So, a short while ago I finally decided to sit down and watch M. Night Shyamalan's adaption of one of my favorite TV series of all time, Avatar: The Last Airbender. I figured that, rather than continuing to slam it as a complete bomb sight unseen, I'd do the honorable thing and see the movie. At least then, I thought, I'd be able to couch my criticisms in legitimate points rather than general bashing broadsides.
That, to put it lightly, was a terrible mistake. I'd never felt betrayed by a movie before, but there really is a first time for everything. This post is as much a stab at catharsis as it is a dissection of what makes Shyamalan's adaption so awful. My apologies to die-hard fans of the series, as I wrote this post to be understandable even for people who haven't seen the show. If you'd be so kind as to bear with me when I explain things you take for granted, that would be awesome. Now, without any further ado, let's get to it.
The film adaption fails profoundly with regards to both crucial pieces of what makes a story like Avatar: The Last Airbender work so well: world-building and characterization. I’ll tackle world-building first, since it’s the more straightforward of the two.
In any story that contains fantastical elements, one of the most important things to do is ground those elements in something that we can relate to, or at the very least to frame them within a set of rules that gives them context and consistency.
In the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, the “bending” mechanic of the series is quickly established in a cohesive way that makes sense and stays consistent for the rest of the show’s run. The principal point is that each style of bending is rooted in an existent, real-world martial art: Earthbending is based on Hung Gar, Firebending on Shaolin Kung Fu, and so on. Each of these styles mirrors the physical nature of the element being bent, creating a transition so seamless between movement of the body and movement of the element that the process becomes totally normal. Or, as is the case with the Firebenders, the creation of the element itself.
Now, contrast that with Shyamalan’s home-brewed mechanics for the elemental “bending” mechanic of the film. Not only can Firebenders no longer create their own fire out of their internal energy (with one notable exception), but the series of movements they have to go through in order to manipulate fire at all is painfully laborious. Not only does it look incredibly overwrought and stupid, but it ruins the entire concept of flow that the series so perfectly established.
The most egregious example of bending being messed up is the infamous “pebble dance” (just youtube that and you'll find it). This is the scene where it takes six Earthbenders working in concert to lift a single boulder off of the ground. Putting aside for the moment the fact that six experienced Earthbenders working in concert would be able to put a large, deep crack in the side of a cliff-face, the movements the Earthbenders do are ridiculously complex. In the series, the movements of an Earthbender are blunt, compact, and forceful—much like the earth itself. In the film, we’re treated to men flailing around like a swarm of invisible bees has descended upon them, and they’re all deathly allergic.
I was going to talk about the Spirit World next, but I have to digress for a minute and explain what makes the previous example of the “pebble dance” so irritating. In the series, that whole scene takes place in a prison camp for dissenting Earth Kingdom Earthbenders—on a ship made of metal, floating in the middle of the water. Where there is no earth, and therefore no means for the Earthbenders to bust their way out of the joint. Shyamalan seems to have thrown situational logic to the wind on this one, resulting in one of the most excruciating lines I’ve ever heard in a movie: Aang (pronounced Ay-ng, by the way) has to tell grown men, and experienced Earthbenders besides, that they are standing on solid ground.
Yes, because apparently they’re all selectively blind and completely, utterly stupid. Just so it’s here as evidence, the line is as follows:
“People! You don’t need to live like this. There is earth, right beneath your feet!”
I apologize for carving away a small piece of your soul. I’m just the messenger.
Also, in the series, the inspirational speech to the Earthbenders is delivered by Katara, the Waterbender—just one of several other female empowerment moments in the series that Shyamalan has chosen to ignore… but I’ll get to that in the characterization bit.
Now that that tangent is over and done with, we can move on to glaring world building screw-up number two: The Spirit World.
In the series, the Spirit World is very much a part of the overall Avatar universe, existing in tandem with the normal, physical world. The Avatar is the bridge between the two, being the only person who can cross back and forth without the direct intervention of a spirit. However, and here is where context and framing rear their ugly heads again, Shyamalan decides to render the whole concept muddled, unexplained and ultimately forced. In the film, Aang crosses over into the Spirit World whenever the plot feels like he needs to, where he talks to a nebulous, impossible-to-understand spirit dragon.
