# The Last Airbender(movie) **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 1, 2010, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185 "2010-07-01T13:17:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/1 "2010-07-01T13:17:40Z")
Or, as it appears it should be titled, “What Happened to M. Night Shyamalan”? The reviews are coming out and it, to say the least, is looking bad for the movie. Ebert gives is 1/2 star and say, that it, “ **is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that _something_ should have gone right. Not here.** ” Capone, who I can usually get behind, says that it, “ **is a hate crime against film lovers. No one should ever have to endure what I was unexpectedly put through yesterday afternoon watching this murky 3-D shitstorm of a movie that appears to have been shot through unflushed toilet bowl water, which, upon reflection, seems 100 percent appropriate.** ” Capone says it is the worst movie of the year, and perhaps of the last decade(or perhaps he was saying this next decade). Both say the 3D conversion is bad, but that nothing could have saved it anyway. Even in 2D, this movie appears to be horrible. Did he really cast white people in clearly Asian roles? Won’t this confuse the fan-base(which I assume is kids)? I have not seen the show, by the way. Is it any good for adults or is it mostly a kid show? ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/2 "2010-07-01T13:19:48Z")
Oh, it’s at 5% on Rotten Tomatoes(2 positive, 41 negative). I wonder of M. Night can just man up this time and admit this movie got out of control and is not what he expected. ---
**Author:** ![Kiros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/439d5e/32.png) [@Kiros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiros)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/3 "2010-07-01T13:49:49Z")
The show is good for adults as well as kids, if you’re into light-hearted epic fantasy. And who isn’t? There have been several other threads in CS about people discovering the show over the last year or so, in the lead-up to the movie and otherwise, and the reaction from most tends to be positive. I’m almost glad that the movie is this completely terrible; if it was getting 55 or 60 percent positive reviews, I’d probably have to go see it, and inevitably I would have ended up disappointed. With M. Night and the casting and everything else, there was never any hope that it was actually going to be excellent. So this works out well enough. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/4 "2010-07-01T14:29:51Z")
Is this guy on a quest to make the worst movie possible? How far can his 6th Sense fame carry him? Tomatometer: 6th Sense: 85% Unbreakable: 68% Signs: 74% The Village: 43% Lady In The Water: 24% The Happening: 18% Airbender: 6% ---
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/5 "2010-07-01T14:36:07Z")
The fact that it has Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show doesn’t seem like a good sign. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/6 "2010-07-01T15:13:56Z")
The Sixth Sense was a pretty shitty movie, too. Seriously, I think a lot of people who liked it when it was first released would feel very differently about it now. I rewatched it recently and was stunned by how much it really did suck. And **The Happening** was the worst movie ever made (for many reasons, but I think what tipped it over into the abyss of shit was the scene when they had to outrun the wind). So what happened to M. Night? Nothing. He’s always been a terrible film maker. The mystery is why did it take him reaching apparent Ed Wood levels of bad before anybody noticed. ---
**Author:** ![mozchron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c2a13f/32.png) [@mozchron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mozchron)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/7 "2010-07-01T15:23:17Z")
> [@joebuck20](#): > > The fact that it has Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show doesn’t seem like a good sign. Aasif Mandvi is comedy _GOLD_. Who cares if the movie isn’t supposed to be funny? ---
**Author:** ![Khadaji](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Khadaji](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Khadaji)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/8 "2010-07-01T15:49:23Z")
I’ll still probably see it. There just isn’t much out this year that I have wanted to see. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/9 "2010-07-01T16:14:12Z")
I have to disagree with the general trend here. I loved **Sixth Sense** , even upon recent rewatchings. I didn’t much care for **Unbreakable** , although i saw a lot of what he was doing. For the rest of his _ouvre_ I admired his storytelling and director’s skills, and just watched for the inevitable crash when his point hit home, because it invariably seemed to be stupid by this point – _Signs, The Village, The Happening_ (I didn’t even try to watch _Lady in the Water_) It got to the point where we were MST3King his films, which I thought was too bad, because it seemed to me that if somebody else wrote the story and the screenplay Shyamalan would probably turn out a good film. So when I saw he was doing _Last Airbender_ I thought it was a good sign. Our daughter MilliCal, who has watched his other flicks with us, started chanting “please don’t be bad, please don’t be bad,…” when she saw who the director of Airbender was going to be. She loves the animated version. How could this be so awful? The scenes from the ads look great. I could live with anglos doing nominally Asian roles (although, hey, it’s a fantasy – they don’t _have_ to be Asian). Somebody else came up with the story, which shouldn’t require some stupid “reveal”. How could this be that awful? ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/10 "2010-07-01T16:26:26Z")
Now, M. Night needs to make a video game movie. And complete his transformation into Uwe Boll. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/11 "2010-07-01T16:54:31Z")
