Fish and Cherries Productions

The Last Airbender is a true hate crime of a movie. Everything about it is wretched, from the wooden acting to the craptacular special effects to the needless exposition that takes up damn near 100% of the dialogue. Is there even any point bringing up the animated show it was allegedly based on? Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most nuanced, charming, smart, and mature animated shows to come out in the previous decade. This movie captures none of that and defiles it even further by butchering the characters’ names and races while simultaneously sucking all the joy and charm out of it in an attempt to make it super cereal. Every single decision is baffling from a filmmaking standpoint with logic being butchered thoroughly and the “show, don’t tell” principle being violated so hard that it could legally file for a restraining order. It is this generation’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and definitely one of the worst movies I’ve seen, if not the worst.

And yet, I can’t be mad at it. It’s too pathetic to incite rage in me. It’s basically a cinematic version of a bad fanfiction that tries to retell a beloved story and make it extra serious to “improve it.” Nothing came of the movie either; for all of M. Night Shyamalan’s proclamations that he would gladly make a sequel, no one has moved forward on it. And why should they? This was one of the most reviled movies of the new millennium and all in all a completely pointless movie. Shyamalan may have gotten some cred back with The Visit, but he has a long way to go to scrub off the bad karma from this.

To sum up, on a scale from one to five stars, I give this movie three flaming farts. There’s your airbending right there.