You know, I went into The Last Airbender not expecting much, in fact expecting something pretty laughable, but this? I'm insulted by how bad it was. I'm annoyed that I can't get my money back. I'm infuriated that anyone thought this was watchable. It's not. It's badly paced (too fast at first, then way too slow), badly acted (no one emotes... NO ONE), it's heavy on expository dialog and narration (they do a lot of telling when they could be showing), there's no character development, the scenes don't seem to connect to each other at all, and oh yeah, the 3D looks like crap.

The scenery is pretty nice, though, and the costumes are passable. Assif Mandvi is also decent, if only because he's playing the same character he plays on Daily Show, which is fine because Admiral Zhao kind of is the same character. If only all of the characters could have been played by Daily Show correspondents.

I suppose Shaun Toub as Iroh was also decent, except for the fact that all of the personality was sucked out of his character as well.



They got the basic plot down at least. Katara and Sokka find Aang entombed in the ice near their village, they decide to accompany him on a journey to learn all four elements (in this particular instance, water), eventually they end up at the Northern Water Tribe, the Fire Nation attacks, they fight back and are victorious. This is exactly what the movie does. Unfortunately, it's all they do. All those bits of plot in the middle? Almost non-existent. Omashu? Never see it. Warriors of Kyoshi? I know not of which you speak. The ticking time bomb that is Sozin's Comet? Only mentioned once, and not to Aang.

I know it's hard to take 400+ minutes of show and condense it into a two hour movie—wait, what's that, the movie was only 103 minutes? Why would you do that? If kids can sit through 2+ hours of Harry Potter or Twilight, they can sit through at least 2 hours of this, if done right. Anyway, there are twenty episodes in the season, but surely you can do better than only touching on seven of them. And one of those happens to be "Imprisoned," which wasn't that good in the first place, in addition to being completely irrelevant to the plot of the show (it introduces Haru, that's it, and he's never an important character).

And honestly, as much as I like the episode "The Blue Spirit," it's also somewhat superfluous to the plot, since all it did was set up Zhao's attempted murder of Zuko (and had that nice bit where Aang talks about how they could have been friends, which was sort of in the movie except stupider). So we didn't need to dedicate so much screen time in the film to it. I would have preferred "Warriors of Kyoshi" given that their existence is important to the end of season 2 (namely, the Teen Girl Squad's infiltration of Ba Sing Se).

And the movie does take pains to set up a second installment. "I found a scroll! It was in the library! Remember the library you sent me to? It's where I found this scroll! Check out this scroll, it's from the library!"

But enough about the plot. You can get away with a thin plot if you have good characters, right? Iron Man had no script but we watched it on the strength of Robert Downey Jr., right?

The Last Airbender has no characters. What it has are a bunch of lifeless automatons that only superficially resemble the characters on the show, race issues aside. Aang is not fun-loving or childish, Katara has all of her worrying but none of her sass and spark, and Sokka? Oh, my poor meat-and-sarcasm guy. There was no sarcasm to be found... or meat, for that matter. Iroh might have been in character, but it's not like he got enough lines to tell, and Zuko... well, there was nothing particularly bad about Dev Patel's performance, but he wasn't given much to work with. The lack of proper flashbacks for him (and Aang) also really hurt the character.

And they actually show us the Fire Lord! For most of the show he goes unseen, just a mysterious shadow surrounded by flames (and voiced by Mark Hamill). In the film they show him in full daylight, walking and talking and seeming practically normal. Not intimidating at all (though rather puffy). And worst of all, he almost seems to like Zuko, or at least not completely despise him. Which hurts Zuko, considering that if the films want to follow the plot of the show at all, Zuko needs to be sympathetic, and if his father is only mildly bad, Zuko just seems like an even bigger jerk. Maybe this is all the fan in me talking, but let's face it: your bad guy should be BAD. The Fire Lord was only bad, lower case 'b'.

I don't have to tell you that a movie that was retrofitted to 3D looks awful. It does. The location shooting was actually really nice, but the coloring was blah, supposedly because of the 3D.

Oh crap, let's just go back to the plot. The last 30 minutes was especially egregious because Zhao spends all this time talking about the scroll and how he can find the spirits and turn the tide of battle blah blah blah, and then when he finally does it, it lasts about a minute before Yue sacrifices herself and fixes everything. We never actually get to see any real negative effects on the battle itself, and we especially don't get anything cool out of it, like Aang turning into an angry water monster and smooshing Fire Nation troops left and right. Yeah, the one thing that would have looked awesome in live action was completely not in the movie. Save your $16.