Speakingof the Uwe Boll comparison – [this from eCritic](http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=19249&reviewer=389): > [@](#): > > M. Night Shyamalan’s stupefying awful live-action adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon anime series. This is not just the worst film of the season or the year to date, this is quite simply one of the worst films to ever achieve a commercial release. “How bad is it?,” you might ask. It is so bad that it now marks the artistic low point in the career of the man who gave us such mega-bombs as “The Village,” “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening.” It is so bad that I would rather attend a Henry Jaglom retrospective than watch any five minutes of it again in this or any other lifetime. It is so bad that it is one of the very few films that I can think of that would come up on the short end of the stick when compared to the infamous “Battlefield Earth.” It is so bad that I would be perfectly content to simply write the phrase “Your Movie Sucks, Night!” over and over again if it weren’t for the fact that I would have to pay Roger Ebert a quarter in royalties every time I did. It is so bad that not only could Uwe Boll make a better movie than Shyamalan has done here, he already has. Ouch. Could this be so bad it at least has trainwreck appeal, though? A movie being called worse than _Battlefield Earth_ and worse than Uwe Boll actually has me intigued. It sounds like it goes beyond just being another lousy movie into being spectacularly, once-in-a-decade bad. ---
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/12 "2010-07-01T17:10:19Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Speakingof the Uwe Boll comparison – [this from eCritic](http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=19249&reviewer=389): > > Ouch. > > Could this be so bad it at least has trainwreck appeal, though? A movie being called worse than _Battlefield Earth_ and worse than Uwe Boll actually has me intigued. It sounds like it goes beyond just being another lousy movie into being spectacularly, once-in-a-decade bad. I was thinking the same thing. I’m actually kind of curious now to see it, where as before I didn’t really care about it one way or another. Granted, that doesn’t mean I’m going to spend 10 bucks to see it at the theater. I’ll probably just wait and get it on Netflix. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/13 "2010-07-01T17:12:35Z")
> [@Mahaloth](#): > > Did he really cast white people in clearly Asian roles? Won’t this confuse the fan-base(which I assume is kids)? Which roles, exactly? The uproar seems to be about Sokka and Kitara from what I can tell, but that really confuses me, because they had blue eyes in the cartoon. ---
**Author:** ![Gangster\_Octopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a8b319/32.png) [@Gangster\_Octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gangster_Octopus)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/14 "2010-07-01T18:13:05Z")
These reviews make me wonder about those who gave it a positive review. ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/15 "2010-07-01T18:17:26Z")
> [@Cisco](#): > > Which roles, exactly? The uproar seems to be about Sokka and Kitara from what I can tell, but that really confuses me, because they had blue eyes in the cartoon. Fire Nation were definitely Asian, probably Chinese. I always thought of Water Nation as Inuit, and Air Nation as Tibetan, so Asian also. I couldn’t pin down Earth Nation as easily, but they seemed Asian to me as well. ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/16 "2010-07-01T18:22:43Z")
Having read the Tomato reviews, it seems like the reviews are more slanted toward M.Night bashing, rather than objectively addressing the movie. I’ve enjoyed most of his movies far more than the critical-dogpiling suggests I should. From all of the previews and pre-production I’ve seen, the action, effects, fights, and actors look perfectly realized to me. There would really have to be some colossally disastrous acting or editing otherwise… ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/17 "2010-07-01T18:28:38Z")
> [@](#): > > Ebert: > “I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.” Ouch. Boy, I am so bummed. I loved the series, and was really looking forward to this movie. Dammit. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/18 "2010-07-01T18:32:59Z")
This movie is worse than _Dragonball: Evolution_. I really can’t put into words how breathtakingly horrible this film is. I’m just glad I got in for free. ---
**Author:** ![Omi\_no\_Kami](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a88e4f/32.png) [@Omi\_no\_Kami](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omi_no_Kami)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/19 "2010-07-01T18:42:53Z")
> [@Onomatopoeia](#): > > Fire Nation were definitely Asian, probably Chinese. I always thought of Water Nation as Inuit, and Air Nation as Tibetan, so Asian also. I couldn’t pin down Earth Nation as easily, but they seemed Asian to me as well. I always thought of Earth Kingdom as Han chinese and Fire Kingdom as Mongols/Jurchen/Khitan. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2010, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185/20 "2010-07-01T18:43:53Z")
> [@GargoyleWB](#): > > Having read the Tomato reviews, it seems like the reviews are more slanted toward M.Night bashing, rather than objectively addressing the movie. I’ve enjoyed most of his movies far more than the critical-dogpiling suggests I should. > > From all of the previews and pre-production I’ve seen, the action, effects, fights, and actors look perfectly realized to me. There would really have to be some colossally disastrous acting or editing otherwise… The reviews I’ve read have been pretty specific about why and how the film fails. It’s not “bashing” to point out that somebody did a bad job. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-last-airbender-movie/545185.md?page=2)