While I’ve heard about Avatar: The Last Airbender, I’ve never quite gotten around to watching the TV show. I decided to wait until the movie was out and let that serve as my introduction to the franchise. That is, until the reviews came out and they were unanimous: This movie is dogshit.

So I gave my little sister one of my free Regal passes and said “Hey, Deborah! Want to write another blog entry for me?”

Yes, in addition to being a Twilight fan, Deb is also a great fan of the Airbender TV show. And as you may remember from her Eclipse review posted here the other day, her standards for movies have always been far below very different than mine. If she couldn’t find anything nice to say about it, nobody could.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to watch the first few Airbender episodes on DVD. Take it away, Sister Deborah!

***

He changed the main character’s name. I repeat: M. Night Shyamalan changed the main character’s name.

I really don’t think a summation of all the reasons why The Last Airbender is a horrible movie can be done any more succinctly than that sentence… but here, I’ll try another one:

Some movies are just not meant to be made.

I’ve been a humongous fan of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” since 2005, and I’ll tell you why: the TV show is perfect. There has never been a cartoon like it, and in my heart I don’t believe there’ll be anything like it ever again. It’s just a beautiful microcosm of hope and war and optimism and being a kid who just happens to be able to save the world, but still takes the time to hang out and go penguin-sledding with his friends. They laugh and joke and deal with serious issues in a serious way, and there’s a reason why fans are so passionate about this show. It’s because it’s perfect.

And here’s the thing, this is why I knew two years ago that A:TLA as a movie would break my heart, this is why I dreaded seeing the movie this evening, and this is why I left the theater with that horrible feeling you have in your stomach when you’re right, but it doesn’t make the bad things go away:

Hollywood, as a whole, refuses to believe that anything can be perfect without their involvement. Yes, it’s a great TV show, they say, but wouldn’t it be better if we threw several million dollars at it AND MADE IT IN 3-D?! No, the fans say. No, it wouldn’t. But that hasn’t ever stopped Hollywood before, and damned if it made them stop here.

And then, of course, they throw in M. Night Shyamalan, the most arrogant, talentless fuckhead in Hollywood. This guy hasn’t had a hit since The Sixth Sense, he cast HIMSELF as the Messiah in his OWN MOVIE (Lady in the Water, in case you’re curious), and ever since The Last Airbender has been going under fire, he’s been defending it tooth and nail, his delusions of grandeur forming an impenetrable armor of douchebaggery. Why defend it so vigorously? Because the worst parts of the movie — the casting and the script — were both DONE BY HIM. The Last Airbender was his precious little pet project, and as a result I don’t think he’ll ever work again… and with good reason.

There are about 700 15-year-olds on Fanfiction.Net that could have written a better Airbender script than Shyamalan. Every single line was either exposition or really bad foreshadowing, the characters that had once been so vibrant on the TV screen reduced to identical cardboard cutouts reciting one-line summaries of what’s happening at that particular moment. Even their intonation of the lines were the same, all overdramatic, what-are-we-going-to-do creased eyebrows, only serving to brush this and that 3-D action scene under the rug so they can quickly move on to the next one… which will make as little or even less sense than the first.

I could talk about the actors here, but I don’t feel like there’s much point. They weren’t acting – they weren’t given anything to act with. Watching them was downright painful, like watching someone try to read a McDonald’s menu and make it mean something. And when Academy Award Nominee and Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel sounds like he could be reading a McDonald’s menu… well, that’s just a crying shame.

The special effects are totally the point of this movie, by the way. Shyamalan might as well have put subtitles blinking throughout the whole film: Hey, isn’t this so cool?! Wouldn’t this look so even cooler if you were watching it IN 3-D?! Water was dripping everywhere, gusts of wind, sparks flying, dramatic whooshing angles, draping sleeves flapping in the wind, big explosions of ice and fire and water, ashy snow falling… this movie used every trick in the book during every second of its running time, to the expense of everything else.

I want to look Shyamalan in the face and say: You’re doing it wrong. Because fans? They don’t care about the bending. I mean, yeah, it’s cool, but when Toph invented metalbending in Season Three, did we cheer because it looked cool? Not really. We cheered because while she did it, she crowed, “I am the greatest earthbender in the world, and don’t you two dunderheads ever forget it!” and then earth-surfed into the sunset. LIKE A BAMF.

We cared about the characters. That’s never been a secret, I mean, it was a cartoon. We certainly weren’t fans because of the special effects. We cared about the characters. We cared about the characters. I’ll say it again: We cared about the characters.

And then Shyamalan spits in the face of The Last Airbender’s most loyal fanbase by giving them bland, shitty dialogue with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, and on top of that changing the pronunciation of half of their names for no discernable reason.

(“Here, M. Night Shyalaman,” I want to say to him. “Here, this is my favorite butterfly. Why don’t you strip the wings off it while I watch? Here, I’ll even pay $13.50 to watch you do it IN 3-D!!!”)

Whatever. Aang (and his name is Aang, not AHng, you stupid fuckhead) would just shrug, smile crookedly, and forgive your mistakes. Me?

I’m just going to straighten the A:TLA episode DVDs on my shelf, sigh happily with the knowledge that, at the end of the day, those little half-hour gems will remain untouched forever… and then go watch Toy Story 3 for the umpteenth time.