In the series, the Spirit World is bound to concrete rules just like everything else. The two worlds are closest to each other on the Solstices, and it is then that the Avatar can cross over most easily into the Spirit World. If it’s not the solstice, you either have to wait it out, or find somewhere in the physical world that has a strong link to the Spirit World. Try to remember that caveat, since it’ll come into play later.
Also in the series, a much clearer point is made of the fact that the Avatar is basically the Dalai Lama: he/she is a person who has been reincarnated hundreds upon hundreds of times throughout the history of the world, following the cycle of Water, Earth, Fire, Air as far as which nation they’re affiliated with. Because of this, while in the Spirit World, Aang is able to converse with his immediate predecessor to the title of Avatar: a Fire Nation man named Roku. Roku had an animal companion in the same way that Aang does, and that companion was a dragon.
Shyamalan decided to axe Roku entirely and to significantly shrink the importance of the Spirit World on the whole. He mashed up everything into a single, ill-defined glowing blue dragon that I guess was supposed to be Roku's dragon-- even though he never says anything to that effect. Rather than use Roku himself as a narrative device that seamlessly combines world building, character development and important exposition all in one person, we’re given a glowing snake with laryngitis. Simply brilliant.
This is an even greater shame when you know that, at the climax of the first season of the series, there’s a scene where Aang confronts an ancient spirit in the Spirit World that is the dictionary definition of unsettling. I’m talking the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth level of creepy. But no; tension and a sense of dramatic weight are unimportant concepts for Shyamalan, clearly.
One last point has to be made about the mishandling of the Spirit World in the film, before I move on to characterization. In the film, there are two fish that reside in a spiritual oasis at the heart of the Northern Water Tribe. One black, one white, they represent mortal incarnations of the Ocean and the Moon spirits, respectively. In the series, the white fish/Moon Spirit is still blasted into oblivion by Admiral Zhao, and the princess with the white hair (Yue) still has to give her life to revive the spirit. What happens after that, however, is where the series and the film diverge in a monumentally important way.
In the series, the Ocean Spirit is understandably pissed off that his soulmate has just been turned into a charred piece of teriyaki, and he wants revenge. Of course, none of this is verbalized, but it is implied all the same by the visuals—something Shyamalan has seemingly forgotten how to do. So Aang decides to use his unique ability as the bridge between the Spirit and Mortal Worlds to perform a spiritual merger with the Ocean Spirit. This essentially takes the form of a gigantic, fat version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon materializing out on the battlefront, where it rampages while Aang semi-controls it from the safety of the oasis.
Long story short, all the Water Tribe people are safe because they bow down in appropriately terrified reverence, while scores upon scores of Fire Nation soldiers are drowned, and their battleships are capsized or otherwise ruined. It’s a truly awe-inspiring sight, and I can’t understand why Shyamalan decided to substitute that with something less impressive. In a freaking summer blockbuster. It simply makes negative sense.
But beneath the superficial exterior, we run into a deeper, more philosophical problem with Shyamalan’s approach. In the series, Aang’s use of his power at its fullest potential—dubbed the “Avatar State”— has potentially disastrous consequences if he can’t control it. This is very firmly established by having him more-or-less singlehandedly massacre an entire army by himself, even if he’s not completely aware of what exactly he’s doing. In the film, this very important philosophical pillar is completely knocked down, replaced by a scene ripped out of The Perfect Storm.
This may very well turn out to be a big problem for Shyamalan if he makes a sequel, since so much of the character drama for Aang in the second and third seasons revolves around his need to accept and understand his responsibility as the Avatar—including the very real danger potentially posed by the Avatar State.
Speaking of character drama, it’s time for a segue into the second part of this smackdown! But wait, John, you may very well be thinking, surely this is enough? Surely Shyamalan’s ineptitude left at least the characters alone? What more could he possibly screw up?
Everything else, my friends. Absolutely everything else.
Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon, and its demographic was ostensibly a young audience. The first half of the first season would back this assertion up, as those episodes are mostly concerned with world building, characterization and the occasional zany antic or two. Once the series really gets its footing and has enough cache with the studio powers-that-be to turn up the heat, though, things start to get serious and the plot matures beautifully. So much so that the second season is basically the Empire Strikes Back of the animated genre, with high stakes and emotional weight to match. Even the end of the first season, though, is very intense and badass in its own right.
