Shyamalan’s mocking laughter in your sleep. It’s an absurdist masterpiece, in which a million things happen but nothing takes place. (In completely flat 3-D.) This is the standard by which all future epics will be judged.
HORRIBLE HORRIBLE HORRIBLE, please don’t go see this movie to send a message to hollywood that M Night must not be allowed to ruin anymore movies.
I saw the movie and LOVED it. Critics make me sick.
That’s because the only people who bother to write reviews are people who don’t like something and they wanna vent. People who loved it, like me, just go home happy and skip jumping on the internet to rant and rave. I truly loved the movie, and those who didn’t simply didn’t connect for their own reasons.. it was a fantastic adaption of the series, and the only problem I had with it was that it was too short.. paramount shouldn’t have capped the time at 2 hours in M. Knight’s contract… hopefully we’ll see a director’s cut that is the way M. Knight envisioned it.
ok so even with the bad reviews i went and i got to say the movie is good. There was a LOT to cover in the 1st book/season and i think it did it very well. The story it self is fast paced and even with bad reviews, its good. I’m a huge fan of avatar the last airbender, and it was done well. i think this story is more for the avatar fans then anything else.
*~ashley~*
I went knowing about the dismal reviews, and without knowing a thing about the story. I just like Shyamalan films. The Last Airbender exceeded my expectations and then some. The characters had heart and were sympathetic, I followed the story just fine despite my ignorance and the effects were top-notch.Yes, some of the dialogue was a bit wooden, but it’s based on anime, not Shakespeare. My whole family enjoyed it, there was nothing offensive, and we’ll see the next one when it comes out.
I think The Last Airbender was a great movie. I can’t wait for the next one. The sad thing is that people on rotton tomatoes said horrible things about the movie. I’m glad that people don’t care as much about reviews. I am writing this because someone needs to stand up for this movie and give the second one a second chance. It will be awesome just wait and see. The graphics were awesome. The acting wasn’t that bad and I love who played Zuko. The cast is amazing. Please stop listening to the crowd. I don’t think we should ignore the facts anymore. Make the second movie a reality! Thank You!!!
xoxo….the biggest fan on earth
I want my money back. It was a complete waste of time and money. It was definitely a failure. It was not just the script, the main actors and actress were not able to act. The minute the movie started, I knew it was not going to be bad. Matter of fact, I fell asleep half way.