But even throughout the process of its growth from kids' show into epic martial arts action-adventure story with a metric ton of character development, the series never loses sight of one very, very important thing: that a sense of humor is a crucial thing to have. For every stretch of seriousness in the series, a little levity is never far behind in almost all cases. This prevents the tone from getting oppressively heavy, even in its darker moments. It also keeps the characters human and relatable—even with enormous odds stacked against them, they still have hope, crack wise from time to time and keep us rooting for them. There's even some romance here and there, to add to the heartwarming quotient.
The film has none of this. At all. If anything, Shyamalan takes the grim-dark to a level even higher than the series does, losing all sense of balance and proportion in the process. The chief casualty of this extreme tonal shift is the character of Sokka (Sah-ka, not Soh-ka… goddamnit).
Sokka starts the series out as the 'straight man' type of character, mixed in with some comic relief when it’s called for. He’s someone who can’t bend at all, suddenly traveling around with a kid who has the potential to be the most powerful bender alive. Not to mention that his sister Katara is also a very accomplished Waterbender in her own right, which would risk making Sokka into a humorless, odd-man-out kind of guy who feels outmatched on every front.
The series avoids this with aplomb, by making Sokka into the group’s main strategist, tactician and all-around impressive warrior— in addition to still having his goofy moments. In the film, he’s dour and humorless from frame one and never lightens up. The series has him in some genuinely hilarious moments, including an absolutely brilliant improvised haiku poetry contest (I know that's in season 2; the point stands), but in the film he never cracks a single joke. I think he smiles maybe one time in the whole two hours, and even then it’s a stretch. He’s supposed to be a partial audience surrogate at times in how he reacts to the world of bending around him... but in the film Sokka is completely alien, wooden and lifeless. Much like everyone else, really.
In addition, his romance with Princess Yue was also horrendously bungled in the film. It was quite poignant and sad in the series, regretfully hamstrung by an arranged marriage on Yue’s part, and the culmination of it was treated with an appropriate amount of gravitas. In the film, its growth is boiled down to a few voiceover lines of exposition to set it up. Then a wooden kiss, that abysmal “Belief” line and completely emotionless farewells are supposed to convince us that these two people care about each other. Ridiculous.
But I’ve railed on poor Sokka enough: the other prime offender in the humorless department is Aang, the Avatar himself.
In the series, Aang is a twelve-year-old boy. He’s a sixth-grader, to put it in school terms. And he acts accordingly for much of the beginning of the series, being completely flippant in the face of his looming responsibility to stop the war ravaging the Four Nations. He’d much rather check out cool animals, fly around on his glider and goof off with his Saint Bernard-esque Sky Bison Appa all day, and so that’s what he does. It takes a few important character development moments in the middle of the first season before Aang begins to accept his responsibilities, but even then he still retains a sense of humor, innocence and childlike wonder in relation to the world around him. It stays alongside his burgeoning sense of maturity and self-accountability, creating a well-rounded, flawed but solid protagonist.
In the film, though, Aang is serious to the point of melodrama from square one and never gets any better. He might as well have “WOE IS ME” tattooed across his forehead instead of his signature arrow for all of the whining and sanctimonious drivel he spews during the course of the movie. Not only that, but another fundamental aspect of his character in the series is that he has a huge, huge crush on Katara—something that the film never even comes close to acknowledging. Once more, Shyamalan seems to be shooting himself in the foot multiple times, lighting himself on fire and then jumping off of a cliff as far as sequel setup is concerned.
Then again, that’s not at all a bad thing.
Speaking of Katara, she herself also falls victim to the Shyamalan brand of character assassination. In addition to being designated as “Expository Voiceover Girl”, which is enough to make everyone in the audience want to murder the poor kid just on its own, her character is also stripped of every ounce of complexity it possessed in the series.
In the series, Katara is a girl who’s forced to grow up before her time when her mother gets murdered by Fire Nation raiders—something I don’t think even gets mentioned in the film. She develops a very strong emotional core that makes her by turns both incredibly stubborn and surprisingly maternal, depending on the situation. She’s the heart of the group in a lot of ways, but the film reduces her to a cardboard cutout, exposition-delivery drone.
Not to mention that her entire badass subplot with Master Pakku towards the end of the first season is completely neglected. It was one that culminated in a truly awesome character moment for her, while simultaneously establishing the considerable improvement of her Waterbending skills. It’s because of that subplot that her duel with Zuko in the finale is believable and awesome, and without it her character progression seems totally crowbarred, random and inorganic.
I can understand the need to condense things in order to transition from one medium to another. All things considered, though, Shyamalan could have fit that in easily if he’d cared enough. And considering that Master Pakku also teaches Aang, it would have fit into the main plot easily as well. A damn shame.
So rather than being a shining beacon of a strong female character in a normally male-dominated medium—of which there are several in the series, six of which I can count off the top of my head—Katara comes out sounding like she’s perpetually on the verge of tears. Absurdity, I say.
Next up in the character assassination roulette is the banished Fire Nation prince, Zuko. He’s played by Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire fame in the film, who comes the closest out of any of the actors to actually giving two shits about what he’s doing. Patel does what he can with what limited time he’s given, but the subtle character moments from the series that really flesh out Zuko’s conflicted persona and troubled past are swept under the rug. The flashback scene of Zuko’s Agni Kai with his father in the middle-end of the film could have been made as effective as it was in the series, except it got ruined by terrible shot composition and an overwrought voiceover.
There’s voiceover during the flashback in the series as well, granted, but it’s considerably less invasive and lets the power of the scene stand pretty much on its own. And the motivation Zuko had for speaking out against his father isn’t mentioned in the film either, which is another major character moment for him. The fact that he spoke out is established, but the 'why' of it is lost. In short, the complex nature of Zuko’s character is paid little more than lip-service, and we’re given very little reason to empathize with him. Which is, again, a problem for the story to come.
And last, but most certainly not least, his rivalry with Admiral Zhao is also completely kneecapped in the film: it erases not one, but two duels that they fight in the series.
Admiral Zhao in the film is pretty much the same theoretically as he is in the series, except that he’s played by Daily Show alum Aasif Mandvi. That alone is more than enough to completely torpedo the brash, reckless anger that makes Zhao an effective villain, as well as deep-six his few moments of ruthless cunning. I just kept waiting for him to pan over to Jon Stewart, and I couldn’t take him seriously at all.
Fire Lord Ozai was completely butchered simply because he was featured so prominently, period. In the series, he’s a shadowy, mysterious villain for the entire first season, given maybe three lines of dialogue voiced to absolutely creepy perfection by Mark Hamill (bolded for awesome) in one of the best voice-acting roles he’s ever done. That keeps the tension and anticipation high... so that when he finally does start getting serious, it’s nerve-wracking, stomach-churningly good stuff. In the film, he’s around so often that he becomes goofy, innocuous and impossible to see as the threat he is in the series.
Princess Azula only has two scenes in the whole film, but taken side-by-side with those two brief scenes in the series, there is no comparison. She’s a cold, calculating, utterly ruthless (and severely emotionally repressed) borderline sociopath for a huge portion of the series... but the actress in the film plays her like a theatrical psycho, grinning and giggling. In the series, the only response to her father’s command she has at the end of the first season is to flash a smirk that’s so vicious looks like it was cut across her face with a dagger. That alone as a gesture is countless times more affecting and scary than what’s shown in the film, easily.
Well, I think that pretty much covers all of the bases as to how thoroughly and completely Shyamalan ransacked the source material he plundered to cobble that “script” together. All of my frustration and anger towards this movie stems from how much potential was wasted making it: that, to me, has always been the most cardinal of all storytelling sins. It simply boggles my mind that the frames of the series weren’t just turned into storyboards, a la Robert Rodriguez and Sin City. If they’d cut out some of the more filler-ish episodes, they’d have had about two and a half hours of animation to use—just the right amount to get everything in, craft a solid film and make everyone happy. And I just recently marathoned a ton of series episodes with kids who are the target demographic, so any arguments about short attention spans are completely invalid.
Shyamalan’s work was almost completely done for him: he only had to not mess it up. At one time, I would have thought that such a thing was absolutely impossible.
But, as it turns out, I have been proven thunderously and resoundingly wrong. Seriously, screw this movie. Go watch all three seasons of the series on Netflix Instant instead; that’s a much better use of your time. Then, if you want to truly understand why I consider this film the worst ever made, try watching it again post-series. Try to make it past the half-hour mark without turning it off, or at the very least getting up and walking around.
It's not easy.
